You know the drill. One meme per customer. Meme Review tonight.
Tag: UATV
UATV ALERT
UATV will be down for the next two hours for maintenance. Please do not feel the need to alert anyone of the streaming service being down. This is scheduled maintenance. You will be informed when it is back up.
UPDATE: We’re back! Mostly. Some recently-published content is still being processed, so you may see a few broken links. These will be resolved in the next day or two.
UATV Brave Issue
A public service announcement from the UATV devs.
The current error screen shown on Unauthorized is an issue with the latest Brave update. Unauthorized is 100% operational and subscriptions are not affected in any way.
TEMPORARY FIX: Use a different browser.
As far as we can tell, the Brave devs broke some crucial connection components in their recent updates. They’ll almost certainly fix it soon, at which point everything should start working again.
Leaving the Cloud
A large tech organization explains why they left the Cloud, and how much they have benefited from doing so:
Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!
A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell servers to carry our exit, and did the math to conservatively estimate $7 million in savings over the next five years. We also detailed the larger values, beyond just cost, that was driving our cloud exit. Things like independence and loyalty to the original ethos of the internet.
Still in February, we announced the new tool I had bootstrapped in a few weeks to take us out of the cloud – without giving up on all the innovation in containers and operating principles from the cloud. This was the introduction of Kamal.
Shortly thereafter, all the hardware we needed for our cloud exit arrived on pallets in our two geographically-dispersed data centers. All 4,000 vCPUs, 7,680GB of RAM, and 384TB of NVMe storage of it!
And then, in June, it was done. We had left the cloud.
To say this journey was controversial is putting it mildly. Millions of people read the updates on LinkedIn, X, and by following this very mailing list. I got thousands of comments asking for clarification, providing feedback, and expressing incredulity over our nerve to zig when others were still busy catching up to the zag.
But the proof was in the pudding. Not only did we complete our cloud exit quickly, customers scarcely noticed anything, and soon the savings started to mount. Already in September, we’d secured a million dollars in savings on the cloud bill. And as the reserved instances (where you prepay for a whole year in advance to get better pricing) started to expire, the bill just kept collapsing:
I’ve never trusted the Cloud. And I’m very pleased to be able to say that as of last week, we no longer have a single project that is on the Cloud. While it may be useful in the initial stages of a project that isn’t capable of sustaining itself, the sooner one can move off the Cloud and onto one’s own servers, the better off one is likely to be.
And that doesn’t even begin to get into the peril of relying upon a corporation filled with SJWs who enjoy nothing more than playing thought police and denying corporate services to anyone they don’t like or of whom they don’t approve.
On a not-unrelated note, the Arktoons devs have successfully defeated a DDOS attack on the site. It’s good to be able to handle these things on our own, and not be dependent upon the security of the Cloud services company. If you were having problems accessing the site last night, it should be fine today.
The Three Stages of Social Maturity
Upon further reflection in the light of the recent Darkstream on the subject, I think I can present a more substantive and succinct TL:DR version.
- I care what you think about me
- I care what I think about me.
- I care what you think about you.
Perhaps this articulation will prove more useful in furthering one’s social maturation.
Number Six Video Essayist
Academic Agent lists and analyzes his top ten video essayists. He was gracious enough to include me on the list, and as high as number six, which is a nice surprise.
Next person on the list, and again this is somebody who’s still around but they tend not to do video essays anymore, they tend now to focus on doing streams, although this person’s streams are still typically solo and straight to camera so they are kind of essayish, but that is Vox Day. Now, again, he might not be to everybody’s cup of tea, but back in the day Vox Day made some of the best videos going, so let’s have a little watch of one of his…
You get the idea. So I did notice a lot of people kind of instinctively reacted against that. To me it’s just self-evidently true. It’s just obviously true. All of this stuff is clearly, self-evidently, observationally true, and all Vox has done is codified something that exists in the world. I mean, you all know this guy, you all know this guy and if you don’t know this guy, or if you’re instinctively reacting against it, you probably are that guy.
So in terms of why have I rated Vox, he has very clear way of articulating himself. He does have this kind of slow kind of speech pattern but he’s quite good at articulating exactly what a concept is, defining it well, I think Vox has some sort of background, whether it’s formal or informal, he has some sort of philosophy background. I seem to remember he certainly studied ancient rhetoric and so on, so he’s quite good at explaining his concept in a very clear way.
Vox has also got something that I think is an underrated skill, basically which is coining a phrase. I am actually very good at doing this, I have so many phrases, you know, back to Fresh Prince and Boomer Truth Regime, and you know, you all know my little slogans and phrases. Aon McIntyre is fantastic at this on Twitter as well, but Vox has also always been very good at coining a phrase, you know, day of the pillow is one of Vox Day’s, for example, and you know he’s got others as well, but his categories here in the psychosexual hierarchy are also a good example of it and you’ll casually see these terms used around the place so that is why I have ranked Vox Day.
The Deepest Lore, 25 Oct 2023
It’s always nice to see that one’s work is appreciated. I really need to somehow find the time to get back to doing more Voxiversities. One per month would probably be doable, assuming that one of my preferred producers have the time. Perhaps once I get a camera installed in the library, which is something I’m already planning to do, we can revive the concept in the new year.
Aborted by the Market
The end of the age of free money has finally brought about the always-inevitable demise of the wicked e-thots of Jezebel:
Jezebel, a feminist US news site, was shut down by its owners on Thursday, with 23 people laid off and no plans for the outlet to resume publication. G/O Media, which owns Jezebel and other sites including Gizmodo and the Onion, announced the closure in a memo to staff, which was obtained by the Guardian.
“Unfortunately, our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s,” Jim Spanfeller, the chief executive of G/O Media, wrote in the memo, which was sent to staff on Thursday morning. “And when that became clear, we undertook an expansive search for a new, perhaps better home that might ensure Jezebel a path forward. It became a personal mission of Lea Goldman, who worked tirelessly on the project, talking with over two dozen potential buyers. It is a testament to Jezebel’s heritage and bona fides that so many players engaged us. Still, despite every effort, we could not find Jez a new home.”
Translation: Jezebel was losing so much money on a monthly basis that not even its most ardent ideological admirers in the media believed they had a chance of making a go of it.
Remember this inability to find anyone to fund a well-known and supposedly influential operation when people are talking about success in Clown World. None of it is real, none of it is popular, and none of it is genuinely profitable. It’s all been propped up by free money. The business world covered by the media is a Potemkin one that is little more than a brightly-painted facade that conceals the fact that there is nothing substantial behind it.
Razorfist, as is his wont, empathized with the newly disemployed Jezebelles, and helpfully encouraged them to look at the situation in what they might see as positive light, which is to say, as being aborted from the marketplace.
Looks like you’ll have to propagandize the old-fashioned way: by inserting your insipid horseshit into a children’s movie, video game, or sitcom script while flagrantly denying you’re fucking doing it!
And here is an interesting statement by a member of the union: “A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude.”
Not that it was needed at this point, but the statement further confirms the wisdom of building platforms that religiously avoid reliance upon the advertising model and thereby being able to put the interests of the core subscribers first.
Meme of the Week 15
We had a record number of perfect 10 memes – three, to be exact – but this one was definitely the winner. Visual rhetoric so powerful that no words are even required.
A Meme Request
Someone on SG said they hadn’t seen any memes yet with an image that practically screams for one. So here’s one in honor of Mr. Benjamin:
Also, you can submit one (1) meme for the Weekly Meme Review today. You know what to do.
The End of Free Social Media
It would appear that either the intelligence services of the world have all the information they need now, or, more likely, they’ve decided that all those pictures of people’s pets and lunches simply isn’t worth the expense to obtain them and effort to analyze them.
Facebook and Instagram users have blasted the launch of a new paid-for service to remove adverts from the two platforms. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company which owns the two social media sites, said it was launching the subscription option to comply with EU regulations.
The change will force millions of users to decide whether they want to face personalised adverts, or fork out the fee for an ad-free offering.
But users attacked the idea, vowing to delete their accounts rather than pay for the privilege of no ads. The monthly subscription plans will cost €9.99 for web users, while iOS and Android users will have to shell out €12.99 a month. They will not be available in the UK.
I find it interesting that while UATV and SG have been criticized on occasion for requiring paid subscriptions for access – never mind that we were starting from complete scratch with no corporate stock market billions to spend on infrastructure – the realities of the market imposing itself is proving that it was the correct strategy from the start.
And notice that UATV+SG is half the price of the Facebook services, which shows how heavily these “free” services were being subsidized all along.
Facebook may be claiming that it’s only instituting subscriptions in order to comply with EU regulations, but you can be certain that it’s eventually going to do the same thing in the USA.