Enclosure of the digital commons. An attempt to at least. I do think that it’s ultimately doomed.
Fundamentally, the internet is an open thing, by the very nature of how it works, thus it is difficult to enclose. Google is more likely to destroy its market share than to fully gate off its user base.
But when all is said and done, the average person will be left to pick up the pieces of the fractured web they leave behind.
Maybe some of the obviousness is a sort of camouflage in that if it looks like a fishing scheme, people at YouTube won’t look any deeper. I think the actual goal of the bots is to manipulate the algorithm. Like, most of the time, the obvious bots just get ignored, especially on videos from bigger creators, no reason to put effort in to making them believable.
Like, maybe they comment on video A to show “engagement” with that content, then they go and comment on video B. Fool the algorithm into associating people who engage with video A as the same kind of audience who would engage with Video B. Thus getting the algorithm to recommend video B more often to viewers of Video A. For something like that you wouldn’t need the bots to look real to other commenters, and having them seem like innocuous fishing scam bots might reduce the scrutiny on their activity.
I could see a lot of different reasons to do that. Could be as simple as some shady “Viral marketing consultancies” trying to boost a client’s channel in the algorithm. Could also be something more comprehensive and nefarious, like trying to manipulate social discourse by steering whole demographics towards certain topics or even away from specific topics. I do wonder how much the algorithm could be nudged by an organized bot comment spam ring.
I don’t think you sound paranoid at all, at least not compared to me. Bots are everywhere on social sights and there is a well documented history of different groups using various tactics and strategies to hide the bots or distract from what the bots are doing.
Often times reviewers will get cards before release day without going through the manufacturer, as cards will ship to wear-houses and stores in preparation for launch day, and reviewers can get access to buy the cards early through contacts at those places.
One of the things nvidia did this time was they blocked reviewer’s access to drivers until release day, despite them having the cards through third parties.
To some extent it comes down to nvidia’s software. Like, some people like their upscaling, and I’ve heard from streamers that they need them for NVENC.
On the other hand, their Linux drivers are an pain and they’ve been less than cooperative on that front in the past.
Judging by the fact these are launching on long march 20s. It’s probably not going beyond LEO, so it doesn’t need proper deep space hardening like the RAD750 or the like.
It’s probably closer to off the shelf parts like what’s used on the ISS.
That’s still not very much compared to most data centers. Like, 7000 terabytes is a lot of storage for one person, but it barely even registers compared to most modern data centers.
Also, 2800 desktops networked together isn’t really a super computer or a data center.
such a network is interesting as a scientific tool for gathering and processing data, certainly, but not a data-center and not a super computer.
it seems a bit disingenuous to call these “data centers in space” or “super computers”.
30 terabytes of storage across 12 satellites? So 2.5 TB each and 744 tops (which is like, a modern mid range graphics card for a PC, the RX 9070 XT does 1557 tops for reference). Like that just sounds like they’re launching a powerful PC in to orbit. Like, that’s a lot of power for a satellite, for comparison the curiosity rover is using the same kind of CPU as a 2000 era imac G3, but it’s not a data center.
The idea of doing more processing of the data on the satellite rather than processing it on the ground is interesting and neat, but representing these as anything more than that is… weird.
it is the nature of personalist authoritarian regimes. Anything that presents them with information or outcomes that don’t serve the leaders goals gets turned in to an enemy, even if it’s the dumbest strategic choice possible.
They have an incredibly favorable Supreme Court, and rather than working with it to consolidate power, they are throwing rocks at it for not letting them do what ever they want.
It’s a pattern across a lot of dysfunctional organizations, when a leader doesn’t accept “not possible” for an answer. Doesn’t care about the dissent presented by subordinates and dismisses it as disloyalty. If you don’t want to get fired, you just go along with the boss and never present him with the reality.
The real messes occur when this kind of behavior scales. When the subordinates of the leader start doing the same to their own subordinates. When people start lying to their superiors about what is happening because they know the boss doesn’t want bad news or to be told their idea didn’t work. You get a game of telephone where information is distorted as it moves up the chain.
I think cases like this are a great look at the internal thought process of trumps team. Like, this isn’t them developing a masterful plan and executing on it. This is the first fucking idea that someone in the room proposed after a few drinks.
Like, they don’t understand the laws they’re bumping in to, or even if someone understands it, they’re pretending they don’t so they can tell the boss that they have a plan to make the thing happen. It’s trumps method of running an organization failing because the incentive structure is to tell the boss you can get him what he wants, even if what he wants isn’t possible. So they keep wasting their time and resources chasing stupid plans.
The thing is, I don’t think valve wants to become a desktop OS provider. Becoming the provider and maintainer of an OS for hundreds of millions of users is so far beyond their scope as a company. They’ve got a third the employees of Canonical and a fiftieth the employees of RedHat, the companies behind Ubuntu and Fedora. Maintaining a limited scope console/handheld OS that runs on a handful of hardware set ups is one thing, but supporting a fully fledged daily driver desktop OS meant to operate on any system is something else entirely.
Right now, most of their users are on windows, which makes them nervous because Microsoft is a known monopolist and has been slowly creeping deeper in to the PC games space. That’s why Valve has put so much effort in to software to support compatibility on Linux, so there is a viable alternative if Microsoft try’s to push them out. I think the steam deck and steamOS were a means to that end, create a business reason to develop and support those tools, not a first step towards becoming an operating system developer.
A better route forward for them would be to use their reach and public trust to help people make the switch to other extant distros. For example an all in one utility on the steam store that helps people select the right distro for their use case and set it up, have a hardware scan and a little quiz to choose a distro, a hard drive partitioning tool to set up dual boot, a tool to write the ISO to a USB drive (or maybe even just set up a bootable on the disk using the partitioner IDK), and migrate important files over using their cloud system.
If the issue is that people trust stuff with the valve branding on it, but are not willing to try Linux on their own, then Steam acting as a guide is much more practical than Valve taking on all the work needed to maintain a proper distro.
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.
Oh boy, can’t wait for them to start selling off all those houses they’ve been buying so they can get the cash they need to cover this and then crash the housing market.
Enclosure of the digital commons. An attempt to at least. I do think that it’s ultimately doomed.
Fundamentally, the internet is an open thing, by the very nature of how it works, thus it is difficult to enclose. Google is more likely to destroy its market share than to fully gate off its user base.
But when all is said and done, the average person will be left to pick up the pieces of the fractured web they leave behind.