I generally agree with you, but I tried to get it to modernize a fairly old SaaS codebase, and it couldn't. It had all the code right there, all it had to do was change a few lines, upgrade a few libraries, etc, but it kept getting lots of things wrong. The HTML was wrong, the CSS was completely missing, basic views wouldn't work, things like that.
I have no idea why it had so much trouble with this generally easy task. Bizarre.
I say """secret""" because the spec says that the format should not be published so people can't try to mess with the format, but the first link on Google shows the exact format.
The spec says:
> The AML SMS should not be seen by the caller and therefore should not appear in the SMS "sentbox" of the smartphone. This is to avoid any customer confusion and to avoid making the format of the message widely known. In addition, there is also a potential privacy concern in storing the location of an emergency call from the handset, which could be seen by others.
The AML SMS gets triggered by software on your smartphone when you dial an emergency number. You cannot use it to obtain someone else's location.
The issue isn't with the payment, it's that you've burnt a ton of money to extinguish all competition (by giving away stuff for free) and then, when you're a monopoly because of network effects, you lock it in and charge whatever you want.
If YouTube allowed syndication with other websites, for example, so I could watch videos on whatever website I wanted (with an appropriate portion of the revenue going to YouTube), I would have no problems with them changing their monetization model.
That's a good point I hadn't considered it. So YouTube loss-lead with free for all videos -- then became a monopoly and people are reaction badly not because of any inbuilt fairness wiring trigger, but because, actually the price is merely too high?
Hmmm, possible. How to test? Hard, given their monopoly status. Tho does Rumble offer paid subscriptions?
A small but perhaps weak counter to your thesis is that if people were really unwilling to negotiate with YouTube over cost/experience, why would they then so vehemently attempt to eradicate ads, rather that accepting them as a lesser cost than the subscription fee?
But I guess what you're really saying is that none of the costs YT deigns to levy is felt as fair by those complaining. Not the ads. Not the USD9 (?) / mo subscription, however localized. Thus it's not free-then-paid, it's "bad pricing" that's arming the militia? Were the pricing simply "fair" people would be happy to pay it. But what rational expectation could they have for a fair price? Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive, but IMO provide less range. I'm less convinced "fair price" is it the more I think about it, but there could be something there. How else would you expand that?
Good, self contained point overall. Tho I'm going to side with the psychological factor as I've experienced that in other domains where the monopoly is not a factor. And the "merely a fair price" argument hinges on a sense of rationality which appears conspicuously absent from the reactions. Emotional and ape logic, yes, but objective and economic rationality + empathy logic? No.
> Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive
Disney, Netflix, and HBO all fund the creation of and own the content they provide to users. Youtube does not. Youtube inserts itself as a middle-man taxing regular people sharing videos with other regular people. There is obviously a non-zero cost to infrastructure but their attempts to extract revenue go far, far beyond that, hence people feeling their prices are too high, whether the price is paid in ads or subscription fees.
OK, again a good point. There is YouTube Originals (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqVDpXKLmKeBU_yyt_QkItQ) not sure the model vs the others (also want to ad I enjoy the classic films that YT provides for free [tho I think I need to be on a US VPN to get that if traveling], plus of which you need to buy/rent), but I'm also not sure any of us has the inside track on YT's costs/revenue, so I guess we're all speculating.
When you say "their attempts to extract revenue go far beyond that"(A) I feel I can't accept that on good faith, I'd need to see numbers. Also I doubt this kind of data is the thing most people reacting with "prices are unfair" or "payment is bad", are drawing on, instinctively or not. So it's hard for me to accept this thesis as the source of ills. Tho, maybe it is. Maybe people's innate sense of fairness really does cover this, somehow.
I'm not aware of those numbers, so it doesn't seem that way to me, but maybe I'm just not across it. Can you give examples of your claim (A)?
Youtube's direct expenses are not published by Google, but there are a couple of ways we could measure it. One is the fact that Google is among the richest companies in the world, if not the richest at any given time. This definitionally indicates that the margins on their main revenue-generating services, among which Youtube is one, are extremely high, with revenue far, far, above expenses.
Another way we could measure it is by the value of an ad-view relative to the price of the subscription they offer. Ad views are auctioned and go for different prices based on category, demographics of viewers, etc., and aggregate statistics are not provided, but an ad-view typically tends to be in the range of US$0.01 per ad view. A subscription fee of US$9* to avoid ads, then, would require viewing 900 ads to justify the cost. I suspect in reality most people don't see more than 100 ads in a month, so Youtube is likely generating an 8x profit margin over costs of not showing ads to Premium users, give or take depending on how you work out the napkin math. If people had an option to buy an ad-free subscription with none of the other premium features for $1/mo, I suspect the uptake would be significantly higher and feel fair to the general population.
*After looking it up, Youtube Premium apparently actually costs US$14.
Anecdotally, I used to spend, I believe, ¥480 per month for a Niconico subscription (Niconico is the Japanese domestic equivalent to Youtube). I was content paying this subscription fee for years, until they increased the price up by 50% to ¥720, and about two years ago the price further increased to ¥990. I cancelled my subscription and stopped using the website. I am not opposed to paying subscription fees to platforms, but when it feels extortionate, I won't. The same is likely true for many or most people.
OK, some anecdotal data in support of the fair pricing hypothesis. Thank you. I guess in the case you state, it's connected with inflation? Wage stagnation / living cost increases? A general trend of digital services? Idk. Have living costs generally been going up against wages in Japan in the period you describe?
For me personally, the ads are too high a cost for me to pay. When my ad-free way of watching breaks and I get an ad, I simply close the tab. I find ads really annoying these days, and I pay to avoid them where I find the price fair, otherwise I don't use the thing.
I don't like the ads, which is why I switched to Premium. I like it. I also listen to white noise variants at night, so I can't tolerate ads there obviously. I know a little of your situation I think from reading your previous posts here, so I'm sure you are able to "afford" the premium fee. What makes you not pay it?
Small strange nuance for me is when I switch to my corp account, and see an ad, sometimes I really enjoy the ad, because it's novel and creative. Sounds funny to say, and I probably wouldn't fele like that if I saw ads all the time. But some of the YT ads do seem pretty high quality.
This is what I appreciate about paywalls, subscription modals, etc: there's a clear definition of the "deal", and I can just nope out. "Please enable ads or don't view our content" is also perfect.
I don't wanna trick anyone into showing me ad-free content, I just want a chance to choose.
I've also seen this done for cheese, do you find that equally reprehensible? Or is the argument just rhetorical sleight of hand, where "drug dealers do X, so therefore X must be bad"? Drug dealers also consume food, and you know who else consumes food? You.
Cheese isn't so far off drugs after all: https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2015/study-reveals... plus you have to make baby animals to get the milk for the cheese, so some exploitation is going on. I like cheese and youtube, but maybe they're both bad.
Cheesemongers have a bit less impact on society than drug dealers or Google. If Google were raking in hundreds of billions giving kids free cheese then charging them full price for parmigiana some might complain and I would not find fault in that. Scale matters.
It's not that we got hooked on YouTube (that would maybe be ok in a free market), it's that YouTube used "free" to make itself a monopoly. That's what the issue is, that you have no other options now.
Yes, the monopolistic aspect and scale are the parts I’m most bothered by. I think we all agree dangerous chemicals should be regulated, but we lack this sensibility when it comes to many tech products. So far at least. Eventually we’ll catch up. Will there be the lingering legacy, the tech equivalent of super fund sites? Maybe.
I don't disagree that some of these apps might need to be regulated, because they're basically attention crack, but to me that's more TikTok and Instagram rather than YouTube.
I hear TikTok is on the decline, and arguably the forced change of ownership is a sort of regulation. Instagram is owned by meta who has an interest in not letting it overtake Facebook in terms of popularity I imagine. It seems like a sort of hedge against other platforms mostly, but I really don’t know much about any of these platforms tbh. I use YouTube very heavily, but have only used twitter, Reddit and tinder in the distant past. I’ve never been on Facebook, TikTok, snap, etc… To me, irc and usenet were greatly superior and I’m waiting for people to return to their senses.
Yeah but the choice isn't "do I spend two weeks on this, or do I spend a lifetime?". It's "I have two weeks, do I spend them making the whole thing with AI, or 5% of it without?".
It's absolutely no issue to build all the technical and design stuff with AI, but science facts must be science facts and not just AI gibberish presented like facts.
What's the benefit of presenting not trustworthy data?
It must be me getting old, but definitely 5% of it without, if your goal is to learn something. 5% of thinking about a hard problem is more valuable than 100% of letting it being done by someone else.
Especially when the value of the end result is close to zero, since it is now so easy to do and replicate.
This is ridiculous. If you are capable of editing the libraries when necessary, and you don't ask someone else to do it for you, then yes. If you can't do it yourself and need to ask someone to do it for you, then no.
Asking for something out of your head, whether you're requesting a custom sandwich at a drive-thru restaurant or you're the project manager of a software company, is not the same as making it yourself. If it were, then you wouldn't need to drive through the restaurant or be a mid-level managerial parasite to get what you envisioned.
We should still judge people's skills on the merits of what they can create themselves. I've never had much interest in people who just ordered things up from their underlings, and claimed they were the creators. That's stolen merit, if you ask me. Show me someone who can create a piece of code from scratch, and then we can evaluate how well they leveraged an AI or a team of people to do the next piece of code for them. Not every piece of code has to be written from scratch, but it needs to be understood. You seemed to assert that this project would've taken many people many years or it wouldn't otherwise have been written. That's not true. It could be written in a week by a competent human. The fact that it wasn't could be a clue that it doesn't add value to begin with, which in turn implies that its output may be unreliable (even if it were useful).
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