Shopify is absolutely fine with selling hate products as long as you give them their cut. If you're using them for free web hosting they draw the line. They probably also didn't splash out for the premium plan where you get a dedicated concierge.
It's wild to me that despite tremendous resources and 100+ years of time capitalism still kills millions of people a year with starvation and preventable diseases. But every right winger has a pet wikipedia page about a failed communist state with no critical examination of why they failed beyond "communism bad".
To clarify my stance I'm an anarchist and that page has a lot of good examples of successful worker owned collectives.
There are good critically examined rebuttals if you actually look for them beyond Wikipedia which is not designed for that purpose. I read a book recently called Socialism: the failed idea that never dies, and while it has a clickbait title, the arguments are pretty cogent as to why people throughout history want to enact socialism based systems and why they eventually fail.
To me it's equally as wild that you say such a thing when no system in human history did as much as capitalism to alleviate hunger and disease. In fact all other systems combined still can't touch the progress we've made to eradicate famine and disease while "under capitalism".
Scavengers Reign is an amazing, 10/10 show and it's so depressing we'll never get a second season. I miss my telepathic dead wife salamander addiction metaphor.
Pretty sure the answer is ads. "Long-form" content has more opportunities to insert ads or sponsored content. There's not a lot of money to be made being quick and to the point.
People's viewing habits have also changed in response, rather than having the algorithm bounce them around they'd rather half-pay-attention to a 3 hour video. But I think the trend of ever-growing video lengths was spawned by a desire for more revenue.
The market bifurcated. Short form content became Snapchat and tiktoks and YouTube shorts. There were never any significant competitors to YouTube for long form content because of how expensive streaming it is, so all of that content remained on the one platform with an audience and decent payouts.
I only go to youtube when I want to learn something that is hard to explain with pictures. Usually that is diy stuff for me, but I can see it being something like a dance move or a boss fight in a game, those things take longer than a minute to explain but never take more than 15 unless it is padded.
Youtube used to add mid-roll ads to videos that were at least 10 minutes, so your video would basically make twice as much if you stretched it that long. I think the threshold is 8 minutes nowadays.
Short form is hard to monetize (if you are Google 8 years ago) since you need to split ad revenue and attribution among the several videos you watch between ads. This goes against a ton of prior trends in the ad industry where last touch attribution is still king and ad fraud is hard to combat. If course tiktok did it late with creator rewards.
YouTube generates a transcript that’s on the sidebar (above the recommended videos). It is kind of broken text though, so I copy and paste the block into Gemini (it’s free and has a huge context) and ask it to read it and generate the points for me
I think the key insight that the article misses is that when consumers interact with an app they have an excess of trust in "the app".
I run an ecommerce site. It's hard as a small retail operation to keep inventory in sync and model the complex network of supplier relationships for special-orders: we can get some products in a day, some things in a week, some in 6 months. Nonetheless customers assume that the computer is the word of God, and that if the website lets them order a product that product must be available immediately.
When you make an app to do something that is illegal, people for some reason assume it is legal (or at least less bad) to do in the app. The presence of a computer intermediary somehow cleanses the action of moral ambiguity. I think this is because most people don't understand how computers work, and they assume that "the computer is always right".
This goes as far back as Babbage:
On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question
The article isn't about consumer apps, though, it's about websites that all four companies in an industry use for "optimal pricing", which just launders collusion through a Python backend. I would considering giving the piece a reread.
I don't really see how doing collusion through a Python backend is separate from my point? They're doing an obviously illegal and immoral thing but wrapping it in a layer of technology which obfuscates and apparently legitimizes it. The consumer view is one aspect but the companies and regulators have the same perspective.
I would argue that stuff like Iceberg is really aimed at Data Platform Engineers, not BI analysts. Companies I've worked with in the past have 10-15 people on a Platform team that work directly with stuff like this, to offer analysts and data scientists a view into the company's data.
Yeah working in the data space I see a ton of customers using Iceberg and some using Delta Lake if they're already a Databricks shop. Virtually no Hudi.
The problem in The Big Short was that lenders bundled many loans with correlated risk and advertised the resulting bundle as less risky. Because of the demand for these bundles they issued and bundled increasingly risky loans as time went on. Eventually when the market corrected all of these loans defaulted at the same time.
