• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle


  • They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don’t play.

    Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.

    Other than that I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.

    Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.












  • AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all

    No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.

    Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.

    Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.

    Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.


  • ‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.

    They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.

    They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.

    Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.

    Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.


  • paying a peasant to work

    Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who’s title controlled the land.

    There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I’ll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.


  • Explaining what happens in a neural net is trivial. All they do is approximate (generally) nonlinear functions with a long series of multiplications and some rectification operations.

    That isn’t the hard part, you can track all of the math at each step.

    The hard part is stating a simple explanation for the semantic meaning of each operation.

    When a human solves a problem, we like to think that it occurs in discrete steps with simple goals: “First I will draw a diagram and put in the known information, then I will write the governing equations, then simplify them for the physics of the problem”, and so on.

    Neural nets don’t appear to solve problems that way, each atomic operation does not have that semantic meaning. That is the root of all the reporting about how they are such ‘black boxes’ and researchers ‘don’t understand’ how they work.




  • In the language of classical probability theory: the models learn the probability distribution of words in language from their training data, and then approximate this distribution using their parameters and network structure.

    When given a prompt, they then calculate the conditional probabilities of the next word, given the words they have already seen, and sample from that space.

    It is a rather simple idea, all of the complexity comes from trying to give the high-dimensional vector operations (that it is doing to calculate conditional probabilities) a human meaning.