In other news today...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
"my home office is in another country.
Just move about 120 miles south.
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I bumped into an argument online yesterday on a related note of “why does Zoom have 8400 employees, it’s only a video conferencing app, they only need 84”
This was with all apparent sincerity. I’ll grant that 8400 people seems a shade high for what Zoom does but I’m not sure it’s 100x too high. Running shit is surprisingly hard.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
Running shit is surprisingly hard.
Just put into the cloud(tm).
84 would sound low (but not impossible). 8400 sounds like much for what they do (though I only know them for their video stuff), even with people to keep things running all over the world.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
8400 sounds like much for what they do (though I only know them for their video stuff), even with people to keep things running all over the world.
Well someone's got to be the useless overhead!
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
I bumped into an argument online yesterday on a related note of “why does Zoom have 8400 employees, it’s only a video conferencing app, they only need 84”
This was with all apparent sincerity. I’ll grant that 8400 people seems a shade high for what Zoom does but I’m not sure it’s 100x too high. Running shit is surprisingly hard.
I rant about pateron every now and then. I have no idea how their headcount is so big and their operating costs are so high. More suprised Visa/Stripe/Mastercard haven’t crushed them yet to be honest.
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At the end of January, the company employed about 8,400 people, more than half of whom were based in the US.
What do they all do?
E: 'd, I guess.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
Well someone's got to be the useless overhead!
I wonder if people have that as a career goal?
: What do you want to be when you grow up?
: I wanna be ayoutubertiktoker!
: I wanna be a doctor!
: I wanna be useless overhead!Filed under: One of these three will realistically have a decently paid job with a reasonable work-life-balance.
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@DogsB the thing about Patreon is that they’re not a payment processor as much as a funding redistributor, and Visa/MC/Stripe/PayPal aren’t interested in the service provision attached to what Patreon does.
I’m more surprised someone hasn’t come along and stolen the rug out from Patreon because Patreon is reasonably incompetent at the value-adds that it offers - their Discord integration is wonky as fuck, their OAuth integration is borderline broken and beyond that it functions as a glorified forum where you can post for your members.
Substack is eating into it but it lacks some of the usability that Patreon has, such as that’s a thing.
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@cvi
Odd one out:
A - youtuber
B - tiktoker
C - doctor
D - useless overhead
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@topspin is it C?
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
I’m more surprised someone hasn’t come along and stolen the rug out from Patreon
I'm not sure anybody wants to do the job Patreon does. International money shuffling sounds like a pain.
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
I rant about pateron every now and then. I have no idea how their headcount is so big and their operating costs are so high.
Google says they're at 400. Given that they work with money in a ton of different countries, I'd expect them to have a bunch of staff to deal with that. And, as @Arantor says, a lot of infrastructure providers (visa etc) probably aren't that interested in working with them, so they need people to manage that situation on their side.
As for operating costs. They're moving around money. I'm sure everybody wants a chunk out of that for every hop.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
I'm sure everybody wants a chunk out of that for every hop.
One theoretical reason why shitcoins vaguely sound like a good idea (i.e., digital dollar, no intermediaries), if not for all the reasons they horribly suck, including failing to solve this.
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Eventually, Germany / Europe will get a modern chip factory: TSMC and some other companies will build it near Dresden.
Expected costs: 10 short billion Euros; 3.5 paid by TSMC, 0.5 by the other 3 each.
The sum is 5 only... The other 5 will be government subsidies.
Beyond 22/28 nm chips, also 12/16 nm chips will be produced.
Well, for car industry, that's ok. But the latest generation of chips ...
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
But the latest generation of chips ...
It depends on what you're doing and what sort of yields you're after. And yes, I know (a little bit) more about what's going on inside there. Saxony's pumping a lot of money into many aspects of semiconductor manufacturing, not just on the physical side but also into companies making the designs that will be made.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
why does Zoom have 8400 employees
I've often wondered that about LinkedIn. 25000+ employees. A few hundred to keep the computers running. A few hundred to write and maintain the software. 24000 to ... ???
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@BernieTheBernie I have a feeling this is once again costing me more in tax money than it's bringing me in in dividends / stock value.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
why does Zoom have 8400 employees
I've often wondered that about LinkedIn. 25000+ employees. A few hundred to keep the computers running. A few hundred to write and maintain the software. 24000 to ... ???
Be the “users” that give the company apparent value
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@izzion said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
why does Zoom have 8400 employees
I've often wondered that about LinkedIn. 25000+ employees. A few hundred to keep the computers running. A few hundred to write and maintain the software. 24000 to ... ???
Be the “users” that give the company apparent value
Their own company profile page claims they have about 1000x that many "followers". I guess every LinkedIn user is automatically counted as a LinkedIn "follower".
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
Beyond 22/28 nm chips, also 12/16 nm chips will be produced.
Question is on volumes. How much of the current capacity is at the very high end? And what do you use it for?
Not everybody is doing their chips on the latest and smallest node. A ton of random-ass chips that you have in everything will be running on older processes. If your first goal is to make sure you can survive a chipocalypse, those will more important than making fancy PC/phone CPUs or expensive GPUs.
Besides, there was recently somebody mentioning using mixed processes for high end CPUs and similar in the future (e.g., have a couple of chiplets with the latest and greatest, a few + "peripherials" with a more conservative one).
Stuff like RAM seems to be lagging behind too. Briefly searching mentioned that some DDR5 is on 12nm now. I suspect slow storage (SSD/nvme) will be further back (I didn't find anything on that on a quick google).
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
Stuff like RAM seems to be lagging behind too. Briefly searching mentioned that some DDR5 is on 12nm now.
Can they just hurry up and make RAM fast again? This whole 5+ layer deep storage hierarchy is getting insane to deal with.
Okay, I guess that ship has sailed some 30 years ago.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
This whole 5+ layer deep storage hierarchy is getting insane to deal with.
Joins us on the dark side and start programming GPUs. I think there are technically fewer layers (they're more like independent things that sit next to each other). But I wouldn't necessarily say that it's less tricky.
That said ... given that we're now pushing 1TB/s on GPUs, and that still isn't enough, I don't have much hope for
Can they just hurry up and make RAM fast again?
happening.
Also: 5+ layer deep storage hierarchy? Weren't you working on like clusters? That adds like a pile of layers. I still have PTSD on trying to making things run on GPU-clusters with multiple GPUs per node.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
That adds like a pile of layers.
I wrote the "5+" first and only then tried counting. Then I figured "ah crap, that's what the '+' is for."
It also helps if you just code like you don't know these things exist and just pay a few orders of magnitude abstraction penalty.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
I wrote the "5+" first and only then tried counting. Then I figured "ah crap, that's what the '+' is for."
Ah, I was thinking you only considered the layers in the CPU hardware and were just hedging your bets for the next generation of CPUs.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
Well someone's got to be the useless overhead!
I wonder if people have that as a career goal?
: What do you want to be when you grow up?
: I wanna be ayoutubertiktoker!
: I wanna be a doctor!
Filed under: One of these three will realistically have a decently paid job with a reasonable work-life-balance.
TFY
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
why does Zoom have 8400 employees
I've often wondered that about LinkedIn. 25000+ employees. A few hundred to keep the computers running. A few hundred to write and maintain the software. 24000 to ... ???
I think LinkedIn is an interesting point because there is a lot of the platform that you or I might not see. Even just the extra functionality of “premium” is significant versus the free plan, and there are higher tiers. So cost of development is probably not as subtle as you’d think - especially factoring in web, devops, secops, plus the mobile dev people.
But I suspect the reality is that a number of the staff are regional support staff - they have presences in a number of countries, have something like 25 human languages in-house and that means you’re putting in local presence. As a result you’re going to end up with local IT, local HR, local etc functions that bulk out the employee count.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
Can they just hurry up and make RAM fast again?
You can get great bandwidth if you pay for it. Latency will remain horrible for anything that isn't tiny because you have to pay the energy costs for the conductors between the CPU and the memory, and they necessarily have non-zero capacitance. L1 cache is about as fast a compromise as you'll get away with, unless you configure the chip to use that as real memory (but then you've got a non-uniform memory architecture in full, and that's a very large can of worms).
Forget about using optical connectors. The bandwidth is good, but the latency isn't and the manufacturing is awful as silicon is terrible at that task. I also can't remember what the heat dissipation is like. All in all, it's enough that optical isn't going to be used for chip interconnect any time soon, and it would require a major engineering breakthrough for that to change.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
plus the mobile dev people
Well, there's some useless overhead that can be eliminated.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
I’m more surprised someone hasn’t come along and stolen the rug out from Patreon
There are a handful of competitors, but just like Youtube they all add up to a fraction of the size of the 800 lb gorilla
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
If your first goal is to make sure you can survive a chipocalypse
That's the point of the politicians: independence from Chinese imports.
Of course, hardly any items use the high end types. But today's high end will be tomorrow's middle class - and hence you have to repeat.
And the manufacturing technology is developed elsewehere (Taiwan), and only the middle class production facilities are built in Europe.
And more money will flow.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
plus the mobile dev people
Well, there's some useless overhead that can be eliminated.
What about the people who decide I need to see the Spanish translation (disregarding my language settings posted ) of all things when I for some reason end up at this wholly useless piece of shit site?
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
And the manufacturing technology is developed elsewehere (Taiwan),
From what I understand, ASML in one of the key drivers in this, and they're a dutch company still doing stuff in the Netherlands.
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@cvi Yes, they produce machines required for production, and have almost a monopoly. And after export restrictions were imposed to China, China reacted with export restrictions for rare earth metals
So, at least some technology step is still dominated by Europe.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@cvi
Odd one out:
A - youtuber
B - tiktoker
C - doctor
D - useless overheadYou put useless overhead thrice.
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@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@cvi
Odd one out:
A - youtuber
B - tiktoker
C - doctor
D - useless overheadYou put useless overhead thrice.
That's not entirely fair. There are YouTubers who make interesting and worthwhile content, but I'll concede that more than 3 9's worth is dross.
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
@cvi Yes, they produce machines required for production, and have almost a monopoly. And after export restrictions were imposed to China, China reacted with export restrictions for rare earth metals
So, at least some technology step is still dominated by Europe.And in 10-15 years, Europe will have its own sources of rems. This seems to all be about clawing back independence from the Chinese government. And considering there will possibly be some Chinese wars within the next decade or two, this is probably strategically extremely important and worth the cost far more than most if the virtue signalling that European governments get up to.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@cvi
Odd one out:
A - youtuber
B - tiktoker
C - doctor
D - useless overheadYou put useless overhead thrice.
That's not entirely fair. There are YouTubers who make interesting and worthwhile content, but I'll concede that more than 3 9's worth is dross.
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@Mason_Wheeler Sure, but the implication was that all as opposed to merely 90% (or as I suggested, 99.9%) was rubbish.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
why does Zoom have 8400 employees
I've often wondered that about LinkedIn. 25000+ employees. A few hundred to keep the computers running. A few hundred to write and maintain the software. 24000 to ... ???
Fact-check
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@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
@cvi Yes, they produce machines required for production, and have almost a monopoly. And after export restrictions were imposed to China, China reacted with export restrictions for rare earth metals
So, at least some technology step is still dominated by Europe.And in 10-15 years, Europe will have its own sources of rems. This seems to all be about clawing back independence from the Chinese government. And considering there will possibly be some Chinese wars within the next decade or two, this is probably strategically extremely important and worth the cost far more than most if the virtue signalling that European governments get up to.
At least, we would be able to produce mass market products ourselves, similar to highly developed countries like Vietnam. The cutting edge will be developed elsewhere. Mediocrity is what is best applicable for Europe.
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@BernieTheBernie You rang?
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
@cvi Yes, they produce machines required for production, and have almost a monopoly. And after export restrictions were imposed to China, China reacted with export restrictions for rare earth metals
So, at least some technology step is still dominated by Europe.And in 10-15 years, Europe will have its own sources of rems. This seems to all be about clawing back independence from the Chinese government. And considering there will possibly be some Chinese wars within the next decade or two, this is probably strategically extremely important and worth the cost far more than most if the virtue signalling that European governments get up to.
At least, we would be able to produce mass market products ourselves, similar to highly developed countries like Vietnam. The cutting edge will be developed elsewhere. Mediocrity is what is best applicable for Europe.
First learn to produce mediocre mass market stuff before moving on to bleeding edge. Like how we taught Asia to mass produce shitty cars and then they suddenly started making the best cars.
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@Carnage And do you think will do the next step then?
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
@Carnage And do you think will do the next step then?
Possibly... Europeans are an industrious lot, in spite of their governments. And if no other country in Europe, then Poland will do it, if not for any other reason then to spite the rest of Europe.
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When it comes to solving captchas, bots are faster than humans. And have better rates at succeeding.
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
When it comes to solving captchas, bots are faster than humans. And have better rates at succeeding.
So I guess they'll incorporate this fact and change the box to say "I am a robot", and you'll get bounced out if you click it.
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Nature has a paper full of fun for the math and 3D printing fans among you: how to create odd shapes which roll down a slight incline in an odd periodic path.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Watson said in In other news today...:
without caring about their users' time in anything except the most performance-critical situations (e.g. gaming).
If they really cared about my time, they wouldn't write games. They steal so much of my time...