this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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in which the Hollywood Reporter, of all outlets, attempts to explain our very good friends and their billionaire very good friends to normal people (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

If you were to stick a pin in a timeline at the exact moment Silicon Valley declared war on Hollywood, it would likely land on Aug. 29, 1997. That’s the date Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph got together in Scotts Valley, about an hour south of San Francisco, and started a little DVD delivery company called Netflix.

Weird bit of critihype that ignores a massive amounts of things. Napster and Blockbuster for example. Massively overestimates the power of SV imho, and a bit ironic as of all the various media providers like Netflix, netflix is often not considered that highly from what I can tell. (In .nl iirc the big non-american providers are also the NPO and Videoland owned by RTL. Both traditional players in the market.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago

True enough, but it feeds too beautifully into the terminator reference that closes it out.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

as of all the various media providers like Netflix, netflix is often not considered that highly from what I can tell.

Well, it should not be considered that highly, but for some god damn reason they occupy a letter in FAANG since forever.

Probably only because if you remove the N the acronym stops being that cute.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

FAANG came about because of "unexpected growth" in how those could "surprisingly" capture money, as time has passed it's become clear how all of them did so in pretty shitty ways (of the bigtech-flavoured "it's better to never ask for permission, fuck 'em" variety)

netflix's burgeoning unpopularity is a far more recent thing. I could guess at a few inputs, but not really sure how much each contributed

(idle thought: without the N, it's probably be GAFA or something, or finding another letter to substitute and make a tortured reference out of that)

[–] billseitz@toolsforthought.social 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] grumpybozo@toad.social 5 points 3 months ago

@billseitz @froztbyte @V0ldek But F is obsolete.
It’s now MAGA.

Oh, wait: G is obsolete too
MAAA

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

FAANG came about because of “unexpected growth” in how those could “surprisingly” capture money

I don't know the origin, but I came to know the term itself from my time as a freshman Computer Science student, where "working at FAANG" was to be the highest career thing you could aspire to.

It was always extremely confusing, cause like, Amazon, Apple, Google - I get those, they actually have things they work on, I'm sure working on AWS or like the internals of Google Search has to be interesting for a CS person, but fucking Facebook? The fuck does Facebook do? What unsolved technical challenges lie in a message board? Same goes for Netflix.

[–] grumpybozo@toad.social 5 points 3 months ago

@V0ldek @sneerclub For both Facebook and Netflix, the interesting technical challenges are secondary to scale.