Zos_Kia

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?

That was a classic House MD episode 🎖️

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 :

• 575B$ in sales
• If you remove costs of goods that’s 270B$ in gross profit
• If you remove operating expenses (including R&D) that’s 30B$ in net income

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.

I have one kid. Don’t really want a second one. No fucking regrets he’s a swell dude, he’s smart as fuck and has a gentle heart that just warms my soul. Also thanks to modern schooling he’s got some amazing psychological skills like identifying his and others’ emotions, processing them before reacting, etc… Coming from a stupid family that’s shit i learned to do in my 30s and he was already working on it at 3. That’s stuff he won’t need to power through with weed and alcohol in his 20s i guess.

Sure the world is considerably more shit now than it was when he was born, which is dumb because he’s only 6. But hey the world was shit before and every time period brings its own brand of anxiety and uncertainty. With kids you learn to take things day by day and not dwell so much on what you don’t control. You have to accept the universe on its own terms, that’s the whole point of psychological and philosophical integration after all.

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.

Yeah i don’t know much about TS but as an extreme metal fan happily married to a K-pop & K-drama fan, I agree with your point. But again, there’s a lot of signal in those various situations.

The girl in the story has clearly signaled that pop-culture tastes are important for her in a potential partner, while you and I have clearly signaled that it isn’t. Both are very valid.

I was actually agreeing with you. She rejected him for liking anime just like he may have rejected him for liking Taytay & reality TV. As you said, dating is not a speedrun to making some random person like you - it’s a search for someone you like and who likes you back. Personal interests and hobbies are a great proxy to finding that person. But of course you have to be in a good place mentally, and not ready to ditch your dignity for validation from a random person you might not even like if you were frank with yourself.

Yeah if Anon had asked first and she had replied “Taylor swift and watching reality TV” how would he have reacted?

I have to keep my LinkedIn for business reasons but recently I noticed a big uptick in fascist-adjacent posting. At first it depressed me big time but then I started blocking and a couple weeks and dozen blocks later it was over. Turns out a small number of people can really give the impression of a crowd and fuck with the whole experience.

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.

Last year it was APIs

Hahaha the inane shit you can read on this website

Oh yeah the John Wick hangover is a real thing !

Yeah that’s the fun of movies and art in general. I find it empty because it did not speak to me on a personal level but of course that’s probably cause i’m missing the whole entire point of it.