Only the crumb grabber is worthy of your attention.

After seeing announcements and headlines like this for over 10 years and just about nothing available for sale I just kind of yawn Now. Good way to raise some venture capital though. does it have AI? let’s do this

Deciding to change quantum reality is actually not a bad way to solve most of your problems

Yeah that was another choice quote for sure. We make the LLMs in our own image, and maybe thats not the best idea.

To be fair, some of the LLMs like Claude had a higher profitability than humans. The average human made 800 bucks in this business and one of the latest Claude models made 2700, so it searched, picked its inventory well and achieved results. The only thing is that humans were profitable 100 percent of the time and if they experienced existential dread, they were good at hiding it from HR.

*Added a couple choice transcripts at the end for the TL:DR people.

*corrected spelling

Yeah I have been following him for awhile, he has some great takes on things.

Another thing I think is fine is “because you watched ____” and suggestions based on that. Like we see a video that the user watched the whole video or liked it, and then we find similar videos to that I don’t think its that invasive and may be helpful.

As long as its transparent and the user has control to use it or not I think thats the key. The fediverse however is enormously privacy and corporate sensitive, so I can see that it is a tight line to walk here.

We shouldn’t fear these algorithms, the key though is everything has to be under the control of the user. A simple way is just tags, which are widely used almost everywhere. If the user has their panel and can block tags or words or give a rating from +10 to -10 for any keyword or tag, you can accomplish a hell of a lot with no black box fuckery.

Please bring sweeping back. Sweeping is cleanly and good.

Aptera has a 15 year history now of only producing prototypes and being restructured/resold. Granted there were some problems not caused by the current founders but the marketing is misleading as to exactly where they are and when they will actually be able to build these damn cars. I am no longer a believer. There is a reason why there are no major VCs behind this, even though they were enthusiastic over a decade ago. During the same time Tesla became a household word, and Nio and Rivian came into being and actually produced more than prototypes. Why are they so uninvestible? Why did all these other companies get the big investor dollars and not them? Why all these years, and no product? Each question seems to lead to other things that just don’t make sense.

I got taken in by their promo 5 years ago, wanted it so much to be real, but the “factory” as of one year ago doesn’t have any actual machines despite raising millions of dollars. The influencers literally just do the factory tour which is like 5 places where there are presentations, and follow the yellow markings where the “factory machines” will be. But its all made up. They can literally fold up shop in a day or two and be gone. Pretty long standing grift though, you have to give them that. The influencers all who are incentivized are the only thing keeping it going.

Any other sources of audiobooks besides my local public library and librivox?

“We should join them. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way.”

More American than America

Interesting pattern emerging, the IT time of the admins is pretty damn priceless, (thank you admins!) but when an instance gets up to scale a lot of them can end up with a hard cost of 10 cents per user per month.

The last stat I remember from Facebook was revenue per user per year was around 4 dollars. At 31b revenue and 2.7b monthly users, Youtubes average profit per user is about $10 per user per year. 100 million people pay for YT premium now.

So if every user paid $1 per month, it might not pay all the costs but the admins could get paid something and the fediverse could scale. The bigger you get though, you get economies of scale from future Fediverse data centers, but also you need really good programmers because its a huge temptation for hackers and propagandists.

I also want to say its a labor of love and a lot of work for mods too who may be non technical but the work and time they put in is important.

“Private equity always finds a way”-Jeff Goldblum

Its interesting that they plan to profit off of the Fediverse but they aren’t paying for running instances themselves. At least they aren’t now.

The only thing that is actually valuable in all this is the data generated by Fediversers themselves though, lets say 90 percent, and a nifty container around the content to make it more viewable/accessible/prettier, 10 percent.

They want to make profit off of memberships and probably ads, off of Fediversers content, and then they can leverage and monetize their new “social network” by some astronomical valuation in the market.

Good playbook, its been done many times now by Reddit, linkedin, Facebook, and all the rest, and maybe they will pull it off, but after more than 10 years of Social Media abuses, the Fediverse is filled with people who no longer want to be exploited in this way anymore. How about just paying for some instances, or supporting some FOSS projects already in the works?