swampman posted:

The only thing I can think is it involves a lot of magical thinking, like, snapchat's going to be so technologically relevant once it survives into neo-feudalism

Ok I didnt know about this

The Economist Snapchat story has gone full fash pic.twitter.com/7nP2Ect0al

— T. F. Surgerie (@surgicaltheatre) February 17, 2018

The new snapchat update has enabled it to be exposed to this kind of content regardless of whether you were subscribed to their posts or not, before you got to choose if it automatically played.

— T. F. Surgerie (@surgicaltheatre) February 17, 2018

ilmdge posted:

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

following this stuff is kinda stressing me out to some degree because i feel like a crazy person. so many of these companies are losing money hand over fist yet assumed to be the future. spotify, hulu, netflix, lyft, uber, tesla. all losing hundreds of millions a year and i'm sure there'd be plenty more examples. it's addictive to follow but i should probably get back to thinking bigger picture.

Yeah it's weird for sure. Like, I get the idea, keep pumping in more and more money until the entity becomes profitable by forcing out the competition. But I don't see how sustainable losing 6 billion dollars a year or whatever in Uber's case can be. How much money are Hulu, Netflix, and Spotify hemmorhaging?

If they finally admit defeat on this stuff and shut it down, is the business world gonna freak the fuck out?

i keep saying it but if these "unicorns" are at best barely breaking even at the top of the business cycle, with many of them still losing a ton of money, what are they going to be doing once everything crashes again and people start cancelling their subscriptions to save money

Another challenge is the deep fragmentation of the sector, with no obvious common standard for these high-definition, 3D maps, nor any sharing of data because companies consider this to be important proprietary information.

“Everyone is trying to develop their own in-house HD map solution to meet their self-driving needs, and that doesn’t scale,” says Mr Wu of DeepMap. “It’s all reinventing the wheel, and that’s wasting a lot of resources. That will probably be one of the reasons to block self-driving cars from becoming a commodity.”

Because companies do not share mapping data and use different standards, they must create new maps for each new city that they plan to enter. “It will delay the deployment in certain geographies,” Mr Wang says.

Different driving rules in each city also mean that further software tweaks must be made. “You will have to redo the software in every geography that you enter,” he says.

lol

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

ill try to find 2017 losses

spotify - 600 million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/spotify-losses-widen-after-music-site-flags-accounting-errors

this news piece says it actually lost 1.5 billion:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/28/spotify-files-for-ipo.html

The company posted a loss of $1.5 billion in 2017, $1 billion of which was from a non-recurring expense due to convertible notes from a transaction with Tencent in December 2017. It had an operating loss of $461.3 million last year, and $425.9 million in 2016.

what does this mean? how do you lose a billion dollars due to "convertible notes"? the jargon is confusing me again...

spotify filed for an ipo so i will be watching them carefully for a bit to see what the process is like

toyotathon posted:

i feel like the 25% of internet traffic that's currently piracy's gonna get hit hard with the stick, after the cheap cloud carrot of netflix and spotify never turns a profit. the actual value of these services vs bittorrent is zero. well maybe a little higher than zero for convenience and library size, but that's a function of bittorrent's illegality, not the software. good thing mass surveillance on the wires is getting shored up for the IP battle to come.

do you think my only friend in this world soulseek will remain pure and unsullied

toyotathon posted:

i feel like the 25% of internet traffic that's currently piracy's gonna get hit hard with the stick, after the cheap cloud carrot of netflix and spotify never turns a profit. the actual value of these services vs bittorrent is zero. well maybe a little higher than zero for convenience and library size, but that's a function of bittorrent's illegality, not the software. good thing mass surveillance on the wires is getting shored up for the IP battle to come.

otoh iTunes happened when Apple realized specifically that a large percentage of people prefer to pay for something they can get for free through piracy if they can buy it as quickly or more quickly than they can pirate it

Uber has had little trouble finding investors eager to buy into its vision. It relishes telling backers about gross bookings, or the amount riders pay for service. That number is enormous, totaling $37 billion last year. But most of that goes to drivers. Uber’s cut, or net revenue, came to $7.4 billion. Compared to public companies with similar valuations, Uber’s revenue lags well behind. (See chart below.)

At the same time, Uber has worked to downplay its persistent losses. Because the company doesn’t disclose financial results with much consistency, it’s easy to lose sight of how much of investors’ money Uber has spent. Since its founding nine years ago, Uber has burned through about $10.7 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. Over the past decade, only one public technology company in North America lost more in a year than Uber lost in 2017. None has burned such a tremendous amount in the first stage of its life, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Investors have contributed $17.3 billion to Uber, said the person, who isn’t authorized to discuss the figure and asked not to be identified—an enormously long leash for the company to experiment with and subsidize global growth. Figuring out whether that investment will pay off is partly based on what you think will happen to Uber’s losses.

Making matters more complicated, the financials Uber has long given shareholders and the media presented a prettier picture than reality. Uber traditionally prefers a loss calculation that doesn’t include interest, tax, stock-based compensation and other expenses. This adjusted accounting downplays the scale of Uber’s losses over the years. Uber has said adjusted numbers better reflect its business. However, it agreed to share financial details with Bloomberg for all of 2017 using both accounting practices in an effort to be more transparent about its business.

Back in the dot-com days of the late 1990s, a similar measure was favored by analysts trying to persuade investors to put money in untried companies. It was mostly abandoned after many of them failed to make the difficult journey to profitability, and investors started demanding concrete results and a clearer picture of the bottom line. Uber is well-advised to follow suit before selling shares to the public as early as next year.

note that the "cash on hand" figure is even lower than the other figure mentioned in the article (17.3 - 10.7 = 6.6). i assume this difference is the amount of value they have in assets like real estate which can be at least partially recovered?

the graph is kinda hard to read but it looks like about 5 billion cash-on-hand left? that seems roughly correct to me based on numbers discussed previously in this thread. ~5.2 if i had to guess.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 (March 7, 2018 07:37:10)

shriekingviolet posted:

yeah I'm not contesting that itunes is successful, that would be dumb, the model is still a step backwards in quality and available goods. you're trading variety and convenience away to gain legality, if you want to consume media legitimately you have to subscribe to 5 different streaming services all with their own quirks and get scalped by fake costs like double the price for higher quality encoding even though the real cost of the marginally higher bandwidth for the bigger file size is some miniscule fraction of a cent.

this is a really old tired spiel though so I don't know why I'm hauling it out here, just had to complain that these "innovations" are only in extraction of profit and are in fact making the usage of new technologies worse for people. uber.

I appreciated your particular distillation of this giant crock of shit, for what that's worth.