Taldan
@Taldan@lemmy.world
- Comment on The moment we've all been waiting for: you now can have targeted ads on your 2k smartfridge 2 days ago:
Streaming is a perfect example of this, as people don’t seem to realise just how expensive it is to maintain the infrastructure for it compared to traditional cable infrastructure
Much of the cost of streaming for platforms like Netflix, and especially YouTube, are due to the need to centralize it to allow for more data collection. The cost of streaming also gets overblown, by a lot. Companies like Google and Netflix are spending huge amounts of money trying to build out new features and offerings, like games, that make it look like maintaining the streaming service is far more expensive than it is
But that price was also only possible because of various venture capitalists investing heavily in Netflix
Netflix has never needed to rely on venture capital for their streaming platform. Netflix has made a gross profit every quarter since 2011 when this data starts. They have also had a net income all but one of those quarters, which is absolutely insane for a new tech company investing that much in R&D + licensing
The recent hikes (all the way up to what, $20?) are the result of venture capital drying up
No. They’re the result of perpetually increasing profit margins. They were very profitable before the price hikes. Their expenses have gone up far slower than their revenue. It’s simply extracting more wealth without providing additional value
as Netflix went from a market-shaker startup to revenue generating machine
It’s a bit pedantic, but Netflix wasn’t a startup when they got into streaming. They were an existing business that was profitable to fund their pivot to a technology platform
So how do you offset these increases?
Netflix has had an operating income (revenue - operating expenses) of $12.6B over the past 12 months. With ~300M subscribers, that’s about $3.50 per subscriber per month. Subscription prices are much lower in most countries than in the US. For the ~80M US subscribers, that is probably $6 in profit. The $5 cheaper ad tier is probably about what we’d expect their prices to be if they had simply continued to make a couple billion a year in profit. Also keep in mind they would probably get and retain more subscribers with a lower price, and their increased operating expenses includes them building out tons of stupid mobile games most people don’t want, and one-off necessary expenses like building out their original content capabilities
Note: This last bit is doing some napkin math and is subject to error. I didn’t feel like digging deep enough into their financials to get more exact numbers (such as the average subscription price for the rest of the world)
TL;DR – Much of the price increases and addition of ads can be attributed to increasing profit margins, not increased operating costs
- Comment on The moment we've all been waiting for: you now can have targeted ads on your 2k smartfridge 2 days ago:
How long until we have no real choice? The vast majority of TVs are smart TVs now
- Comment on The Answer May Surprise You 3 days ago:
The largest cost is going to be building out data centers and buying the chips to fill them. OpenAI has essentially been telling investors they’re only losing money for now as they build out infrastructure, but when that’s done they’ll be making money hand over fist
We have no idea what the compute costs actually are since OpenAI is a private company. It’s just a shift in the speculation that it’s higher than previously estimated
- Comment on FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs 3 days ago:
That sounds like what they’re saying, but they don’t provide any reason for us to believe them
- Comment on FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs 3 days ago:
The truth can absolutely be a bad thing. If google reports an important vulnerability, then buries it in CVE slop for 90 days, and publicly announces details of the important vulnerability that hasn’t been fixed yet, it would be worse than if they had never reported it
The 90-day publishing window is tough when OSS projects are getting buried in AI slop reports
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 4 days ago:
Median home prices peaked at $216,000 in August 2006. The lowest they’ve been in 2025 is $414,000. You had some absolutely atrocious luck. You buy in Detroit or something?
- Comment on The 512KB Club is a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet. To qualify your website must both be actually useful and under 512KB in size. 1 week ago:
I clicked on 6 sites
-
4 were personal portfolio sites
-
1 was a personal blog
-
1 was a web design company
Pretty disappointing, and I’m not going to keep clicking on more in the hopes I find something interesting
-
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 1 week ago:
So Square Enix is demanding OpenAI stop using their content, but is 100% okay using AI built off stolen content to make more money themselves
As a developer, it bothers me that my code is being used to train AI that Square Enix is using while trying to deny anyone else the ability to use their work
I could go either way on whether or not AI should be able to train on available data, but no one should get to have it both ways
- Comment on What is the catalyst that actually causes (financial) bubbles to burst? 1 week ago:
AI companies are more insulated from quarterly returns due to being private companies, and not being expected to have any profit, or even revenue growth
The only thing investors are looking for are user growth, and increase in AI capabilities. The second KPI being difficult to objectively measure
- Comment on What is the catalyst that actually causes (financial) bubbles to burst? 1 week ago:
The How Money Works video was decent, but I was annoyed he showed the Apple cash on hand chart without mentioning they peaked at ~100B, and the contracts we’re talking about are in hundreds of billions
Microsoft, for example, has about 100B in cash on hand. Their total liabilities have gone from about 2x their cash to 3x, which is effectively doubling the leverage
When you think about that additional debt in absolute terms, it’s huge. Historically companies wouldn’t be able to get to that level of debt simply because they lacked the cash to do so
- Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now 1 week ago:
I’m glad people use Playstation/Xbox/Epic, so Steam still has competition, but I’m also really glad I’m not using any other store
- Comment on What 1 week ago:
That alien is a fellow Dvorak user! (aoeu is the Dvorak equivalent of asdf)
- Comment on hmm breakfast 2 weeks ago:
I like how different people have said each different item is the main cause of heart disease
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
A lot of them are actively talking about how it could be a bubble and the implications. No one is going to be surprised. Billionaires are just really hoping they can make it work before the bubble pops
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
what really is lacking is now more hardware dedicated to single user sessions to improve quality of output with the current models
That is the exact opposite of my opinion. They’re throwing tons of computing at the current models. It has produced little improvement. The vast majority of investment is in compute hardware, rather than R&D. They need more R&D to improve the underlying models. More hardware isn’t going to get the significant gains we need
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t have a problem if they were actually investing the money in something useful like R&D
Nearly all the investment is in data centers. Their approach for the past 2 years seems to be just throwing more hardware at existing approaches, which is a really great way to burn an absurd amount of money for little to nothing in return
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
AI is here to stay. AI is also in an unsustainable bubble. Both things are true
- Comment on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs 2 weeks ago:
investment bankers are the worst
Lawyers are even worse T.T
- Comment on monumentale 2 weeks ago:
Each line is 10,000 characters and the function only supports
shortprimitives - Comment on monumentale 2 weeks ago:
Yes, and it only returns, “I can’t even”
- Comment on monumentale 2 weeks ago:
we don’t use this without first writing proper unit tests for our changes, integrating them with the regression tests, and thoroughly documenting our changes for the next developer that has to work on this
I’m an optimist, and it’s technically possible
- Comment on Space is beautiful 2 weeks ago:
As if we’re not already doing that
- Comment on Ok, boomer 2 weeks ago:
Oh don’t worry about that, they already caused their havoc
Thanks to the FAA’s shoestring budget, they don’t have the funds to just issue an STC to allow existing planes to use it. Each plane owner will have to pay for one to be issued. It costs me $200 to get one issued. It costs that much because the FAA hasn’t had the budget to upgrade their systems, so handling applications takes a lot of labor. They need to manually verify the make and model of aircraft will not be at risk of adverse effects from unleaded gasoline, since safety > all else
It’s a good thing the FAA verifies this, but it shouldn’t be such an inefficient process. The only reason it’s so inefficient is because conservatives have gutted federal agencies for so many years. MAGA will still point to the inefficient process as an example of why they should keep cutting funding, “see how inefficient the FAA is? They don’t deserve our money!”
- Comment on Ok, boomer 2 weeks ago:
The FAA finally approved 100UL (unleaded), so the US is on track to stop using 100LL in most cases within the next 20 years
EPA has tight regulations on washing your plane though, so there’s no problem with lead /s
Disclaimer: It’s better than nothing that the EPA tried to do something, but the government really should have gotten their shit together and approved 100UL decades ago
- Comment on Ok, boomer 2 weeks ago:
I know the US is one that has 100LL
- Comment on Introverts of our era spend their time on their computers, but what did introverts do before? Like when literacy rates were lower (pre-1950s)? Or before the printing press? 3 weeks ago:
For much of America, going on walks isn’t a pleasant experience. Most people live in car-centric areas, where you will have the noise, fumes, and dangers of cars at all times
- Comment on Meta is removing its Messenger apps for Windows and macOS 3 weeks ago:
I’m confused. Are you upset the app is being removed? As in you don’t like webapps, you want them as apps?
- Comment on Tragic Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site 4 weeks ago:
James Cameron is genuinely a world expert on submersibles. He made The Abyss and Titanic because he loves the deep sea
He made Titanic solely as an excuse to go down to the Titanic and film the wreck. He didn’t even have an idea for the story when he pitched the movie
Then he became the first person to ever design and dive his own submersible to Chellenger Deep, and only the second ever submersible to reach that depth (after the US Navy’s Trieste)
- Comment on Tragic Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site 4 weeks ago:
The main issue with the Titan wasn’t as much the depth as it was cyclic loading
- Comment on Honestly Bizarre 4 weeks ago:
Why you hatin’ on mushrooms? They’re a fungi, if you get to know 'em