samspenc

The post itself was technically useful, I found, and they posted their entire project to GitHub https://github.com/hershalb/music-video-arena which I think makes it worthy of a HN post and discussion since it is technical and at least IMHO a very interesting post.

This should be the original link since its the official announcement and has more concrete info, hope mod(s) can update.

There was a QA where they specifically called out this was NOT for QE (quantiative easing) or "money printing", but rather normal technical operations, I think build up more liquidity as needed.

Not bad with 16 GB VRAM, a bit disappointing on performance though, looking at the Blender 3D (open source) benchmarks: https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...

It clocks in at 1503.4 samples per second, behind the NVidia RTX 2060 (1590.93 samples / sec, released Jan 2019), AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT (1539, May 2022), and Apple M3 Pro GPU 14 cores (1651.85, Oct 2023).

Note that this perf comparison is just ray-tracing rendering, useful for games, but might give some clarity on performance comparisons with its competition.

Somewhat on the similar track - Blender and Unreal Engine for games and cinematics, as a hobby.

It takes a significant amount of time (few hours) on a single consumer GPU, even 4090 / 5090, on personal machines. I think most people use online services like runpod, vast ai, etc to rent out high-powered H100 and similar GPUs for a few cents per hour, run the fine-tuning / training there, and just use local GPUs for inference on those fine-tuned models generated on cloud-rented instances.

I think the author's main point is that it's product revenue is flat (iPhone) or dropping (all other products), in comparison to (I guess) other tech companies that are still growing.

For anyone curious, this video is about the Cloudsurfing glitch in Final Fantasy VII which allows players to walk around unaffected by the game's geometry. It goes into a technical deep dive on the 3D geometry that causes this.

> It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? To YouTube, of course. That’s a 2:1 split in favor of the platform. Lord, give me strength.

I thought the split was something like 55-45 for Youtube vs the creator. This sounds more like 66-33, is this typical for other creators / influencers as well?

Estimated spend in 2025 of the 4 largest companies in this category will be $320B in total:

  Amazon 100B
  Microsoft 80B
  Google 75B
  Meta 65B

Curious how this compares to other existing similar services, such as Meshy AI and Rodin, that already have this functionality?

Curious, wouldn't doing something like this qualify as illegal:

> Google has gone through great lengths to obfuscate its involvement, funding, and control, most notably by recruiting a handful of European cloud providers, to serve as the public face of the new organization. When the group launches, Google, we understand, will likely present itself as a backseat member rather than its leader. It remains to be seen what Google offered smaller companies to join, either in terms of cash or discounts.

> Google offered CISPE’s members a combination of cash and credits amounting to an eye-popping $500 million to reject the settlement and continue pursuing litigation. Wisely, they declined.

> ... putting forward paid commentators to discredit us.

> Google pivoted to stand up its own astroturf lobbying organization. It hired a lobbying and communications agency in Europe to create and operate the organization. And it recruited several small European cloud providers to join. One of the companies approached, who ultimately declined, told us that the organization will be directed and largely funded by Google for the purpose of attacking Microsoft’s cloud computing business ... [the document] omits any mention of Google’s involvement and the actual purpose of the organization.

The difference is that Meta and the FAANG companies make hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue, and are capable of hiring top talent to solve this problem of their AI running well on any GPU they choose for their data center.

Consumers, open-source solutions and smaller companies unfortunately can't afford this, so they would be dependent fully on AMD and other providers to solve this implementation gap; so ironically smaller companies may prefer to use Nvidia just so they don't have to worry about odd GPU driver issues for their workloads.

I'm guessing most recent dissertations have been digitized, but this is probably the norm only in the last 10-15 years? Most universities likely have never given thought to digitize anything from before then due to the extra costs that would be involved in digitizing those physical copies. I am curious how much such an effort would cost though.

JFYI for anyone who may not know, the donor is the co-founder of HashiCorp which was acquired by IBM earlier this year for $6B https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm

He wrote about the donation on his own blog as well https://mitchellh.com/writing/zig-donation

As someone learning 3D animation for indie games, it seems to take at least a year to get good enough. And even after spending that much time drinking from the firehose of information that Youtube is, I suspect that someone with a 4-year degree in animation would have a significant leg up over someone learning by themselves.

I think there are a lot of people who are going to school for animation, but maybe supply and demand are mismatched? But at the same time, a lot of VFX, animation and game studios are doing layoffs, so there probably shouldn't be that much a shortage of talent? I suspect GP comment may be right that the studios that are not able to find animation talent may just not be willing to compete on salaries.

For anyone curious about what Cesium does, they build 3D viz of real-world maps / places / architecture you can import into your program.

For e.g., they allow embedding 3D world maps and places in Javascript / webpages https://cesium.com/platform/cesiumjs/

They allow integration into Unreal Engine https://cesium.com/platform/cesium-for-unreal/

For anyone curious before watching the video, it is about a company called "EK Water Blocks" which is (was?) the world's largest manufacturer of water cooling components for the "build your own computer" crowd.

Looks like this is a completely free project, 100% supported by donations, and no option for a paid plan https://exercism.org/donate

This is one case where I wonder if the founders could keep the 'core' free and open source, and have a paid model on top of it to generate enough revenue to work full-time on it.

More active discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41457329

I'm not the GP, and I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think what they are complaining about is this sequence of events:

  - ElasticSearch was open-source
  - Amazon offered ElasticSearch open-source as a paid service
  - ElasticSearch was not happy about this and changed their license
  - Amazon forked ElasticSearch (the open-source version) and created OpenSearch based on that, continuing to serve OpenSearch
  - (Few years pass)
  - Amazon and ElasticSearch are now buddies

I think GP is talking about the events that transpired a while back before Amazon and ElasticSearch made up.

Key takeway from the article: OpenAI's ChatGPT APIs might actually be, surprise surprise, profitable.

"As of June 2024, OpenAI's API was very likely profitable, with surprisingly high margins. Our median estimate for gross margin (not including model training costs or employee salaries) was 75%." "Once all traffic switches over to the new August GPT-4o model and pricing, OpenAI plausibly still will have a healthy profit margin. Our median estimate for the profit margin is 55%."

I was very surprised by this as well. From the article: "The person familiar with OpenAI’s departure said the company’s rent had not been covered by a typical lease, but rather a less formal agreement paid for by Musk, the billionaire who also controls automaker Tesla and social media firm X."

Surprising OpenAI and Microsoft were OK with this after a $13B investment.

More discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41164240

I don't think Nvidia cares much about the mid or lower tier of GPUs, especially consumer GPUs. Sure they manufacture them to stay competitive in that area, but I don't think they care too much about it.

Their core revenue comes from - in decreasing order - really expensive data center GPUs, somewhat expensive workstation / enterprise GPUs, and finally, expensive top-of-the-line consumer GPUs like the 3090 / 4090 (and upcoming rumored 5090) which they can mark up higher than the lower tiers.

I'm sure that Nvidia knows that even though consumers / gamers will complain, the companies and hobbyists buying them will have no choice and be willing to pay for that power and extra performance and VRAM, whether it be for creatives (3D or game creators) or AI / ML / LLM hobbyists trying to GenAI at home.

The title is editoralized, the original is "Italy imposes fine of over €120 million on Amazon"

Also based on the article, the Italian authorities haven't "seized" anything yet, just put a provisional fine, which I'm guessing Amazon will appeal.

The first 3 paras:

  Italy has imposed a provisional fine of €121 million ($131 million) on the US retail giant Amazon on suspicion of tax evasion. 

  The responsible police authority in Milan justified this with the results of investigations by the public prosecutor's office, which indicated that Amazon diverts large sums from taxes by assigning shipping orders through an intricate system to subcontractors. 

  This is said to be associated with the systematic exploitation of workers, the authority said.

Ah that seems more reasonable, with $8.7B a quarter in advertising revenue, that's about $35B a year, so for Youtube annually:

  - $35B in ad revenue
  - $15B in subscriptions
  - (minus) $23B paid out to creators ($70B / 3 years)

Which seems to line up with around 50% paid out to creators ($23-24B out of $50B revenue).

I don't know how many employees work on Youtube specifically, but even with salaries and infra / CapEx / OpEx costs, they are probably making a decent profit on the remaining $25B they keep annually after payouts.

From the results

  - Revenue up 14% from $74.6B -> $84.7B
  - Net income up from $18.4B -> $23.6B
  - EPS up $1.44 -> $1.89
  - Number of employees down from 181.8K -> 179.5K

Yeah, if we assume they are at 20% profit margin like FAANG or other tech / finance companies, at $1B ARR, they are making $200M net income per year. At 30-40 PE, they would be valued at $6-8B max.

In reality, they are most likely losing money at this point like most startups, might take them a few years to hit profitability. But that doesn't seem to have stopped previous startups from commanding insane valuations, so maybe Wiz is able to do that too.

Didn't realize there was a WiZ that specializes in home lighting https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us

Per their About Us page, they are an "IoT platform for smart lighting solutions and smart services" and "offer people connected lighting".