TheChurn

A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.

The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.

A renderer in Python has to be slow AF

Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.

That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.

AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all

No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.

Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.

Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.

Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.

‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.

They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.

They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.

Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.

Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.

Not quite. First, the vast majority of Iraqi equipment was Soviet, and the vast majority of the stuff that wasn’t Soviet was French.

French contractors even built the air defense network and control center.

Certainly there are tensions in Iraq as a result of it coming in to being as a constructed nation - nowhere did I say otherwise. However that doesn’t justify a war of aggression against a neighboring country.

Further, Iraq’s casus belli had nothing to do with having a potential ‘claim’ to Kuwait’s land. Kuwait sovereignty pre-dates by centuries. The real reason was Kuwait’s refusal to write off Iraqi debt and refusal to lower its oil product (it was producing above its OPEC quota - depressing prices and hurting Iraq’s exports).

It is true that Saddam thought the West was using OPEC and Kuwait to undermine Iraq. That may be true. Putin thinks the West is using Ukraine to undermine him - so should we stop supporting Ukraine and let Russia annex it?

Desert Storm was the good one. Sadam invaded Kuwait, a large international coalition ended the occupation. Today’s analogue would be NATO entering Ukraine, kicking the Russians out, and showing that wars of aggression are unacceptable.

Iraq in '03 was the problematic one. Falsified casus belli, war crimes galore.