Shortsighted. If they're willing to stoop this low, they should have started by selling multiple kinds of badges for smaller monthly amounts.
$0.99/mo for emojis. $1.99/ to show your support for various causes. $3.99/ for sports teams. $4.99/ for ID verification. $0.49/ of your red cross badge goes to earthquake survivors.
“I am not a bot/intelligence services construct/foreign troll masquerading as an citizen etc.”. Is a pretty valuable service for the network.
Right now it’s a property not advertised to network participants. But in the near future you might seem the following above unverified accounts posting about controversial topics
“Careful. This person could not be identified. They may be a bot or falsifying their identify to misrepresent opinion”
At which point, the value of verification goes up. Maybe.
> “I am not a bot/intelligence services construct/foreign troll masquerading as an citizen etc.”. Is a pretty valuable service for the network.
It is valuable to Facebook to maintain a healthy pltform. But is it really worth $15 a month to you to broadcast this to others?
Unless the culture of the platform shifts to a point where non-verified accounts are considered second-class, the only reason to pay this is basically as a status symbol. In which case, I think the tiered approach makes more sense. And maybe "Facebook Gold" for people who want to pay even more for a badge....
Twitter had their checkmarks established as an artificially constrained status symbol you couldn't buy with money... and then, under Musk, they altered the terms of the deal by saying you have to pay, but you get tangible perks in terms of platform features, visibility of your content, etc. Unless Facebook wants to do that, I can't see people paying this much on their own...
I have family members that have hundreds of people they've never met on their friends lists. Some of those personalities are obvious scammers/grifters etc. But aging people have diminished capacity for detecting that kind of stuff.
Example:
My MIL is 'friends' with a prominent US based surgeon who is also a leading founder in a biotech company. He convinced her to buy stock in said biotech company, when its price was peaking. Of course it was a classic pump and dump and the value plummeted a few weeks later.
Would identity guard rails have saved her? Possibly not. But telling her "if you don't see a verified XYZ they are a scammer" might move the needle.
Fair enough. Maybe that doctor’s account would benefit from paying for verification? He is a public figure of sorts. For accounts where most of its “friends” aren’t actually friends then some verification makes sense. I would guess that most accounts don’t fall into this category though.
It's more like class than caste, because it's possible to move between classes after birth. Modern advertisers are sort of similar to a priestly/censor class, in the same way that serial C-suite/board members are sort of like an aristocratic class.
Discussing that sort of thing is discouraged in the US, because it stinks of nepotism and conflicts with our culture's ostensible ideals of meritocracy and egalitarianism.
It's an easy mistake to make, because in order to obscure our society's important class distinctions, we make a lot of noise about other differences that people are born with, which feels very caste-y.
Heyo! FWIW, just wanted to let you know that your last two comments were auto-killed by HN. I've vouched them, which unkilled them. Looking over your comment history, you seem smart and earnest, so either you're posting from Tor or you've angered Dan somehow, or there's some new filter in place.
Assuming it's not the middle one, you can email [email protected] and ask to be marked legit, or you can wait out the noob threshold -- aged accounts are allowed to post from tor without being autokilled, since tor + new account was likely one of the most common ways to abuse the site at one point. So the problem will go away in about 14 days.
The problem is that people who are willing to pay $20/mo for privacy are much more valuable to advertisers than those who can't.
If those users go away, the average $/user from ads goes down, because the only people seeing ads are those who are too poor to avoid it.
To an advertiser, poor people who direct their attention towards whatever is put in front of them are worth a lot less than rich people who carefully curate what their attention is directed towards. It's grody, but that's the advertising industry for you.
Counterpoint, the main demographic for this already uses ad/tracker blockers. I'm sure Meta has some ways around that but getting that $20/month is much easier from a willing participant.
That is definitely not true. Tech workers and people who are tech savvy use ad/tracker blockers, regardless of how good of an ad target they are. They are a very small slice of consumers with excess income.
In other words, a lot of people who use ad blockers are good ad targets, but the converse is not true.
The lack of ad blockers on mobile is the real sweet spot. I pay for Youtube 100% to use it on mobile/ipad without ads. So even ad-blocking privacy people still see lots of ads if they use these apps.
Firefox on iOS isn't really Firefox, Apple doesn't allow that. It's a thin skin around the platform-provided web view, essentially Safari. This really limits what Mozilla can support on iOS.
Firefox's usage rate on Android is tiny, among that I doubt even >10-25% know you can install an adblocker (which is generous but they are probably more technical). And I use iOS on mobile.
Right, someone willing to regularly pay $20/month is probably worth closer to $40/month to potential advertisers.
It probably scales all the way up until $10k/month, which is near the upper limit of what super-luxury brands, that would buy ads online, can earn per customer.
So the curious implication is that such services could be 'free' or $20k/month.
But with a changing advertising market and lower budgets, FB might view the alignment of incentives more beneficial.
Homeless people are often unbanked, and it's very difficult to open a new account without a credit score and permanent address.
Recent immigrants have difficulty opening accounts for a similar reason - only US credit counts. Political activists are also often denied accounts out of an abundance of caution on the bank's part, e.g. with the Occupy Wall St protests.
The hurdles you mention are nothing compared to lack of ID. Lack of ID is the #1 obstacle to homeless people, especially anyone on the street whose stuff is regularly lost or stolen.
Especially if someone is from out-of-state, good luck rebuilding that cache of ID again. It requires nominal payments and some sort of starting point of documentation. Sometimes it's chicken-and-egg with the DMV.
The first step usually involves procuring a birth certificate from the correct jurisdiction. Good luck if you're an immigrant from, say, a small village in Latin America.
There are whole services and ministries that help people with obtaining ID. I really appreciated that fact. If you're an addict or mentally ill or raised in poverty or abuse, you're gonna have trouble calmly navigating bureaucracies, for sure. It helps to have a tour guide alongside who can coach you through it.
TBF, you need working hands to use hands-on computers.
Plus, the offline part could make a good starting point for a DIY personal assistant.
That said, their "getting started" sounds...esoteric.
>There normally isn't any output but you should be able to type "hey" by saying "hoof eve yank" and transcribe a sentence after saying "scribe". You can terminate it by pressing Ctrl+c or saying "troll cap".
Hmm. It looks like natural gas is a little less than $2.50 / GigaJoule (~29.3kWh) at the moment. One A100 eats about 400W, and apparently OpenAI used about 1023 of those running for 34 days to train ChatGPT[1].
There's also a bunch of supporting equipment, so maybe they used around 500W * 1023 * (34*24=816)hrs = 417,384kWh?
I think that would be around $35k in fossil fuels, assuming none of the datacenter's energy came from renewable sources?
You just assumed 100% efficient conversation between heat and electricity plus zero transmission losses etc, ignored the training time for earlier versions of ChatGPT or any of the building or developers equipment, and of course Natural Gas prices have only recently fallen so they where vastly higher during the actual training.
A more reasonable estimate might be 5 years * 500W * 1,000 systems = 76.7 GWh, ~29.3kWh * 55% = 16.1 kWh. Actual electricity generation isn’t 100% natural gas but this is additional demand on the grid which tends to be supplied by natural gas unless there’s a surplus of green or nuclear power. Also, data centers also use AC etc so it’s really quite arbitrary how you want to estimate things.
PS: A similar thing applies to EV’s people tend to use the existing mix of generation to estimate how green they are but it’s not like we are adding hydroelectric dams when people increase electricity consumption. It’s really a question of how marginal increases in demand are supplied.
-420,000 kWh X 30 year average grid emissions data California 0.233kgCO2e/kWh = 98tCO2e which is about the emissions of 7 households in the USA for one 2021 year.
In the transcripts I saw, it seemed like Sydney repeated itself a lot. It used the same sentence structure a lot. Stephen Wolfram wrote a good primer on LLMs, which was recently discussed here a lot:
To my eye, BingGPT's personality looked similar to the early "low-temperature" examples in that article. Like the model got stuck overfitting to a topic that acts like a local maxima of word probabilities.
$0.99/mo for emojis. $1.99/ to show your support for various causes. $3.99/ for sports teams. $4.99/ for ID verification. $0.49/ of your red cross badge goes to earthquake survivors.
Like virtual hats, but for social media.