> Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
Correct, but the current market is not working. 15+ streaming services is terrible for consumers. Catalogs are compromised. Bigger services can push prices up because they have more stuff. Clearly if there are too few players then there's less competition and no price pressure, but there's a sweet spot between what exists today and that.
Youtube, Android and Google Maps got better (and became financially viable at all) when Google bought them. Github got better and cheaper when Microsoft bought it.
I'm not necessarily talking about the product itself getting better, I'm talking about the overall consumer situation being better.
All these products were acquired very early in their lifespans, so them getting "better" was practically inevitable.
GitHub's acquisition effectively took at least one competitor off the market. Now, Microsoft doesn't have to seriously develop a competitor, they just bought their competitor and adopted it. They never had to improve Azure DevOps (VSTS) enough to be attractive, they just bought the market leader. If GitHub was never acquired, my company might be deciding between BitBucket, Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure Repos. Instead, Azure Repos is more of a niche offering where most of Microsoft's effort has focused on GitHub. Microsoft removed an option which likely raised prices or reduced user choice.
Google Maps was acquired in basically a prototype stage before it was ever a public product, so that case is irrelevant.
Android is worse in a number of ways due to Google's integration. Google Play Services APIs and other Google technologies have led to heavy Google lock-in. If Android continued as its own project, it would have been much more vendor-agnostic.
In the case of YouTube, I'd argue it's worse in a number of key ways: ads are wildly pervasive (sure, monetization would have had to happen anyway in some fashion), many of the platform changes are user-hostile (removed dislike count, background playback limited to premium subscription), content moderation more heavily influenced by Google's advertisement-based business model (e.g., if YouTube had continued on its own, it might have chosen a different monetization strategy less advertisement oriented, but Google is an advertisement company. Advertisers are more sensitive to their products being presented next to objectionable content) and competitors were snuffed out due to ecosystem integration (YouTube videos as Google search results rather than agnostic video results).
Remember the era where YouTube got extremely badly integrated in to Google+ and basically forced you to use it? That was a pretty terrible user experience.
Piracy is seeing a big uptick because streaming increasingly sucks. 10+ years ago before studios started chasing their own streaming platforms, and Netflix was the only game in town, it was an excellent deal. $10ish, as opposed to $50+ for cable (might be low on the cable subscription - I never had one).
If you wanted an equivalent catalog today, you'd need at least 3 or 4 streaming services, and you're paying $50+ or so. Netflix + WB (inc HBO) surely gets them back to roughly where they were. Will Netflix jack up their rates on the back of this acquisition? Inevitably, but I think they'll have a very hard time approaching a similar monthly rate. My gut says that they'll have a hard time getting beyond $30, with Disney and Youtube anchoring in the low teens. So, for the consumer, it's a win. For competing studios, of course, not so much.
You're assuming a free market working perfectly would bring the price down, but the free market is kneecapped by stupid and arbitrary licensing and IP games, which is the result desperate overreach of an industry hanging on by its fingernails as its business model has been upended multiple times over during the past 2 1/2 decades. But as we used to say about the music industry while happily napstering, your broken business model is not my problem.
as much as I think the copyright 14 years thing is one of the more contemptible ideas well to do programmers have on how to improve things by making things worse for people who make less money, I don't think copyright is longer than 14 years is the only reason works by the original author of a series earns more money than fan fiction.
pick your battles. You decide what extra work is worth your effort.
learn to say "no", by which i mean "yes, but...". e.g. "can you look at this production issue?" --> "yes, but it is outside my comfort zone, so i will have to charge at least 8 extra hours of overtime towards that issue".
Sure. The problem is more like that during the interviews I was made to believe this is welcome and on day one I was told in no uncertain terms that I'll follow a script to the letter or get fired. Which ultimately happened.
Shitty luck and all sometimes, of course. But really, most of the HN crows very quickly glances over how many toxic and terrible places to work at exist out there.
It's weird to doubt something that's been in the news a bunch and is reported on by reputable sources though. Instead of expecting 100 people to do a basic search for them, they should have done their own search and only doubted if they didn't find anything.
You may have read a different comment then. I didn't doubt this claim, I only asked for more information about it.
And no, one should never be discouraged from doing so, even if a "basic search" (not exactly well defined either) leads to many results.
This whole "do your own research" attitude is not good. It's easy to make any claim whatsoever without any basis of truth in this manner. Good for you if that is enough for you but for me that is not enough, logically speaking.
Yes. I didn't doubt the claim. But I was able to read a lot about the topic and inform myself better by visiting the links in some of the responses.
One may call me lazy but I think it was a valid request and I also believe that informing oneself is not quite as easy as it perhaps seems. I certainly don't think it's as simple as "googling the issue" when it comes to something like this.
I didn't downvote the comment, but I would have done so. If we want to talk about how discussions should work then the commenter should have first spent two minutes researching and/or explained why sources like the Associated Press (my first result when copying and pasting the comment in DuckDuckGo) aren't reliable.
"I don't understand" is a good way to foment discussion. "I don't believe you" usually isn't.
I believe the Associated Press is a reliable source, I'm not sure where I stated otherwise...
I just want to state for the record that I didn't claim to disagree with the comment nor am I a conspiracy theorist, nor a Chinese spy... I only asked for more information (which other comments have then provided).
> if you assume all the computational pathways happen in parallel on a GPU, that doesn't necessarily increase the time the model spends thinking about the question
The layout of the NN is actually quite complex, which a large amount of information calculate beside the token-themselves, and the weights (think "latent vectors").
iirc some european countries are currently exploring the idea of "law as code", i.e. law in a machine-readable format that can be parsed algorithmically. iirc austria already made some progress by converting some of their lawbooks to such a format. (I remember being in a presentation about that topic, and I explicitly asked about some actual laws being converted, and they actually showed some of these laws, but I can not find publicly available sources I could link, except some general corporate statements like this https://wwwdev.unisys.com/our-clients/advancing-public-servi... ). EU seems to work on something similar, e.g. https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/endorse...
> then suddenly receive a lecture about velocity, moving fast, being efficient
I like to give the opposite kind of lecture, like when someone refused to even consider alternative ways of solving a problem. Some phrases I like to throw around: "you just wasted 2 days of work, because you skipped 30min of research at the start", or "it's arrogant to assume, you'll find the perfect solution on the very first try".
this is not how markets usually work.
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