I think I have about 50 bucks of monthly subscriptions all in by this point, and most of that is to patreons or various similar systems for smaller independent creators I wish to support directly. The rest is for a VPN for cough “downloading Linux ISO”, also libro fm for audio books to listen to on the night shift.

I actually spend a fair bit monthly on one time donations, purchases of media or related merch, especially stuff I already have access to and wish to support the creators of. I’d probably support more creators this way if it was easier to do so but there are so many times where there just is no way to do so.

With media on big streaming services, it’s been made pretty clear that I have little to no input on if the money I’m spending will actually end up supporting the creatives who make the media I enjoy. In fact it seems most of the money I spend will end up getting spent on stuff I do not care about. “Supporting creatives” through these means feels more like handing the reins of culture and art over to large companies and shareholders.

It’s not even really cheaper. Especially for Microsoft who is actually footing the bill to run all the data centers.

But, the potential benefit lies in the fact that it’s a potential labor substitute that can’t unionize, can be rapidly switched between different skill sets, won’t quit, won’t ask for raises, and won’t protest when you ask it to participate in DOD contracts. The labor that goes in to making it work is constant, uniform, alienated from the actual outputs of the system, and easily replaced if they start causing problems.

Want more capacity at the company? Build another data center. Need to pivot company priories to the latest fad? Just reduce token allocation form one department to another, no need to fire a bunch of people and wade through that legal mess, then wade through the mire of hiring a bunch of new people from a limited talent pool. Not using all the data center capacity? rent out the remainder to other companies.

It reduces the complex and intricate system of a company to a simple resource allocation that can be wielded at will by company leadership.

Nadella is perfectly sane and doing the most logical thing given his set of priorities and incentives. He’s payed insane amounts of money to push initiatives and pursue goals at the behest of the board, the board is attempting to maximize shareholder value, the value of stock is largely determined by perceptions of theoretical future growth.

The reality is irrelevant, the narrative and adhering to the party line is what matters.

It gave CEOs an excuse to do layoffs even though they knew it would hurt their human capital long term, and that they would probably have to hire back a lot of those positions long term at higher wages. In the short terms it gave them a few quarters of increased profits. It also let them push out blatantly unfinished products on the promise of future improbable improvements. This will hurt companies reputations long term, but in the short term is let them juice the stock price.

They needed the increased profit and the pie in the sky growth promises to game the stock market, say all the right buzz words and show an improving price to earnings.

Sure they made the companies worse and less sustainable long term, but, they got huge compensation packages right now thanks to the markets, and they probably won’t be running these companies long enough to see the true fallout.

I think Google is doing this specifically because of the anti trust trial against their ad monopoly/monopsony.

Like they’re clearly loosing the trial and that means they’re probably going to have to sell off parts of their advertising company, or at least massively alter how they operate to end the anti competitive practices.

It used to be that Google made money on every user, even if they left the site, because they served all the ads on every other site as well. Now that they won’t be making money that way, so they don’t want people going to other sites anymore.

I think the argument in this context it’s more about how Google is acting as a company, and less about how the underlying technology is dangerous.

Like Google clearly intends to turn off the web traffic to anyone who isn’t them. They want to maximize the amount of time users are spending on their page, seeing ads served directly by them. With their ad monopoly liable to get broken up in court, they won’t be able to monopolize advertising on other websites, so they’re just going to prevent people from going to other websites.

The fall out for smaller websites, news, blogs, ect, will be that suddenly a lot of their traffic is going to disappear because Google is no longer sending people to them, instead Google will scrape their pages and then just give that information directly to users. It will be an apocalypse to those making information to put on the internet.

It’s so funny to watch C-suite executives slowly turning in to fanfiction writers for investors and getting payed hundreds of millions to do it.

Meanwhile their systems are drowning in “exquisite attacks”. Of course instead of hiring more people to deal with that (or training up people to deal with it if there is a shortage of that skill on the market), they’re just making up these fantasies of infinitely scalable unpaid skilled labor.

I suspect that they’ve been pressured to keep it out of public by turbo tax lobbyists, but with the straight on attempt to kill it lately, they decided just to ignore that pressure and push it out to spite those lobbyists.

If it was from 10-20 years ago, top down from an angle with modeled 3d units, it might be one of the Wargame titles from Eugen, or if it was WW2 setting maybe Combat Mission: beyond overlord, Company of Heroes, or Men of War.

If it was straight on top down 2D, it might have been Mud and Blood, which was a WW2 wave defense flash game.

Was it top down in the sense of looking straight down or from above at an angle? Were the units modeled as individual 3d models or just 2D icons?

Also, roughly what time period was it set in? Like, Napoleonic, WW2, Cold War, Contemporary?

Was it single player or multi player focused?

Could you get additional units as the game went on or were you locked with the units you started with? How could you get additional units? Points? Timer?

This group will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai.

Don’t worry, the hen house guard force will report directly to the fox.

And of course this is all definitely worth it so checks notes we can become dependent on a handful of private companies to move us through our highly car dependent society and dismantle what little public transit is left.

Yup, totally a good idea and definitely worth it.

They’re assuming that just because they can bullshit legal authorities to get the things on the road, that’s a fait accompli. Once the services is operating and generating income it’s untouchable.

Thing is, they’re going to cause problems that will affect people, they will cause traffic jams, they will piss people off, they will cause accidents. These vehicles are, by design, unattended, sure they have cameras, but, anyone with nondescript clothes and a face covering can sabotage these vehicles without much risk of legal consequence.

The cost of maintaining a fleet of these vehicles in the face of road rage induced sabotage will sink these companies even if they are able to bribe every politician in every major city.

Butt why?

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.

There is a very interesting dynamic occurring, where things that didn’t used to be called AI have been rebranded as such, largely so companies can claim they’re “using AI” to make shareholders happy.

I think it behooves all of us to stop referring to things blankety as AI and specify specific technologies and companies as the problem.

There is a difference between opting out of a default feature and having the option to install a plugin.

I can go replace the horn in a car with an air raid siren, but that’s very different than every car coming with an air raid siren you have to turn off.

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.

I think there is a pretty big difference between an optional plugin and it being built in by default.

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.

Oh yah, for sure 90% of people shouldn’t be wasting the money on Nvidia cards at this point. There are very few situations where they make sense.

Intel and AMD both have way better price to performance cards.