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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Even for the third party shipper, it’s still Amazon’s choice to contract out or permit shipping via that company.

    The actual problem with these reviews is that the review is meant to tell us if the product is good, not the seller. A review of Amazon on the product page for… I don’t know, an electric toothbrush… on Amazon’s storefront doesn’t help me decide if that specific model of electric toothbrush is worth buying.




  • It’s especially egregious with high end GPUs. Anyone paying >$500 for a GPU is someone that wants to enable ray tracing, let alone at a $1000. I don’t get what AMD is thinking at these price points.

    FSR being an open feature is great in many ways but long-term its hardware agnostic approach is harming AMD. They need hardware accelerated upscaling like Nvidia and even Intel. Give it some stupid name similar name (Enhanced FSR or whatever) and make it use the same software hooks so that both versions can run off the same game functions (similar to what Intel did with XeSS).


  • I agree, it’s just strange from a business perspective too. Obviously the people in charge of AMD feel that this is the correct course of action, but they’ve been losing ground for years and years in the GPU space. At least as an outside observer this approach is not serving them well for GPU. Pricing more aggressively today will hurt their margins temporarily but with such a mindshare dominated market they need to start to grow their marketshare early. They need people to use their shit and realize it’s fine. They did it with CPUs…


  • GPU prices being affordable is definitely not a priority of AMD’s. They price everything to be barely competitive with the Nvidia equivalent. 10-15% cheaper for comparable raster performance but far worse RT performance and no DLSS.

    Which is odd because back when AMD was in a similar performance deficit on the CPU front (Zen 1, Zen+, and Zen 2), AMD had absolutely no qualms or (public) reservations about pricing their CPUs where they needed to be. They were the value kings on that front, which is exactly what they needed to be at the time. They need that with GPUs and just refuse to go there. They follow Nvidia’s pricing lead.


  • You can look at it too for looking at what causes people to be conservative.

    Conservatism at its core psychological roots is fear of change. In a vacuum, people who are well served by the status quo are the ones least likely to want change. The historical adage of people becoming more conservative as they age was basically a result of that: when you’re young you don’t have much to lose from change. As you age you gain the opportunity to buy a house, to get married, to have kids, to get promoted at work and see your income go up significantly, to develop some meaningful job security. And so on. Thus, as people age they gained things, status, accomplishments, all the various life goals being accomplished. Even if change would probably make things better for them, they didn’t want to risk it. Things were OK.

    The reason we see that adage breakdown is because we’ve seen the core causes breakdown too. Buying a home five years ago was a struggle compared to how it was historically. Buying a home today costs so much that it makes buying a home five years ago look trivial. Many couples are now intentionally delaying or forgoing becoming parents because children cost so much: just giving birth can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s just to get them to day 1 of existence. Education costs keep going up. Job security is down. Wage increases are seen as something that even the “professional class” has to fight for, requiring a job hop to get a raise instead of getting one as par for the course from staying at an employer.

    In light of that breakdown… far fewer people are afraid of the risk of change. The 30-something of today has a lot less at risk from change. Even much of the lower half of the upper middle class of today is far more able to stomach the risk of change.

    It’s really not a surprise at all.


  • It’s useless for answering a questions that wasn’t asked, sure. But I didn’t pretend to answer that question. What it is useful for is answering the topic question. You know, the whole damn point?

    How much of a factor off do you think the estimate is? You think they need three drives of redundancy each? Ten? Chances are they’re paying half (or less) for storage drives compared to retail pricing. The estimate on what they could get with $100m was also 134 EB, a mind boggling sum of storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using up on the order of 1 EB/year in needed storage. There’s also a lot more room in their budget than 0.34%.

    The point is to get a quick and simple estimate to show that there really will not be a problem in Google acquiring sufficient storage. If you want a very accurate estimate of their costs you’ll need data that we do not have. I was not aiming to get a highly accurate estimate of their costs. I made this clear, right from the beginning.

    If each video was on a single hard drive the site would not be able to function as even the fastest multi actuator hard drive can only do 524 MB/s in a perfect vacuum.

    The most popular videos are all going to be kept in RAM, they don’t read them all off disk with every single view request. If you wanted a comment going over the finer details of server architecture, you shouldn’t have looked at the one saying it was doing back of the envelope math on storage costs only, eh?


  • I wasn’t calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.

    All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.

    With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.



  • LetMeEatCake@lemm.eetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.

    Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn’t need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they’ll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.

    Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don’t like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we’ll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $15/TB. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they’d be able to buy 6,666,666 of those hard drives. In a single year. That’s 6,666,666x20TB = 133,333,333 TB of storage, also known as 133note 1 exabytes.

    That’s a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube’s compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That’s 768,722 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube’s annual revenue.

    Note 1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024n for data names, then the SI prefixes aren’t correct. It’d be 115 exbibytes instead.

    EDIT: I initially did the price wrong, fixed now.