ilinamorato @ ilinamorato @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

If this is it happening bit by bit, then why is most of the news about them doubling down on their principles? Why did they make clear what they were doing and why, and talk about their work to make it modular, instead of trying to hide it or sweep it under the rug?

This sort of doomerism and slippery slope purity test nonsense is exactly why niche companies that do what people value eventually go under, leaving us with just the awful ones. This isn't a betrayal of their values. This isn't the beginning of the end. It's just a choice they made, and all of the other choices they made confirm that they're still doing stuff the way they were.

Edit: I'm not saying you have to buy it, or that you shouldn't make clear to the company you don't think this comports with what you want them to value. But writing them off forever based on this one product seems so self-defeating.

their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy).

Maybe so. But the big difference is, you can upgrade iteratively rather than taking the entire hit of a new device all at once. So I can buy all of the individual components of my next laptop a few hundred dollars at a time over the course of a couple of years, and use them as I get them. By the time I've ship-of-theseus'd the whole device, I may have spent the same amount of money on that new computer, but I paced it how I wanted it. Then I put all of the old components into an enclosure and now I can use it as a media center or whatever. Plus, if something breaks, I can fix it.

They also announced three other products (one new, two refreshes) which are still being actively developed and are fully-modular devices at low cost. If they're "throwing away their values," they're not doing it very well.

For modularity: There's also modular front I/O using the existing USB-C cards, and everything they installed uses standard connectors.

Desktops are already that, though. In order for them to distinguish themselves in the industry, they can't just offer another modular desktop PC. They can't offer prebuilts, or gaming towers, or small form factor units, or pre-specced you-build kits. They can't even offer low-cost micro-desktops. All of those markets are saturated.

But they can offer a cheap Mac Studio alternative. Nobody's cracked that nut yet. And it remains to be seen if this will be it, but it certainly seems like it's lined up to.

Yeah, so we need to plug all of those holes, too. I'm not saying that's the thing that'd solve everything. Just that it helps.

Term limits makes buying politicians more expensive and insider trading less lucrative, while containing the damage one bad actor can do. Overturning Citizens United makes it even more expensive. Switching from FPTP to ranked choice voting makes third party candidates more viable. Abolishing the Electoral College equalizes the value of votes between rural and urban citizens. Age limits make it so that politicians have to live with the consequences of their actions for longer. Expanding the judiciary makes justice swifter and makes it less likely that a politician who breaks the law can escape justice by being elected again.

There's certainly not a magic bullet. We have to do a lot of things. I'd agree that age limits aren't the highest problems on the list—but they're on it.

I think the age thing is a problem, if for no other reason than that very old politicians won't have to live as long in the world that they create. Sure, for politicians of good faith, that wouldn't matter much; but many of the ones currently in office would absolutely trade our future for their own temporary enrichment, knowing that they won't be here when the chickens come home to roost.

You're not going to get any argument from me about the scourge of sensationalized headlines.

Did you miss the part where I said "reasonable" and "more"? I did not say that there should be no ads or that they should pay creators everything.

YouTube makes more than $350b annually, and the most liberal operating cost estimate I've seen (they don't release numbers) has put their hosting and distribution costs at about $25b. They pay out $9b annually to creators. They have 122k employees making an average of $117k annually, so that's another $13b in employee salaries (which is always the biggest cost any company shoulders). To be extremely generous, let's assume they also spend another $40b for all the other stuff they do as a business (office space, gold for play button plaques, pizza parties for their employees, legal, etc)--to be clear, that's more than Netflix made in total last year, so while it might be ridiculously high, it's not ridiculously low.

That adds up to $87b in operating costs annually. To be even more unreasonably liberal here, let's double that. $174b in operating costs on $350b revenue would be less than half of the total, leaving them them with a whopping $176,000,000,000 in profits annually.

Only about $40b of that is ads; everything else is from subscriptions, deals, etc. And, as noted before, they pay creators about $9b annually. So if they cut ads in half, and doubled their creator payout, they would reduce their total profits to $147b. If they totally eliminated ads altogether and quadrupled their creator payout, they'd still be making more than $107 billion dollars per year above operating expenses.

They can afford to ease up on the gas a little bit.

That doesn't mean people shouldn't be fact-checking him. You won't sway the faithful, but you can knock some sense into the unaligned.

YouTube is a little bit different, imo. Ads essentially carpet-bomb you on YouTube, and the money isn't going to the people who actually create the content. If there were a reasonable number of ads, and they paid creators more, I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with it as I do.

Cybertrucks, maybe. But the sedans were, for a long time, the only real EV game in town. Owning them now does nothing to enrich Musk, and selling them does nothing to harm him. In fact, a mass selloff (of vehicles, not shares) may very well be helpful to his bottom line, since if you increase the used stock you make buying a dealer-new Tesla more attractive (when a bunch of them sit on a dealer lot all shiny, they're essentially advertisements). Plus, if you replace one with a gas vehicle, you're enriching the petroleum lobby that also helped put Musk Trump in office.

Tesla owners who care about making a difference should reduce waste by hanging on to their vehicles until they're falling to pieces (which won't take long in the case of the cybertruck), and then replace it with a low-cost EV made by someone else. In the meantime, cancel any recurring subscriptions on the vehicle, put a meaningful statement of resistance on the bumper, drive it to protests and campaign events for non-fascist candidates, and use it to contribute significant mutual aid within your community.

In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.

I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I've never picked it up again, and now it's so big and unwieldy I'm not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.

A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I've gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I'm unlikely to go much further in it.

At 11:00 in the evening, there are two options for what they're dealing with. Either:

1. They have made precisely no headway whatsoever in actually solving the bug, or
2. They have fixed the bug, but the debugging made them go "---wait, how did that ever work in the first place?!"

If it's #1, odds are pretty good that there's a random debug step they put in at 9:08 in the morning that's screwing everything up now. If it's #2, odds are pretty good that it actually didn't work before, and now they've got to go back through the last six months of data and rectify it to fix that bug.

They literally closed my kids' school a couple weeks ago to sanitize every surface because too many kids were sick.

Worst case scenario, we can go off of Canada's vaccination schedule. Assuming, of course, RFK doesn't ban the actual vaccines themselves. Then things become more difficult.

"Ey yo, bro, I got the flu vaccine here, Winter 2027 strain, 100% pure, you buyin'?"

Addictive, yes, but non-extractive. There's a big huge difference.

These idiots still write with quills, read by candlelight...

And it's worth noting—the items they use are still technology! Muggle technology, presumably. They just decided not to advance past a medieval technology level, which is presumably the last time they were actually more advanced than non-magical people.

Oh, there is more than enough blame to go around.

"Okay. Just so I understand it, in your wildest fantasy, you are in Hell, and you are co-running a bed-and-breakfast with the Devil."