Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • As a person who used to work at MSFT:

    I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

    They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

    The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

    Itll probably take half a decade.

    For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

    Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

    I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

    We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

    Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

    Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

    The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.


  • MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

    Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

    The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.



  • Youre looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, not the business side.

    I dont disagree at all that YT streaming is not up to par with Twitch.

    But theres no immutable law that says ‘there must be an easy to use internet video streaming site.’

    I think that Amazon shifting toward Twitch needing to be more soley responsible for its own profitability will reduce its growth in user count, and eventually, as with so, so many other online websites with huge upkeep expenses but very little income stream… this will inevitably lead to death of the service/site.

    I could be wrong about the amount the growth slows down by, but yeah I certainly wouldnt expect Twitch to be around, at least not without huge amounts of monetization compared to what there is now, in 5 years.


  • Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.

    Google in particular… Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).

    MSFT has done this a bunch… even a lot of non really ‘Tech’ huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.

    The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.

    However… as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?

    Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.

    Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.

    Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.

    But… when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.

    Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.

    Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.



  • Just popping in here to toot my own horn:

    I called this happening when whatever his name is, Twitch CEO man, gave the public speech/stream being very, very appreciative of Amazon for their support.

    When you do /that/ it means your business model is a failure.

    EDIT

    https://sh.itjust.works/post/12652127

    (no clue if this is somehow against some rules or some kind of lemmy instance feud, but heres the thread with my original post)

    Anyway, Twitch is quite likely to ultimately basically kill itself with this move, and Amazon will either spin the employees off into existing Amazon sub sections, possibly but not likely do some nonsense like keep the twitch brand name but dramatically re orient the site, or, most likely, just slowly lay off more and more twitch employees and formally pull the plug, while retaining the brand rights and web url, all that kinda stuff.

    I give it about 2 years before one of those scenarios comes to fruition. Could be faster if insanity twitch drama gets even more insane than normal.


  • Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.

    Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.

    You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.

    Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.

    I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth… you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to… what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV

    EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.

    Point is… this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.

    Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.

    If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.


  • Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?

    Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.






  • Yep, Ive been saying this for years now as well.

    We have giant mostly empty office buildings which could be converted into mostly apartments, with even make shift permitted commercial zones for basically street vendor / convention booth style shops every 10 floors.

    Instead it apparently makes more sense to not do this because it makes more sense to keep them empty, heated and lit 24/7, as basically a way to prop up the retail property market.

    Capitalism is a farce, and it has already doomed us all: we have now breached the 1.5 C warming barrier, even more rapidly than most of the worst case scenarios predicted. Permafrost in Siberia and Northern Canada is already thawing and releasing methane.

    Enjoy the collapse of human civilization in your own lifetime as people and governments continue to squabble and combat each other over scarcer and scarcer resources as our entire way of life becomes too expensive to maintain.


  • Yep, been saying this for years now, the vicious and irrational hatred against work from home employees is driven by two main factors:

    1. At a systemic level, despite work from home being obviously less costly in the long run than maintaining an office space, if work from home were allowed to proliferate it basically pop the commercial real estate bubble and then basically every corrupt mayor and idiots in upper management would be shown to be corrupt idiots.

    2. At a more personal level, upper and middle management people essentially get their kicks from seeing busy little worker bees near them, and they would personally have existential crisis when they realize that 90% of what they do is negging and then ommitting or misrepresenting that in actual meetings. Actual meetings which can easily take place in zoom, or often replaced with just an email.


  • Well uh, yes. Its the internet, there are sites where people devote massive time and energy to discussing the wankability but also canonical accuracy of depictions of ‘what if 14 year old anime girl characters actually had penises that are canonically accurate and true to the art style as well’.

    At least one person is into the weirdest shit you can imagine.

    There was at one point a group of people who filmed themselves putting fleshlights in car exhausts and fucking them, then this got even more weird and people seemingly seriously said they had actual sexual attraction to vehicles, then people started fucking the exhaust pipes with no fleshlights, then someone , possibly multiple people actually seriously injured themselves this way.

    And also yes to shock value, now that 4chan is involved, its more or less ‘this is funny because it will very likely make someone angry, and also theres no real way this sort of thing can be prevented, here, lets prove it’.

    I have stared into the void, it has stared back into me, and destroyed all nearly all notions commonly assumed to define reason and humanity.

    Do not do as I have done.





  • Its a 3500 dollar computer you wear on your face, that can only perform basic computing tasks which can more cheaply be performed on a cell phone, draws enormous amounts of attention to the user when used in public spaces, and both the ability to use it in public spaces and the attention drawing nature of it are marketed as pros.

    Ok, so its now exceedingly clear that anyone who would get this thing is a wealthy idiot who has 0 experience with an impoverished community, as if you walked through a poorer area, you would just get mugged and have this high value device stolen from you.

    And frankly at this point I would morally support that happening.

    Not that it likely will, as anyone both dumb amd rich enough to have this happen to them generally has no kind of on foot commute through any such impoverished area.