Discord isn’t a social media. With platforms like facebook, you’re still paying for all your storage, just not with money. There’s ads all over the platform, and all your content is data mined to be sold to advertisers. Discord doesn’t data mine (to my knowledge) OR run ads. Would you prefer a higher limit at the cost of having ads all over the interface? The AWS bill has to get paid somehow, nothing is free.

This was my core point. I don’t consider a business raising prices or gating features as a direct result of those features increasing their cost as “enshittification”. Stickers being paid, custom emojis, etc, that doesn’t cost Discord anything to provide, making that paid is enshittification; But if the feature itself costs the business actual money to provide, does everyone just expect them to eat that cost forever, in a lot of cases for absolutely no revenue from the users?

Calling out businesses for not giving stuff that costs them money away for free just, doesn’t fundamentally make sense to me. Why is it just expected of Discord that they pay to store all your large files? A lot of “freemium” services like GMail recoup some of that money by mining your email for data that it can sell to advertisers, or eating the cost in an attempt to lock you into an ecosystem where you’ll spend money. Storing files on Discord is neither of those things.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of services are enshittifying, and making their services worse so you spend more money with them— but adjusting your quotas and pricing to reflect your real world cost of business is not that. To frame it as though you are entitled to free compute and resources from companies that don’t owe you anything comes off as just that, entitled. The cloud isn’t free. If you want to use a service, you should pay for it if you can.

I don’t see this as enshittification. It’s a real thing that’s happening, but raw storage is expensive. They pay for it directly. Unlike artificially limiting features that are “free” to them, this genuinely isn’t, it’s not even really super discounted for them on the backend. They’re likely just paying for a series of S3 buckets.

Indexing and lookups on datasets as big as companies like Google and Amazon are running also take trillions of operations to complete, especially when you take into account the constant reindexing that needs to be done. In some cases, encoding data into a neural network is actually cheaper than storing the data itself. You can see this in practice with gaussian splatting point cloud capture, where they are training networks to guide points in the cloud at runtime, rather than storing the position of trillions of points over time.

I firmly believe it will slow down significantly. My prediction for the future is that there will be a much bigger focus on a few “base” models that will be tweaked slightly for different roles, rather than “from the ground up” retraining like we see now. The industry is already starting to move in that direction.

While I agree in principle, one thing I’d like to clarify is that TRAINING is super energy intensive, once the network is trained, it’s more or less static. Actually using the network isn’t dramatically more energy than any other indexed database lookup.

Actually, Windows does allow you to use an alternate “compositor”— a feature which is used quite frequently in the industrial/embedded space. Windows calls them “custom shells”. The default is Explorer, but it can be set to any executable.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/customize/shell-launcher

When I read the headline I just assumed this must be an onion article. That is not good.

It’s really not though. It’s actually pretty simple under the hood.

I program professionally, and I copy paste all the time. The difference is when I copy paste, its 10-20 lines of code, not a line or two— and I’m not fishing for a solution to the problem. I already have the optimal solution in my head, and I am just searching for the solution I already know. It’s just faster than typing it by hand 🤷🏻

Nope, it’s either inspecting the TTL of packets coming from your phone (unless you have a VERY custom setup, the TTL from devices other than your phone will be very different), or it’s deep packet inspection. I tried to trick t-mobile last year into giving me home internet on a phone sim, so I did a whack ton of research.

How is it scammy or gimmicky to put ads on a product you don’t pay for? I guess I’m just missing the disconnect here. This service costs Nvidia money to run.

You don’t need to exercise your stock options to access their value. It’s common practice to take loans out against their value, which allows you to access your money effectively tax free by instead paying interest against the loan. This is (again) a fairly commonplace practice used to make collecting tax difficult, and allow them to make the argument to regulators that they aren’t actually being paid that much, it’s totally just options they would never sell off. That’s why C suite has such a “burn everything to the ground, as long as our stock price goes up” mentality, because if it doesn’t, they have to start worrying about interest on their loans— because they have fairly low liquidity (percentage wise).

Base pay is a meaningless figure in tech. Total comp is all that matters. The true high rollers intentionally keep their base pay low to dodge taxes. This doesn’t mean they aren’t still getting and using this money, it’s just an intentional straw man to allow them to make this exact argument.

You can attach a fake one in software via XVFB (X Virtual Frame Buffer). It’s a little involved if you aren’t familiar with X, but it only took me an hour or so to get setup. Then you don’t need any hardware at all, and can set whatever resolution you’d like.

If that were solely true, there would be a lot more competition in the field right now. Amazon, (and to a much lesser extent the other 2 big names, GCP and Azure) are so massive not because they have a lot of power (plenty of other companies like digital ocean or OVM have plenty of scaling power too)— but because the integrations between their products are so seamless. Most of that functionality has a foundation in FOSS software that they’ve built on top of.

That would be a dream come true for Youtube. Think about how that would affect them financially, they would be serving significantly less load, but they would still rake in all those Youtube premium subscriptions. It would effectively be campaigning to remove the users who aren’t monetized from the platform.

Not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but genuinely I would be ok with this.

It discourages innovation more when the vast majority of modern cultural works, or mechanical inventions are completely off limits to all but a small ownership class. It means no one is generally free to iterate on modern ideas without risking legal liability. Ultimately, pretty much nothing in this world is original, everything is an iteration on existing works. When anything approaching a modern work is restricted, there’s far less to iterate on.

They claim it in the article, and in a few other publications, but I haven’t seen anything that explicitly confirms, from sunbird, that this is the case, including on their website. They also make claims on their website that conflict with that architecture, as I don’t believe it would be possible to E2E encrypt messages like they claim they do. I kinda wonder if the Mac Mini claim is an assumption that everyone just ran with, without confirming that it’s true. I could be wrong though, I’ll gladly eat my words if anyone has a primary source to cite, but that architecture and business model just doesn’t appear to be compatible with their claims.