What a way to make a livin
kibiz0r
joined 1 year ago
Can yall idiots just fact-check for a goddamn second? https://www.windowslatest.com/2023/10/16/no-windows-12-is-a-free-upgrade-and-wont-require-a-subscription/
Edit: Just type "windows 12 subscription" into your search bar. It's fewer words than any of these comments!
Upvoting because this is a a true "no stupid questions" post.
So... I think you need to look into the social and cognitive nature of swear words. Vsauce has a pretty good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7dQh8u4Hc
I think you also need to let go of the desire to be better than common culture, and/or the desire to engineer a better culture from an external perspective. People are gross and messy, imprecise and reckless. It's what makes us interesting, motherfucker.
Yet another reason that we cannot allow ML companies to set a precedent that "it's fine to use non-consensual training data, because the model only 'learns' from it and never reproduces an exact replica of any single input".
Also, this was not surprising:
Dillon said that DreamGF has a team of between 20-25 developers, mostly in Bulgaria, and that they previously worked at an NFT company.
Yep. History is written by the victors. And Western textbooks are full of Greek names. But when it comes to Eastern contributions..? Eh, let’s just call it the “Chinese Remainder Theorem”. They don’t get names.
It paints a real strange picture.
NeuraLink in 20 years
I mean… technically, the most reasonable way to invest in crypto is as a grift.
So they’re not wrong.
And even if you, as a user, want to pay with your wallet instead of your privacy, there are awkward logistical hurdles, especially for smaller sites.
Entering your payment info all the time sucks. Platforms like Patreon lock you into specific tiers, which may not align with how much you actually intend to use the thing. Any direct payment at all still has the overhead of a payment processor, which will take a bigger percentage of smaller payments.
in 2022, advertising revenue amounted to close to 113 billion U.S. dollars whereas payments and other fees revenues amounted to around two billion U.S. dollars.
With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide.
113/3 = about $38 per user per year
14*12 = $168 per user per year
Which would be a mark-up (a Zuck-up?) of 342%.
You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month, and it’s those same highly-active users that contribute the most to the ad revenue.
Having no idea how those stats actually break down, we could take a wild guess and do a Pareto Principle 80/20.
Say the top 20% active users constitute 80% of the ad revenue, and those same top 20% all switch to the paid model:
(113*0.8)/(3*0.2) = about $151 per VIP user per year
…which is a lot closer to the $168. Zuck-up of about 11%.
80/20 is probably cutting them too much slack, but the real markup is probably closer to 11% than it is to 342%.
This is also not factoring the extra operational expense of supporting the new model.
—
Math part over, here’s my take:
This is good.
Ad-based models are toxic. We poisoned our culture, bulldozed our privacy, distorted the economy, gave unfathomable power to immature narcissistic opportunists, and underdeveloped public FOSS tech because we expected privately-owned services to be Free™ even though they could never be literally free.
This is a move towards unmasking these services and revealing the real economic gears whizzing around behind them.
The more people understand what their privacy and autonomy is worth to these companies, the more they might insist on keeping it — and maybe even seek out places where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.
—
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
Meanwhile here’s Starlink with 25,000 near misses and accelerating, doubling every 6 months.
Bigger drones, or just more drones.