Insane in absolute terms, but not per user. Take look at the actual fee schedule [1]. The most costly is the license for cable TV, which costs 50¢ per year per subscriber. The least costly is social media, which goes up to whopping 4.5¢ per MAU per user.
I very much understand how the licensing alliance likely was bothered by the fact that they are leaving money on the table, when TikTok's revenue per user is $50 a year, and a cable subscription is easily $800 per year, with the high-end reaching $2000. The big players aren't going to notice much. For the small players, nothing changed.
I think the dumb part is that it's not like decoding or encoding video becomes harder when there's more users. The effort to write code for encoding for a small service of 1000 users and a large service of 10 million users is the exact same. We really don't need middlemen extracting everything they can, which will drive up costs.
Is it insane at all? The biggest fees are charged to the biggest providers. With short form video now the dominant form of addictive social media content, it doesn’t seem insane at all that large media companies ought to compensate inventors/owners of patented video technology. A company with 100 million or more subscribers is not a company I feel a lot of empathy for if they’re trying to avoid paying licensing fees.
It goes to $2.5m for 5 million users/subscribers and tops out at $4.5m for 100 million subscribers. It’s not staggered evenly at all IMO. So I worry mainly for the small players. This shouldn’t have any meaningful effect on any big player.
Two corporations, e.g. Canonical and Red Hat, might suffice.
I hope everybody remembers how systemd was thrust upon the community by having Gnome largely depend on it. This was mostly done by efforts of Red Hat, and that sufficed.
What is the point of playing guitar any more? You're not going to be another Elvis. You're not going to be another Robert Plant or Paco de Lucia, even if you play equally good. The world is choke-full of excellent guitar music recordings.
People still play guitar nevertheless. They do it for the enjoyment of the few friends sitting next to them, and, most of all, for the fun they personally have in the process. If your motivation is seriously different, especially it it involves fame, influence, or money, you are holding it wrong.
Your metaphor doesn't apply. It's not pointless to create a new site because better ones exist. It's pointless because it will get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit, if the few sites people use for discovery even deign to index it. And the people who do consume it will be too lazy to read it in its original unsummarized form.
You can still journal for the love of writing, but why put the effort into publishing for so little return?
> get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit
Well, yes, so what? Are you creating it for your own enjoyment, or are you holding yourself back to stick it to the greedy capitalist? It would be hard to find your site using Google, unless you know a perfect long fragment, but it was equally hard, or harder, to find it using AltaVista in 1995! People who care link to each other and participate in webrings, much like they did 30 years ago.
Everything is dust in the wind, everything we create is most likely going to perish, make peace with that. Then you notice that there is a gap between the moment you create something, and the time it perishes, and it's plenty long enough to bring joy to you and those you care about, and maybe even random passers-by.
No, the analogy does not hold. All free male citizens of Athens participated in Athenean democracy of ancient times, which achieved serious successes. All citizens of Switzerland participate in the direct democracy, and Switzerland is in a pretty good shape.
The "small web" is a different phenomenon. When accessing the Web was cumbersome and unglamorous, that served as a filter for motivated and skillful people. Those who care, those who are inclined to create so strongly that they would overcome all these hurdles for it. Similar dynamics exist among open source software contributors.
Once the internet became a zero-effort communication channel, it started to attract people who just want some quick dopamine fix, but who have a lot of other, more important things to mind. That is, the majority, the regular people. These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
This is just literally normal, in the statistical sense. There's an old saying about not blaming a mirror for the image it shows.
> These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities...
> "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?"
> "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are."
> [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?"
This is precisely the mechanism behind the 'eternal September'. And as such outlets dry up HN is attracting more and more of the overflow and will eventually go that way as well.
The author notes that their website is a result of static generation, while EmDash needs a server beside an HTTP server and a bunch of static files.
It's partly a fair point. Anything that does not dynamically change with each reload should be generated a a static file, and served as such. When the backing data change via the admin interface, then the page should re-generate. I suppose it's the proper caching approach, and I assume any sane CMS does this now (yes, even Wordpress).
But what a static site cannot do is user-specific content. And EmDash has a elaborate structure of user access levels, various auth methods, etc. Once you have to have a user session, there's no way around having an application that handles this. The simplest example is having a comments section.
You can use page fragments to get close enough. I hacked this together in Varnish with custom headers handled by the backend before it was an actual feature. A bit of a pain but eminently doable, even years ago
Looking at the sophistication of modern security exploits, I'd say that just a few minor gaps, strategically positioned, can lead to surprisingly drastic results. Of course, Emacs is a niche editor/IDE/OS/whatnot, so an unlikely target, but still.
It's a great proof of concept though. In the meantime, I'll stick with vterm.
> they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.
OK, I look at two objects [1] and posit that object B is larger than object A. I see it with my very eyes, I directly experience this feeling of largeness and smallness. How dare any data, any calipers or rulers (must be oppressive rulers!) tell me that my perception is wrong, and the sizes are equal?
The whole thing is based on the idea that seeing with one's own eyes is somehow not interpretation, but unadulterated truth. This is, unfortunately, not exactly so. No matter who you ask, Buddhist practitioners or cognitive scientists, anyone who paid attention to the problem know that "direct experience" is not very direct.
Tools to rectify biases in perception exist, and statistics (when properly implemented) are one such tool. But accepting one's own bias is psychologically hard; it's much easier to think that all these other people have a bias, or several. (It's an important part of growing up though.)
Very often you can, or could, because the software is portable (e.g. Node or Python or Postgres), and / or platform-independent (e.g. written in JS, Python, bash, etc).
In my practice it was completely normal to build things inside a container to be deployed on Linux using the same sources and basically the same package names and versions as used on a developer macOS machine (which is BSD-like enough down below).
> macOS machine (which is BSD-like enough down below)
That's like saying an Ubuntu .deb will work on Gentoo because it's all Linux anyway. It's not that simple. There is dependencies and there are differences in the packages, package managers and surrounding system for a reason. It's not 1:1.
Perhaps the naming scheme happened to line up for the packages you where using, but this should be considered not assumed.
It would be nice if there was some sort of translator that could handle "most common cases". I think it would improve the usability of Jails.
Perhaps that would require someone to keep a list of packages mapping certain packages between operating systems.
Something like "apt install python3-serial" -> "pkg install py311-pyserial" may suffice.
For anyone that would use something like that, you should implement a prototype, publish it and perhaps someone else will build upon what you started!
I very much understand how the licensing alliance likely was bothered by the fact that they are leaving money on the table, when TikTok's revenue per user is $50 a year, and a cable subscription is easily $800 per year, with the high-end reaching $2000. The big players aren't going to notice much. For the small players, nothing changed.
[1]: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/3wzYaofEETCfXdQmREx9BK-120...
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