It’s so absurd, the website’s appeal lies entirely in the user driven experience created by volunteer moderators and user submitted content. Yet the path of profit growth for them lies in company placed ads, and LLM bots spamming comment sections to astroturf. The more they push for profit, the less appeal to users the site has.

That drop largely just cancels out the numbers since November. If it drops further then it indicates a general souring if market opnion.

The problem is that the AI branded software doesn’t run easily on old devices, unless you just stream it from one of their server farms. But they’re losing money every time they run one of these services for you, and the vast majority of people aren’t going to pay them a subscription for that.

They’re trying to justify selling new devices with software now, not giving out software that can run on old devices. You gotta replace your 2017 laptop to run windows 11. Gotta get a new computer with an NPU to run AI models locally. But it’s happening again, users are not embracing these new AI features, let alone buying new devices just so they can use them.

Much like wearables and VR headsets, the interest for these things is largely limited to enthusiasts spaces and isn’t translating to mass adoption. The average person doesn’t care about having their computer writing their email in to a limerick, they just want their email client to not freeze up and crash because they got an email with a weirdly formatted picture.

How am I supposed to scan a QR code sent to my phone… with my phone?

Why… would anyone use this? There are plenty of other perfectly capable free word processors…

Perhaps there is a better term and I should be more clear, but people know, roughly speaking, what “new” does, even “active” is fairly straight forward. They are literally algorithms but not what people are talking about when they complain about “algorithms”.

When people complain about the “algorithm”, in the colloquial sense, they’re talking about some nebulous unknowable method of sorting that only the people at meta and alphabet are privy to the details of, not the literal definition of the word.

I should have chosen my words more carefully but I think the point stands, there is a marked difference between a system where it is clear to the user how things get sorted, and the home, discovery or “for you” systems of major social media sites.

Depending on how you browse, it was not algorithmically recommended. Even if you’re using “active” to filter, it’s barely an algorithm. Certainly not a personalized one, unless you’re just looking at the subscribed feed, in which case the personalization was done by you, not the formula.

That’s kind of the appeal of this kind of website, when there is automatic sorting it’s very straight forward and user mailable.

There is this interesting push and pull with algorithms, they need to show content users will engage with, but, their main value to the companies is that it allows them to easily manipulate what is seen.

They push people to hard they stop using the algorithm, but if they just let the algorithm act purely one what people engage with, then they can’t monetize it.

There is a third access of preventing people from going down self destructive rabbit holes, but they don’t care about that until people start talking about regulating them or start moving away.

I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you!

Well not that shocked actually.

I think that meta might have pulled some stings as well because it was sucking younger user time away from instagram.

Previously there was an obvious cap on the value proposition to scaling data centers, mainly, that they needed population centers nearby who would need storage or processing for thin film devices. Latency is important for these kinds of things, so they need to be near to the demands

Now they think they can make value regardless of demand from local population, through training weights for models, or running models and sending the output to population centers. So suddenly the cost of power to run the systems is what matters, and the most profitable (not the cheapest or most efficient) is fossil fuel.

They see dollar signs with the opportunity to turn power directly in to value without the need for people nearby.

It’ll be really embarrassing for them as the consumer market continues to fail to show interest in the outputs they’re making.

At this point systems that need it are probably a couple decades old at least.

But I’m sure there are people out there who are using some ancient system/program because it does what they need and don’t want to buy a new license or pay for a subscription. Guess they’ll just have to stick with the older versions and keep their systems offline to avoid security issues. Or just emulate an older system when they need it.

That might be a bit niche to pursue. Like the mobile gaming device market isn’t that big, and devoting their limited resources to a niche product seems unwise.

Would be cool if they did, especially if they partnered with Valve to launch it with steam OS, like valve did with Lenovo.

I can’t imagine they’d release a new chassis unless it was something radically different to their existing form factors, and even then, it would have to be a fairly big market sector, since they’re not really big enough to target anything niche.

Replacing an existing chassis would require that they continue developing and releasing new upgrades for the existing chassis in addition to the new one, or make all the internal parts interchangeable with one of the existing chassis, both options seems like an R&D nightmare for such a relatively small company. If they just dropped upgrading the existing chassis… well… that would kind of be counter to their ethos.

They’re probably not releasing a whole new model of laptop, and if they are, it’s probably a specialty design, like a steam deck or a surface as other’s have speculated.

If it’s new components, you can probably drop them in if they interest you.

I really do want to see risc V succeed in the desk top and laptop space. The fact that there are only two major architectures and both are owned by companies is a serious potential issue. Especially if they both ended up being owned by one company somehow.

Would be nice if we could see the same kind of chain of response from other models.

I’d love to see what other implicit biases other groups have built in to their models.

I think its appeal mainly comes from the fact that it’s not overtly biased. Other algorithms could achieve the same if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re so heavy handed in what they allow the feed to promote.

Seems iffy to have any sort of federated system for a video based format. Maybe there are some clever compression or hosting tricks to reduce data load.

The thing about the TikTok algorithm seems to be that there are a lot less… fingers in the pudding so to speak, it doesn’t seem to have much preference on what kinds of content users get steered to, responding more actively to what they actually show interest in.

Other systems seem to have strong preferences about what topic and styles they steer users too or away from. Distorting what content users are steered towards tends to flood their feeds with things they’re not super interested in, because what they actually showed interest in is not promoted by the system, or even actively demoted.

i don’t think this is zuck going all in on trump, I think it’s him realizing there will be no consequences under him for doing what he already wanted to: not do any moderation.

He doesn’t want to have to be responsible for anything. He wants the money coming in so he can pursue his pet projects, and thus is minimizing the overhead on the existing money printers.