Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement
I don’t think we’re the right demographic to judge that as our view is very distorted by our own experience. The reddit “exodus” is barely a blip in their daily user count - in fact DAU has gone up by 50% since the API changes which is huge especially for a mature platform. This makes it very desirable as it shows that the more aggressive monetization effort doesn’t in fact drive users away.
When you read that stuff on reddit there’s a parameter you need to keep in mind : these people are not really discussing Lemmy. They’re rationalizing and justifying why they are not on Lemmy. Totally different conversation.
Nobody wants to come out and say “I know mainstream platforms are shit and destroying the fabric of reality but I can’t bring myself to be on a platform except it is the Hip Place to Be”. So they’ll invent stuff that paints them in a good light.
You’ll still see people claiming that Mastodon is unusable because you have to select an instance - even though you don’t have to, you can just type Mastodon on Google, click the first link, and create an account in 2 clicks. It’s been ages. But the people still using Twitter need the excuse because otherwise what does it make them?
Yeah honestly i can’t get anything done with a raspberry. Maybe i host too many services ?
jesus christ what a nice burn
So for the first 20 years or 2/3 of the entire history of the company, they were unprofitable or barely profitable.
We must have a wildly different definition of “barely profitable”. Half a billion in 2004 money is a lot of profit, a billion back to back in 2009 and 2010 is a lot of profit.
I think you’re confusing Amazon with the next generation of loss-leader companies. Let’s talk Uber, let’s talk Twitter, if we want to point at “hugely unprofitable” companies. But Amazon is a beast of its own, they have a very coherent financial story. Even during their money-losing decade they posted insane results, frequently multiplying revenue while barely increasing operating costs.
Oh thanks for clarifying in even more excruciating details how a subtraction works that is really helpful.
Why would you repeat the lie that they’re “usually unprofitable” when the information is publically available in a million places on the internet ? In 2023 Amazon made :
Amazon is factually not “usually unprofitable”, they have in fact made profit (as in money which actually goes into your pocket after discounting all expenses) every year for the last 15 years except in 2022 and some tiny losses in 2014 and 2012.
That’s why it’s important to heavily curate your corporate social media feed. If you see a community where this kind of comments are heavily upvoted just hide it and move on, there’s not that many and most of the niche interests are still relatively clean places.
I’m not much of a reddit defender as i pretty much left this place same time as everybody else. However there’s always been a very clear trend in this kind of subreddits. Places like “noahgettheboat” or “iamapieceofshit” or “thatsinsane” systematically attract the worst kind of misanthropic low-lifes. People will see the most abject violence and laugh “haha he fucked around and found out” and of course this makes the most fascistic types feel at home.
I don’t think they are representative of the overall slant of the community. Most places are progressive by default.
Thanks for clarifying that profit is calculated using a subtraction, but you’re missing the core of my comment. Amazon self-finance their R&D and STILL make a fuck load of profit. They made like 30B$ of free cash last year alone. In the last 15 years they’ve made >100B$ in overall profit and only been in the red twice.
They’re not just profitable they’re an insane money printing machine that doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.
There’s absolutely no doubt that lower-end models are going to keep improving and that inference will keep getting cheaper. It won’t be on a Raspberry but my money’s with you. In 6 years you’ll be able to buy some cheap-ish specialized hardware to run open models on and they’re gonna be at least as capable as today’s frontier models while burning a fraction of the energy.
In fact i wouldn’t be surprised if frontier models were somehow overtaken by vastly cheaper models in the long run. The whole “trillion parameter count” paradigm feels very hacky and ripe for radical simplification. And wouldn’t it be hilarious ? All those suckers spending billions building a moat only to see it swept under their feet.
That’s a long established myth. Amazon started out in 94, and became profitable in like 10 years. Most of their hardcore R&D is self-financed cause they generate just that much free cash.
What is tiring about this conversation is that you have to balance real historically documented dangers of tolerating fascists, versus the theoretical dangers of whatever some internet person thinks might happen in an imaginary future.
I mean, it’s a tough call, right? “Regulating food sounds nice in theory but what if it gives some future government the power to ban pizza haha gotcha”.
I do it because it’s easy and it’s free but if it was difficult i’d probably still do it.
Artists are perfectly able to use the fediverse, that is not what is stopping them.
They don’t come because they need to be where their fans are. That is why Cara will only be a splash: their niche is artists who place more value on the anti-AI slant than on meeting their audience where it lives. By definition that is not conducive to a lot of organic growth.
Yeah he should be using real art like stock photos and shitty clip art