> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.
Easy: Be at the right spot in the right time and be lucky to be noticed.
WhatsApp had one smart idea: tying accounts to phone number, which solved detectability, while SMS where expensive in many regions. When ICQ/AIM still missed the mobile market and before Apple made iMessage.
Easy to replicate, as we can see with Facebook messenger or Google's different attempts, who invested quite a few resources into that.
What tech CEO says is "a text box with magic" Google translate fulfills that and there are ways to integrate with LLM if technology marketing is important.
Unless it is nVidia's CEO, who wants to sell specific hardware, they mostly care about the buzz of the term, not a specific technology, though.
> Code written for a web browser 30 years ago will still run in a web browser today.
Will it? - My browser doesn't have document.layers (Netscape) It seems to still have document.all (MSIE), but not sure it's 100% compatible to all the shenanigans from the pre-DOM times as it's now mapped to DOM elements.
They cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running)
They're only useless in that they aren't displayed for your peers, but that was always the least-useful function.
Being able to see a counter that reads as "Twenty-three thousand other people also didn't like this video!" doesn't serve me in any meaningful way; I don't go to Youtube to seek validation of my opinion, so that counter has no value to me. (For the same reason, the thumbs-up counter also has no value to me.)
But my ratings remain useful in that the algorithm still uses the individualized ratings I provide to help present stuff that I might actually want to watch.
As we all know, investors and advertisers love growth; Youtube thrives and grows and gathers/burns money fastest when more people use it more. The algorithm is designed to encourage viewership. Viewership makes number go up in the ways that the money-people care about.
Presenting stuff to me that I don't want to watch makes the number go up -- at best -- slower. The algorithm seeks to avoid that situation (remember, number must only go up).
Personally rating videos helps the machine make number go up in ways that benefit me directly.
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Try to think of it less like a rating of a product on Amazon or of an eBay seller; try not to think of it as an avenue for publicly-displayed praise or admonishment. It's not that. (Maybe it once was -- I seem to recall thumbs-up and thumbs-down counts being shown under each thumbnail on the main feed a million years ago. But it is not that, and it has not been for quite a long time.)
Instead, think of it as one way in which to steer and direct your personalized recommendation algorithm to give you more of the content you enjoy seeing, and less of what you're not as fond of.
Use it as a solely self-serving function in which you push the buttons to receive more of the candy you like, and less of of the candy that you don't like.
I have literally not rated anything at all, ever since YouTube removed dislikes, and my recommendations are working fine. Ratings indicate(d) if a given video was likely to be a waste of my time or not, and in an age of AI slop, this feature is more desirable than ever.
Someone should make a SponsorBlock/Dearrow-type addon to flag AI slop.
You only assume recommendations are based on ratings, but you don't know. And I have seen your metaphorical green grass, because actual ratings were a thing up until about 4 years ago, remember?
>I don't find any of that on my end.
Good for you. The true crime genre has been hit hard by AI slop.
> And I have seen your metaphorical green grass, because actual ratings were a thing up until about 4 years ago, remember?
I remember this conjecture of yours (that ratings unilaterally ceased to matter as soon as they stopped being displayed to users) very well.
And unlike you, I can see over to the other side of the fence -- in the present day -- at a whim: All I have to do is fire up YouTube in a private session on a disused device. It's fucking awful over there; it's complete bedlam.
Same point as always: That it definitely doesn't have to be that way at all.
(I can't make you take the blinders off and use that utterly useless, vestigial Thumbs Down button, though. You're free to live your life with as blindly and with much suffering as you wish, no matter what anyone else thinks.)
That doesn't mean every talk has to be unique and special. An "introduction to XYZ" talk may have a bunch of equally valid speakers, which all naturally provide a slightly different angle and there is a bunch of factors going in the decision about who gets the slot.
Some talks are plain craftswork, not unique experiences and still very worthwhile.
It can. But I don't want to compete for my slot with others who can give the same talk, or a talk that is similar.
I want to make the conference committee choose between "Do we want ilc's talk on X." or "Do we want foo's talk on Y." If we are both discussing the same thing, if I'm unknown, I will lose. OTOH, if I have something interesting to talk about... I have 2 routes to "victory". "ilc gives great talks, he gets good grades and is working on his skills." and "Man that's a damn cool topic. We want that at our conference, even if ilc isn't the BEST speaker, the combo is better."
I didn't start out as the best presenter. I learned. But I always knew I had to have an interesting topic, something that made it worth them giving me a slot.
> Except for the physical buildings, permitting, and power grid build-out.
Those are extremely localized at a bunch of data centers and how much of that will see further use? And how much grid work has really happened (there are a lot of announcement about plans to maybe build nuclear reactor etc., but those projects take a lot of time, if ever done)
nVidia managed to pivot their customer base from crypto mining to AI.
And in the Ukraine we see that the corruption is uncovered punished, even if it is in the direct circles of the president.
There are problems in uncovering it, but the attempt to get rid of corruption is a big factor in the whole situation and one of the things Russia fears.
For Russia a corrupt system was a lot simpler to influence and Ukraine showing how a partially Russian speaking country, where people moved back and forth, fighting corruption was a threat to the system.
I assume it is more about structure and time. If you start browsing you wait for pages to load and then probably go a page further and to the next. In the batch mode you have the designated time window to go through mail and read what is there and avoid jumping into some rats nest of neverending paths.
In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.
Considering that the lifetime of our sun system is finite that statement is undeniably true.
Also we don't know how a non-Microsoft GitHub could have developed.
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