You mean when the board of directors wanted to fire him? Considering the recent news of OpenAI transitioning towards for profit i think they got what they wanted from keeping him in charge. Seems like something Microsoft would benefit from and if they’d have gotten a different CEO at the time who knows if it had come to this point.
Agreed. Future carbon capture capabilities are used to justify current emissions.
Thanks for the link. That is certainly a frustrating development, since they had to sell it for a much steeper discount before as the article mentions.
Importantly they tried to enter the market with a $40 purchase price, when the existing competition is mostly free to play.
My comment was aimed more towards the excessive CEO pay, not the stagnation in worker’s pay.
Probably not the best source (just one of the first Google results), but as an example, if I read something like this:
How much money did Marissa Mayer make while running Yahoo? During her five years at Yahoo, from 2012 to 2017, Marissa’s total compensation, including salary, stock, and bonuses, was $405 million. Verizon acquired Yahoo for a little over $4 billion in 2016. Marissa earned roughly $120 million from the acquisition through a mix of bonuses, accelerated stock options and salary. For example, she was paid a onetime bonus of $23,011,325 once the Verizon acquisition was finalized.
Then it seems to me like the shareholders somehow got the short end, despite being the ones with the power to make changes.
There might be public displeasure about it, but I think behind the scenes India buying Russia oil is expected and at least to some degree accepted (or possibly even wanted).
The bigger thing is Russia not generating profits from those sales, which I am speculating is not the case at the prices India is buying at. The upside of Russian oil still being available to the world market is keeping the prices lower, something Europe is very much interested in.
I am actually still not sure why it isn’t fixed through voting. And I mean shareholder-voting, not public voting.
But after things like Elon Musk’s compensation package getting approved (again) it cleared won’t work through that mechanism either.
I’ve read somewhere that horse mats made out of rubber are pretty good flooring for home gyms and cheaper than something marketed towards gym use.
If it can take the full weight of a horse standing on it with its small hoofs, then it should have no issues with any weight you might drop on them during lifting.
I am also from Germany and get payed for donating thrombocytes at my university hospital. The compensation is actually quite substantial imo at (up to) 75€ per session, which can be done every two weeks. The money is however mean to offset the time required, not the thrombocytes donated. So it is correlated to how long it takes.
You get 15€ (?) for up to 15min (if they have to abort very early for some reason or at your first visit where they just draw blood to test), 50€ for up to 1h (which equals to 1 instead of 2 pack of thrombocytes, usually done at your first real donation or if you maybe dont have enough for 2 on this particular day), and 75€ for anything over 1h (which is the norm).
Timewise the hospital is on the outskirts of the city, so most will have to travel a bit, then you have to fill out forms, have a quick talk with the doctor, and finally depending on your parameters it takes anywhere from ~55-70min to extract, during which you are tethered to a machine (which takes out some blood, then seperates out the thrombocytes with a centrifuge, pumps back the rest, and repeat).
One could get philosophical about the topic, but from a practical perspective the money makes a lot of sense imo:
It costs them a lot of money to investigate new prospects, so you want reliable repeat donors
Each donation already has other costs associated with it. Like for example the kit used during extraction, the staff handling everything and so on. So even those 75€ are just one more expense among many, and from donation to usage probably vanish in the overall costs.
For the donor it is quite a substantial time commitment, especially when done regularly every two weeks. Unlike for example full blood donations you’d maybe do twice a year. And you should be reliable and not randomly cancel at the last second, so ideally it also has priority over some other things in your life.
the small amount of blood that remains inside the machine is sometimes used for other research (if you agree to it, which i do)
From my own experience i can say that i might still do it without, but certainly not at the same frequency. And considering the time and effort required i don’t think anyone could be blamed for doing it less frequently without the incentive. So at least in this case it imo is a fair trade and net positive. Although it does also help that this is a university hospital that directly uses it themselves, rather than a for profit company.
I never used it myself, but rather than a dedicated alarm clock app, maybe look at tasker?
Looking at their website they actually list your use case as an example of what is possible
wake up with a random song from your music collection
(Third point under “usage examples”)
Not denying that Germany faces serious issues, but using Intel as an example to show Germany’s national problems imo is just wrong. Ifthey want to make that connection they better provide some evidence showing this move isn’t purely motivated by the internal problems Intel currently faces, which recently have been in the news quite a bit.
Now if TSMC suddenly decides to cancel their new German fab (admittedly not leading edge like Intel’s would have been), then it’s a point taken.
Also you can’t withdrawal what isn’t there. They have barely started doing any work in Magdeburg
I also have regular problems with some subtitles. My solution is to enable using an external player in the jellyfin AndroidTV app (i think its under playback->advanced options) and then use VLC player which i’ve also installed to play the movie. That has never failed to me.
Downside is that unlike the regular exo player i don’t think it supports dolby vision, so i have to change this setting back and forth occasionally. It used to be that there was an option that you could tick, so it asked you everytime which player to use before playing a movie (with the downside that it couldn’t resume playing at a saved timestamp), but after a somewhat recent update this went away.
(also no telephone booths)
Speaking of telephone booths: With their disappearance the 2001 movie “Phone Booth” also lost its location.
To be fair the article mentions that they did have it figured out, but later canceled the connection, which was part of a separate project.
Seems like the exact problem that could happen with anything, but ofc shouldn’t. Because it really is such a simple mistake that anyone with a brain, who is in charge of making those decisions, should look at the plans and see it. There for sure are systemic issues, if something this basic can fall through the cracks.
Besides the obvious fuck up, just judging from the picture in the article I also see a complete lack of solar panels or charging stations.
Feels like when you are already spending such a huge sum just for a fancy place to store some cars, then you could at least add that functionality.
Fun thought experiment, but yeah there is no way it ever happens. The simplest reason is that as soon as Ukraine manages to restore full control over its own territory, they will race to join Nato and the EU. Both of which would not accept Ukraine while holding russian land.
There’s a little competition now with like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, whatever, and competition can keep things from becoming deeply shitty. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if in 5 years the big players had merged together, and then things get more expensive.
But the distribution side is only one part of the equasion and tbh the much easier one, which is why there are still so many even smaller players that offer a more or less complete (or at least large) library. Besides the ones you mentioned i can also think of amazon music, youtube music, deezer, and napster. I think there are also plenty more. It’s really not that hard from a technical side to stream audio, certainly easier compared to the high bandwith you need for visual content.
The more interesting part is if anything could happen on the rightsholder side, which unlike with movie/tv-streaming is completely seperate. There you have Disney, WB/Discovery, and so on all doing their own streaming services primarily with their own content (Sony is one of the few to just produce and sell). But on the music side you don’t have the large record labels like Sony, Universal or Warner Music to try and make their own streaming service. And smaller indipendent labels also make up a much larger share, and sometimes the music rights might also lie with the artists themselves or descendants.
That fragmentation of rights combined with the large variance of musics tastes requiring a mostly complete library to make sense imo is what currently holds of enshittification. So i would actually say there is decent competition, although at the same time it is very hard to truly distinguish yourself from the other services.
The question is whether something can break this balance.
Imo unlike movie/TV-streaming music-streaming services at the moment still kind of fulfill their promise to the consumer:
A for the average consumer mostly complete selection of content at a reasonable price (at for the consumer, maybe not for most artists) and a high degree of convenience.
Until you build your own library, which would take quite a while until you drop a lot of money in advance, you’ll have a worse experience.
And even when living alone you could still share with friends, parents/siblings or a partner.
All that said I am very sympathetic to your line of thinking. Because it only works as long as the deal doesn’t change.
And we see all to well how it might not last when looking at the movie/tv streaming market. Prices might increase beyond purely matching inflation, content might fracture into multiple services, sharing might get disallowed, and specific versions of songs or artists might disappear due to censorship (or similar reasons).
The issue is that would at best “reset” their reputation to zero. But the state that they’d like to go back to would be similar to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, which ofc only works with the existing name. And this line of thinking is what got damaged by the degrading processors (and maybe how they handle it).
While it runs a deficit you don’t or at least only through increased valuations, which ofc assume that you’ll eventually be able to turn a profit. Will this ever happen for OpenAI, i have no idea, but that is the bet. And for the likes of Microsoft spending a few billions on bets like this isn’t that big of a deal, just look at how much Meta burns in their VR department.
Uber was running a deficit for a long time until it turned profitable. It’s pretty normal for many new companies to burn money first before they turn a profit. The biggest cost seems to be training new models constantly, and i assume one hope is that eventually this slows down. Then they need to get operating costs down that where i think they currently roughly break even (?) or maybe run a minor loss, but that seems doable, considering the pace at which hardware is still improving.
I wouldn’t say that it is nothing, but at this very moment it probably doesn’t equal the immense amount of resources poured into it. That said, if things improve both in terms of the quality of responses you can get from models as well as reduced costs to run them, then there is definitely huge economic potential.