Ah yes because the cost savings on solar power in constant sunlight over nuclear reactors or solar with batteries definitely justifies the cost of launching hundreds of thousands of tons in to orbit, including the miles of radiators that will be needed to cool all this. Oh and definitely justifies the cost of having to hire astronauts as technicians to repair the thing when something goes wrong.

The numbers for these data centers don’t even work on fucking earth, how does increasing the set up cost by an order of magnitude make this work?

Lmao, of course they backed off, they need to say they’re going to do it to get cash to keep going, but they can’t actually do it.

Because the moment they go for profit they’re gonna have to start explaining how they loose money on every single user of the product, all the way up to the highest tier of subscription. Then people might start asking hard questions like “wait…isn’t this more expensive to run than just having a person do these things?”

So two anonymous observers saw someone else receive an indirect and somewhat ambiguous comment? And this is a bullet proof definite smoking gun admission? Or just… mildly informed speculation that could mean a thousand other things?

It’s so funny, because people act like open AI has a viable business model, but they’re loosing money even on their paying customers, even the highest tier of subscription. The product they’re selling really isn’t good enough to charge the price they would need to charge to pay for the operation costs, let along the training costs, and that’s with Microsoft giving them a bunch of servers for essentially free.

Like, there isn’t a path to profitability for them, certainly not on this scale. They’re just praying that if they throw enough data in to a big enough model that somehow it will start doing something different than what it currently does. It’s not a plan, it’s a prayer, a cult.

“ don’t worry, we’ll offset some of the demand by restarting nuclear plants to prevent burning as much fossil fuel”

“Wait so we could have just had those running already rather than burning fossil fuels?”

“Noooo… because… uh… reasons”

Because he wants to do a huge tax cut, or even get rid of income tax outright, and he needs revenue to replace that.

it goes deeper than just “investors are greedy” though. Most people making these investment decisions are doing it at the behest of other people who have handed them their saving in exchange for returns. Those people aren’t privy to the nature of how money is getting invested and why, they hire someone else for that, the investors.

The investors may be making short sighted, stupid decisions, but they’re doing it because they’re pursuing their own personal incentives, get a raise, a promotion, or just not get fired. The managers are doing the same. If they don’t do it, someone else will.

It’s not the fault or moral failing of any one individual, but a fault in the system of incentives. A failure in the fundamental structure of how we decide how investments are made, in how we accumulate capital for investment.

when average users start fleeing en mass, it’s already to late, and arguably it’s approaching a critical mass where there is enough common knowledge and “friends who use that” to make the jump easier. Right now, the average user doesn’t have much of a reason to jump, but if Google has to restructure their business model due to their ad monopoly getting crowbarred, they might implement stuff that would be enough to get average users to start jumping.

great, just, one issue.

“The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts“

Nah, screw that, actively sabotage the training data if they’re going to keep scraping data after being told not to. Poison it with gibberish bad info. Otherwise you’re just giving them irrelevant but not unuseful training data, so no real incentive to only scrape pages that have allowed it.

but think of the shareholders! How would they feel if the company stoped growing? They need to cram their attempt at an audio content monopoly down your throat or else they’d only just be a music streaming monopoly.

I wonder how effective it would be just to put a bunch of data on servers meant to poison the training data they’re scraping. Like, make it data that only a bot trying to get everything would find, not something that users would see or encounter.

Huh, funny, isn’t that. Almost like Israel’s leadership was lying through it’s teeth.

It’s so absurd, the website’s appeal lies entirely in the user driven experience created by volunteer moderators and user submitted content. Yet the path of profit growth for them lies in company placed ads, and LLM bots spamming comment sections to astroturf. The more they push for profit, the less appeal to users the site has.

Their monetary losses are insubstantial compared to the gains in power they will receive from further weakening the influence and power of the average person.

That drop largely just cancels out the numbers since November. If it drops further then it indicates a general souring if market opnion.

The problem is that the AI branded software doesn’t run easily on old devices, unless you just stream it from one of their server farms. But they’re losing money every time they run one of these services for you, and the vast majority of people aren’t going to pay them a subscription for that.

They’re trying to justify selling new devices with software now, not giving out software that can run on old devices. You gotta replace your 2017 laptop to run windows 11. Gotta get a new computer with an NPU to run AI models locally. But it’s happening again, users are not embracing these new AI features, let alone buying new devices just so they can use them.

Much like wearables and VR headsets, the interest for these things is largely limited to enthusiasts spaces and isn’t translating to mass adoption. The average person doesn’t care about having their computer writing their email in to a limerick, they just want their email client to not freeze up and crash because they got an email with a weirdly formatted picture.

How am I supposed to scan a QR code sent to my phone… with my phone?

Why… would anyone use this? There are plenty of other perfectly capable free word processors…

Perhaps there is a better term and I should be more clear, but people know, roughly speaking, what “new” does, even “active” is fairly straight forward. They are literally algorithms but not what people are talking about when they complain about “algorithms”.

When people complain about the “algorithm”, in the colloquial sense, they’re talking about some nebulous unknowable method of sorting that only the people at meta and alphabet are privy to the details of, not the literal definition of the word.

I should have chosen my words more carefully but I think the point stands, there is a marked difference between a system where it is clear to the user how things get sorted, and the home, discovery or “for you” systems of major social media sites.

Depending on how you browse, it was not algorithmically recommended. Even if you’re using “active” to filter, it’s barely an algorithm. Certainly not a personalized one, unless you’re just looking at the subscribed feed, in which case the personalization was done by you, not the formula.

That’s kind of the appeal of this kind of website, when there is automatic sorting it’s very straight forward and user mailable.