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Another way to estimate upper/lower bounds for hosting videos is by considering the grey market adult video industry. It seems like there are hundreds, if not thousands of websites providing access to video, and from a unit economics perspective I remember reading those advertising CPMs are on the order of $0.01-$0.05 even for the biggest and least illegal websites like the Mindgeek properties. So I would assume the more shadowy websites operate at a budget of less than $0.01 per thousand views in revenue.

I’m assuming their CDNs are just specialised low cost hosting providers as opposed to p2p IoT botnets, but you never know.

I wish someone had the time and motivation to do an investigatory technical deep dive into the infrastructure they use.

On one hand it sounds like a movie trope. On the other hand, life imitates art and plenty of dictators and billionaires are indistinguishable from cartoon villains.

The brand reputation gets milked while cost cutting measures result in subpar products and services. Growth targets are gone, now you optimise for cutting costs faster than you lose market share.

It’s not a Ponzi scheme, it just feels like a scam when consumer brands cash out at your expense (the loyal consumer) and slowly bleed the company dry.

You do have to note that this is not a universal feature of PE-backed business.

Take for example power tools, where most of the big players are privately held and owned by PE firms. Reputation and customer loyalty are profitable in this line of business, so QA and product development are alive and well.

I thought it was common knowledge that for privacy and security you should have FaceID (and before that, fingerprint reader) disabled in favour of a password.

Even speech to text has a long way to go to reach 99.5%!

Case in point: not all vendors implement flags!

Normalize checking notifications 1-3 times per day.

Once in the morning, once after work, once some time later in the evening if you feel like it.

During working hours there’s rarely any reason to touch or check your personal phone (and in many professions you simply aren’t able to).

During after-work hobbies and/or family time you are for obvious reasons unable to have your phone on your person (it’s in a locker room, or you’re playing with your kids) or unable to pick it up (any creative or performing arts, or you’re having family dinner).

But is there actually an API for that? Last I checked the big providers Video Intelligence APIs even distinguishing cats and dogs was still unreliable.

Can you elaborate slightly? Digital escorts is a tough keyword pairing to search for regardless of additional context.

How come? Any TL;DR? Not a gamer, so I’m not up to date on consoles.

Is there an MCP or API to do that? Can it take a template and layout and produce coherent sentences in a consistent format?

It’s interesting how you are probably saying you are scrawny for a westerner, but if you were the oppisite - an ’easterner’ - you wouldn’t be considered scrawny.

I bet there are people who would consider ’westerners’, however they define them, weak and scrawny. Pacific Islanders? Eastern Europeans?

Either way, our piano teachers must have come from the same school of thought and no RSIs here either. For fifteen years now I’ve typed on a macbook keyboard (tethered to a big display 90% of the time) which I’ve never bothered to upgrade from. No vim. A constant mix of the trackpad, Apple magic mouse (!) and Wacom tablet for input. Haven’t experienced any ergonomics issues whatsoever.

Not just at the elite level either. The whereabouts system has expanded to apply to tens of millions of people, completely outside of any serious national or international legal frameworl.

Which also means spending a lot of time learning AI tools gets wasted as the tooling improves.

I still suspect the vast silent majority of professional software devs haven’t integrated any, even Cursor-style, AI tools in to their main gig.

And I reckon that’s completely rational, for those that have made this choice explicitly.

Early adopters of AI tools are making a speculative bet, but so far most of them seem happy with the return.

I’ll spend an anti-hype token :)

ChatGPT wasn’t the iphone moment, because the iphone wasn’t quickly forgotten.

Outside of software, most adult professionals in my network had a play with chatgpt and have long since abandoned their accounts. They can’t use chatbots for work (maybe data is sensitive, or their ‘knowledge work’ isn’t the kind that produces text output). Our native language is too poorly supported for life admin (no Gemini summaries or ‘help writing an email’). They just don’t have any obvious use case for LLMs in their life.

EasyList cookiefilter. Works in uBlock lite as well. It hides all permission notices and consent forms for things you are (presumably) blocking anyway.

Is there anything new that’s come out in conversational/voice? Sesame Maya and Miles were kind of impressive demos, but that’s still in ’research preview’. Kyutai presented really a cool low latency open model, but I feel like we’re still closer to Siri than actually usable voice interfaces.

I meant what I said: chat bots, not models or APIs. Give it a try if you don’t believe me. Try using the leading chat interfaces logged out, from a clean browser and new IP.

Over the past year the chat bots have improved in many ways, but their written output has regressed to the mean: the average RLHF-driven preference.

It is word salad, unless you’re a young, underpaid contractor from a country previously colonised by the British or the United States.

I’ve also always wondered what a more critical and impartial review of source material would reveal about Bernays’ impact.

Seems very backwards for markets where wired/wifi connections at home are nonexistant, 4g/5g is already unmetered and phones are the wifi you connect your devices to.

So, out of interest, what are good TLDR sources for following the gooner scene? Like some highlights newsletter, subreddit, podcast, youtube channel or something? I’m interested in keeping up with their methods, not their results and output.

I tried it and I don’t get it. What and where are the legal usecases? What can you do with these low-resolution images?

How can it come up with a logo? Is it able to output vector graphics now?

Chatgpt and Genini choked on trying to generate even the simplest of 2d shapes, like a 5-pointed star, as svg.

A potential miscommunication about a feature that may have had unintended consequences.

No, wait, claims of intent are falsifiable in discovery.

Are you exclusively an EU citizen?

In certain EU countries, data center sovereignty criteria require the management and beneficiaries to also NOT be citizens of another state.

Could you point to a source, please? I’m not super well versed in the history and lore of cloud and AWS, but interested in and invested in arguing for and supporting adoption of (real) sovereign European computing.

Implementation depends on the country and the broadcasters. I know nothing about US and Canadian broadcasting standards.

In Europe TV is in most countries sent over DVB-T2 (DVB-C2 in urban areas) which supports SD, HD and FullHD. The older standards, DVB-T and DVB-C, are still used in some countries and not everyone even plans to transition to DVB-T2. There are countries and broadcasters sticking with SD and 720p HD.[1]

The resolution of video content (SD, 720p or 1080p) is only approximately correlated with quality (there are numerous resources online comparing different resolutions at different bit rates and bit depths). I'm not a big broadcast TV user, but from eyeing various EU countries' TV broadcasts at hotels and the occasional sports bar while traveling, for the majority of your every day programming the quality corresponds to YouTube's 720p format (~2 MB/s), even if for example German TV is nominally 1080p50 H.265.

As an example, in most of the EU the 2024 Olympics were broadcast in 1080p. There was no 4K option available to purchase in many countries. The 1080p broadcast, however, had a very low bitrate, making it effectively equivalent to YouTube 480p/360p/240p. Many sports involving fast moving landscapes and water looked worse than in the 80s and 90s. Footage of water, in particular, compresses very poorly at constant bitrates because of the constant subtle motion of waves and reflections on its surface.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T2

I’m sceptical this could ever work politically.

There are still people watching television on 1980’s hardware. Full HD televisions have been essentially feature complete for over 20 years and should remain relevant for another 20 years, since the vast majority of broadcasts are still 480p and 720p. There are now hundreds of millions of 4k and 8k televisions and projectors with expected service life and lifecycles extending into 2050s.

Bricking those devices en masse is a PR disaster and invites legal scrutiny from regulators, and any individual service suddenly requiring special hardware is shooting itself in the face financially.

What kind of design work is AI even capable of? I’m not saying the output isn’t occasionally very impressive (as a toy), I’m saying it’s utterly useless in practice.

Coming up with a spec or design system? I’m not sure what an AI-generated design could possibly be based on and how it would get the necessary inputs from stakeholders other than… in the form of a spec, formulated by someone collating those requirements.

Creating assets based on a spec or design system? Again, I have yet to see any output that can stay internally consistent. Frontend code might even work, despite being a mishmash of half a dozen flavours of react with two or three different vintages of tailwind. But good luck with native code or anything beyond basic CRUD forms.

I recently tried to get claude and gemini to scaffold a tailwind component library from a pretty comprehensive design document. It felt like getting a roomba to swim across a lake.