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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Sounds like it’s about equivalent to Intel’s latest GPU. Both are running about a little over a generation behind AMD and Nvidia. Meanwhile Nvidia is busy trying to kill their consumer GPU division to free up more fab space for data center GPUs chasing that AI bubble. AMD meanwhile has indicated they’re not bothering to even try to compete with Nvidia on the high end but rather are trying to land solidly in the middle of Nvidia’s lineup. More competition is good but it seems like the two big players currently are busy trying to not compete as best they can, with everyone else fighting for their scraps. The next year or two in the PC market are shaping up to be a real shit show.




  • Website operators don’t want to have to display cookie banners

    This is false. If they didn’t want to display the banners they could literally remove them, there’s absolutely nothing requiring them as long as they don’t track your behavior. They refuse to give up tracking so they add the banners to annoy visitors and hopefully trick some of them into accidentally opting into tracking. It’s an abusive manipulation of a loophole in the GDPR. If they really hated the banners they could just not track you but they rather make it your problem.


  • The problem is that there aren’t any really viable alternatives. YouTube has three major advantages and all three are necessary. First and most critically it has a viable business model (that is it has a way to earn money to pay creators). It’s a shitty business model, but it is viable which already puts it ahead of most services that are coasting on VC funds and hoping they’ll trip over a business model before they go bankrupt. Second it has the infrastructure and capital to actually serve content. Running a video streaming service is the single largest bandwidth consumer you could possibly come up with and that means considerable network infrastructure costs, to say nothing of the storage demands. Third it has network effect going for it. Nobody is going to watch videos on your platform if there’s only a couple dozen of them total. The sheer size and scope of YouTube means no matter what you’re looking for you can find something to watch. It’s a one stop shop for AV content.

    Every single competitor to YouTube has failed on one of those points, usually the first one, rarely the second. The last service I saw come close to hitting all three was Vimeo, but it flamed out not even a decade after it launched. Twitch.tv is struggling to make their accounting work and isn’t even a direct competitor because they’re pushing hard for live streams as opposed to pre-recorded videos. Alternatives like PeerTube have no business model and will never attract creators or a mainstream audience. Paid hosting platforms like Floatplane are replacements for traditional video streaming services like Amazon Video or Netflix not really platforms where just anybody can set up a channel and start posting videos.

    To paraphrase a famous saying, YouTube is the worst public video streaming service except for every other one. Until someone comes along and figures out how to make enough money to reliably pay creators and has enough capital to actually serve that content reliably and in high quality YouTube isn’t going anywhere.