Aniki

yeah that’s a good explanation why there’s only a very small number of software companies in the world. google, microsoft, apple, meta. the reason is because, when you have two cars, that’s twice as much as one car. but when you have 2 apps, that’s worth exactly as much as having 1 app.

consider this: scenario 1: one big company writes one calendar app that everybody uses. scenario 2: there’s two medium-sized companies writing calendar app, that share the users. Which is better?

two companies -> twice the fixed cost (writing the code twice for no reason). two database protocols -> incompatibilities, so users sharing data with each other becomes more difficult, for example for group calendars where events are distributed to the app that the user already has. this is also called “network effects”: removing boundaries by everything being on one platform.

downsides of monopolies: one company might have too much market determining force. no competition, therefore difficult to evaluate what would happen if things were done differently.

that’s why there’s no second search giant besides google. for mobile and desktop operating systems there’s two, probably to have some competition (android/iOS, windows/macOS).

meanwhile there are no such monopolies for car companies, because if you build twice as many cars, then you have twice as many cars. so competition pays off.

AI companies aren’t profitable because

1. nobody really wants to use it. we all know it’s a walled garden. OpenAI is gonna enshittify just like google and microsoft did. never put your infrastructure into another company’s hands. that’s a recipe for making yourself vulnerable and you’re gonna dearly regret it later. at this point, trusting an US company with your data is a typical example of insanity. In europe, practically every big company/government institution is trying to get away from the dependency on US tech, not towards it. As long as AI is all hosted on US company server, nobody’s gonna use it. It would have to become self-hosted and open-source/open-weight before that.

you can feel seen by a picture (webcomic) even though the picture has no eyes.

i do now :)

i recognize @[email protected] because we think a lot alike and i can see that i would be exactly in their position if i had started life in a different environment.

apart from that i recognize maybe 20 usernames, the lemmyverse is indeed small, it’s easier to recognize people with pfp, i hope i get recognized too from time to time as a calm and reasonable person, idk what else to say.

on blahaj.zone, that’s not difficult, considering that 80% of the posts come from totallynotjessica and adora :-)

only posts anti-Western narratives memes

yugthos or sth

i often wonder whether they get paid

but honestly i prefer 1 account that’s posting propaganda over 10000 small accounts that are posting propaganda.

also some of their takes are actually good.