I acknowledge your point about alternate use, but we also need to look at a datacenter we may or may not need as a “power consumption plant.” These jackasses just keep loading and loading up the grid, looking to make a private dollar on public infrastructure. It’s wasteful and not necessarily a baseline good thing TM even if AI goes flop.
Yeah converting waste heat into useful energy sounds very very much like “making entropy go down.” We know we can make entropy go down in one spot by increasing it even more in others. But for them to do that here… they’d be turning high entropy into low entropy PLUS more high entropy, which sounds circularly self-fueling or essentially a perpetual motion machine.
Most of our electrical generation capabilities use heat at some point to boil water, but what makes that work is water’s phase change behavior, accessible temperature for that phase exchange, and water’s ubiquity. If he can find another water that does something equally useful but at lower temperatures, without exotic materials… I mean John Galt can fuck right off.
If they can pull this off: amazing. But it sounds very much like a quixotic adventure for a legendary inventor’s final days. Someone call me when they have something applicable.
Having really shitty bags is probably the best idea of all.
Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.
As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.
Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?
Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)
the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)
streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that
Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams
Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow
See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Because Reddit exists.
Reddit itself didn’t truly take off to massive scale until some other players were out of the way. It was the underdog for a long time.
Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing.
Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.
I’ve managed entirely on Google Sheets for years now. And I was a really big fan of Excel. It was never viable for me to rely on Windows to be everywhere I need to be, and the functionality gap closed steadily over the years to the point where the benefits of it being on the web now overwhelm the feature gap. Being free helps too, especially as Excel has gone through various pricing and bundling contortions over the years. Someone might tell me here that it’s now completely free but can I really be blamed for tuning out Microsoft years ago?
Some of these are under threat too. There are online lawyer and doctor offerings now. Maybe not plumbers, but there are certainly tech companies trying to own the plumbing referral business (like Thumbtack) and they suck a great deal of the profit margin out of it. Nothing is safe.
Some local retail makes sense, and some does not. For example, my life would really suffer if the hardware store down the street closed up. I like being able to get a paint match home in under 30 minutes. And sometimes I spend half an hour looking for the exact bolt I need, checking it against the other part it’s going to screw into: you just can’t do all that on Amazon and the big box motherfuckers are further away and far less convenient.
Once I messed up and superglued a wrench into my palm. I couldn’t wait for fucking Prime Overnight. I went down to the hardware store and asked if they stocked ca glue debonder. They didn’t, but the store manager got out some acetone and sat there with me, slowly pouring it on as I peeled the wrench out. He wouldn’t even take my money at the end. You just cannot get that kind of service from Lowe’s or Amazon. I now buy every single thing I possibly can there, to help ensure they stay around. I drag my kids anytime I need to go there, and they’re allowed to raid the candy rack at the checkout.
My local hardware store stands apart as an indispensable local retail utility and I buy everything I possibly can there, because I like having a local hardware store and occasionally really need one. I buy all the household cleaning products I can there, for example, because they sell them, I need them, and I’m incredibly happy to pay whatever extra 40 cents they cost over having Amazon pack up a box of dish pods into its own cardboard box and truck it out to my house,
A lot of people in the world only have one kind of HVAC, heat or cooling, but not both.
Why do you even visit them? I’d say if you use them for product discovery but then give all your sales to online merchants, you are an absolute enemy of small businesses, whatever you think you feel about them.
Trillions of dollars worth of compute mining dogecoin
I wish i knew more about the guts of LLMs because I keep thinking it must be easier to optimize them than to put data centers into space.
It will come with an optional $400 fork that does nothing.
The concept of a global language is compatible with linguistic diversity. The Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves all have their own languages, but they also speak the same Common Tongue.
Our world just doesn’t have a common tongue. It has a handful of very colonially dominant languages.
That’s the utilitarian point of view. Even though I often take this POV on many subjects, it would be totalitarian to apply it to cultural matters. Should we adopt one world cuisine that is the easiest to work with? Should we settle everyone on one musical scale and religion, too? It would be a lot more efficient and would facilitate global interaction better.
Only problem: it would erase who we are.
I just go back to the things that forum admins have done forever: block whole IP continents you don’t see meaningful engagement from but see a ton of bots from. Make new accounts jump through a bunch of hoops. Don’t allow new users to create content for a while, and then make them earn that right over time. Shadow ban the crap you can identify so they waste their strength. Reap inactive accounts periodically. And so on.