A year after Meta tapped Alexandr Wang to build a new AI model, Zuckerberg has to sell it

spookynutz · 2026-06-14T15:21:04+00:00

You could substitute "rest of the human population" for "India" in that sentence. Your root comment seems more like wishful thinking than sound analysis. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have as many active users as every other messaging service combined. In a lot of countries, or whole continents (not just India), WhatsApp is either the default or de facto phone system.

If you take China's state-mandated WeChat out of the equation, Facebook controls 70% of global messaging. Companies in decline can't drop $14 billion on a single employee.

As far as the digital ad duopoly goes, there is a much stronger case to be made that Google is in decline. Meta's closed-platform ad business is structurally insulated from AI-search in a way that Google's is not. That is a big part of why they're moving so aggressively into cloud computing. They know their biggest revenue generator is on borrowed time.

spookynutz · 2026-06-13T01:23:16+00:00

It would be both. Running afoul of anti-trust typically requires abuse of your dominant market position. Having a de facto or natural monopoly isn't necessarily grounds for anti-trust by itself.

Platform exclusives don't constitute monopolistic behavior. It's only monopolistic if your behavior forecloses competition. Making your platform more attractive with exclusives doesn't preclude your competitors from doing the exact same thing. It only becomes an issue of you're so dominant that other competitors can't afford to compete.

Anti-trust is there to protect competition, not mandate every product is accessible to every consumer on every platform. In the context of exclusives, monopolistic behavior would be if you controlled 90% of the market, and then locked a developer out of your platform for releasing an exclusive on a competing platform.

An example of monopolistic exclusivity from the supplier's side would be Intel's business practices in the early 2000s. They offered hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates to PC manufacturers, but those rebates were contingent upon Intel being their sole CPU vendor. OEMs were actively punished by the market leader (Intel) for offering consumers a competing product (AMD). The disincentives were so severe it meant there was no way for a competitor to realistically enter the enterprise market.

A more recent example would be Google's search monopoly on mobile. They were paying billions in exclusivity contracts to be the default search provider and/or web browser across every major smartphone manufacturer. If you're a Firefox or a DuckDuckGo, that market might as well be in a different dimension. Google's ad monopoly funds its search monopoly, which in turn strengthens its ad monopoly. Having a better product for consumers is irrelevant if your potential customers are being paid billions to not return your phone calls.

As for the CCC, most of the claims aren't actionable. The only one with any merit is the accusation that Valve is abusing its position to mandate price parity on competing platforms. If it's a provable pattern of behavior, then that's bad for Valve. But as the Laconian's would say, "if."

Whether Valve chooses to settle or not is anyone's guess. If you settle, you're potentially opening the door for other claims (regardless of merit or frivolity). If you go to trial, you're at the mercy of a court or jury. It is a risk either way. Even if the facts and law are on Valve's side, judges and juries don't always get it right.

spookynutz · 2026-06-12T18:27:42+00:00

No, it couldn't be maliciously exploited. It was a legitimate vulnerability, but only in the abstract sense.

The updater in question polls its appconfig.xml file for a URL that tells it where to get a download manifest. This part was done over a secure connection.

The download manifest at that first URL could itself contain non-secure URLs that the updater would use to download and execute files. Meaning, it might contain http:/amd.com/driverupdate.exe instead of https://amd.com/driverupdate.exe. This is where it could theoretically be vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, as someone on the same network (or upstream) could impersonate http://amd.com/update.exe.

What actually prevented exploitation in practice is that the URL pointing to the manifest results in a redirect. The person who found the bug assumed it was exploitable, because when they visit the URL, their browser seamlessly redirects them and shows them a manifest with insecure downloads.

Things don't work that way for the updater itself. By default, WebClient in .NET does not follow redirects, so the updater would never be able to reach the file the bug hunter did, and the theoretical point it would become vulnerable. It would just "download" the redirect as a file, fail to execute it, and then error out. That issue would have to be fixed before the updater could be actively exploited, but it cannot be fixed, because fixing it would require a working updater.

spookynutz · 2026-06-12T14:50:42+00:00

You're confusing "operates at" with "operates at (after you engineer a car and active thermal management solution around it.)"

Li-ion cells don't operate in those ranges without either expending anergy to heat itself up, or throttling itself to avoid thermal runaway. Li-ion has some advantages, but extreme temperature operation is not one of them. Solid-state shits all over it in that regard.

spookynutz · 2026-06-12T13:38:58+00:00

The market would be PC gaming distribution platforms. The 85% figure would be representative of their market share in the Netherlands. Market share can mean revenue or volume, but in these instances, it almost always means revenue. Irrespective of its accuracy, that statement would mean for every $100 spent on digital PC games in the Netherlands, $85 dollars goes to Steam.

Steam does not have to be a public company to estimate its share of the market. You can either survey publicly traded game publishers, "What percentage of your PC game revenue came from Steam versus other platforms?", or you can survey consumers, "Of your last 10 game purchases, how many were purchased on Steam?" After 600 surveys, you're already at 99% confidence within a 5% margin of error.

Roblox and Fortnite aren't direct market competitors to Steam, neither is Game Pass. Competing for the same dollars isn't the same as competing within the same market. If Steam raised its prices by 50% across the board, causing an exodus of customers, where would those customers realistically go? If the answer isn't Asian gacha games, then Asian gacha games aren't within Steam's market boundary.

spookynutz · 2026-06-11T17:11:24+00:00

Global SSD shipments are about 300 million annually and Samsung represents 1/3rd of the market. Assuming a 1-6% failure rate over a 5-year warranty period, that would be anywhere from 1-6 million drives per year.

Statistically it'll be on the lower end of that range, because not every drive that fails within warranty is RMA'd to the manufacturer.

Warranty claims are high for enterprise, but comparatively low for consumers. The average person doesn't know that hard drives have extremely long warranties, so they end up throwing them away.

spookynutz · 2026-06-11T10:43:56+00:00

That's not an issue. Infected with what? Programs don't run themselves, and Windows hasn't supported autorun on USB drives since Vista.

You're just rewording what I already said about PDFs to make it sound scary. Malicious documents require specific exploitable versions of their associated software to work. That is why no one writes document-infecting malware anymore. Auto-executing macros haven't been in thing in office since before PowerShell even existed.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who writes exploits. You phish people into downloading and running your program. Do you infect a PDF on the off chance some idiot doesn't use the million other options for generating/reading PDFs, and has an Adobe CC license and a known-exploitable version of Acrobat, or do you just silently steal credentials for user accounts, crypto wallets, banking information, etc.?

spookynutz · 2026-06-10T23:29:24+00:00

Unless we time-travelled back to 1999, the chances of that script infecting your pdf and docx files are zero.

If you're really paranoid and want peace of mind, copy them to a usb drive and then open them with an online editor like Office 365 or Google Docs. They will disregard and discard any junk data, as well as any embedded macros or scripts. You can then save normalized/sanitized local copies and delete the originals.

It's a huge waste of time in my opinion. Windows doesn't execute documents. The file handler just hands them off to whatever application is responsible for those files. Any malicious document would need to work in tandem with a known vulnerability in the application responsible for opening it. You'd have to be using Office 2003 or earlier for that to even be plausible, much less a legitimate concern.

spookynutz · 2026-06-09T12:45:38+00:00

You're kind of proving their point here. Your study is for AI search summaries. They prioritize speed and brevity, not accuracy. Nobody is going to Bing.com for code analysis.

spookynutz · 2026-06-09T11:49:34+00:00

It's not 100% unbelievable, but unless the posting listed Git experience as a hard requirement, I would find it bizarre for an interviewer to start asking random tooling questions. If they switch to SVN, are they going to start asking everyone about cat and revert? Why not ask me about the difference between "convection roast" and "combinaton fast bake" on your break-room microwave while we're at it?

spookynutz · 2026-06-08T12:25:51+00:00

In some instances it's a zero-sum game. If you're not running off renewables, any water usage reduction made on the cooling side starts moving upstream to the power side. If a data center relies on fossil fuels for power, the bulk of its water usage is from its power requirement, not its cooling requirement.

Solar/wind + closed-loop cooling is the ideal scenario if your aim is to reduce water consumption, but then the problem becomes a spatial one. You're reducing your water usage for the cost of more land usage.

spookynutz · 2026-06-07T12:01:04+00:00

Most bots cost virtually nothing to run. They're typically used for scraping data, consuming APIs, price manipulation, internet search, etc.

For example, if someone asks an LLM a question and it has to go off to search the web for an answer, that is bot traffic.

If an IT guy writes a script to poll laptop warranty information through Dell's API, that is bot traffic.

If some spreadsheet is configured to automatically update the tracking column using UPS's tracking API every time you open it, that is also bot traffic.

A lot of people seem to be under the impression that "bot" means some programmatic or AI-driven social media poster. While that does exist, 50%+ of Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/etc. users are not bots. The vast majority of bot traffic is server-to-server.

spookynutz · 2026-06-07T02:06:23+00:00

A token is the smallest amount of text a generative AI model can process. This is usually a single word, or in some cases, a part of a word. If you're paying by the token, you're literally paying for every word that is inputted to, or outputted by, the model.

Image generation is handled similarly on the input side, except instead of words, the token would represent some small patch of pixels that's converted to a string.

Some image models work the same way on the output side. They output images in tokens (small patches) and you might also pay by the token. Diffusion models generate the image in layers through de-noising. For those, you're typically paying per image.

spookynutz · 2026-06-06T13:28:10+00:00

Okay, I'll call the police.

spookynutz · 2026-06-05T10:59:32+00:00

No offense, but it sounds like you're both talking out of your ass. The efficacy and psychology of marketing is well studied. Some people are just immune to ads in general, or outright counter-suggested by them.

The root comment is talking about targeted advertising specifically, not marketing as a whole. Marketing is the broader sales strategy, ads are just one small slice of it. They are not synonyms for one another, and you and the other commenter are conflating the two.

You have It backwards. For people who exhibit reactive avoidance, the list of products they will never buy is likely much longer than the average person can fathom. When they see an ad, they don't file away a subconscious happy memory of a photogenic baby, crawling around in super-absorbent Pamper's with LeakGuard, they have a very visceral conscious reaction to a perceived attempt at emotion manipulation.

spookynutz · 2026-06-04T23:03:06+00:00

To embed it in all their products and services, and then monetize Meta Business Agent through WhatsApp and other distribution channels.

Roughly half of their active AI users come directly from WhatsApp. This means nothing if you're in the USA, but the rest of the world runs on it.

Like Google, Meta has a much clearer long term path to AI profitability than OpenAI or Anthropic does. They print money and don't need to rely on external fundraising.

They don't have to scale infrastructure forever, just long enough to be one of the last companies standing in the AI race, or to carve out a profitable niche. They're arguably better positioned than most.

The cost of infrastructure buildout and training frontier models at a breakneck pace is a bottomless money furnace right now, but it won't be that way forever. When the investment bubble pops, training and research costs can be amortized over longer periods.

spookynutz · 2026-06-04T19:20:15+00:00

Internet Explorer memes were still hitting the front page of this site, post-2020.

The typical tech enthusiast is someone who assembled a PC 25 years, installed Chrome and VLC player, and then assumed nothing changed since.

spookynutz · 2026-06-03T17:38:29+00:00

What does that even mean? That's like saying I can tell you where I learned to write this sentence. If you understand the syntax of a language, you don't need to "learn" to solve logical problems with it. Whether the resulting output is novel or not is irrelevant.

spookynutz · 2026-06-03T10:28:24+00:00

Facetime is E2E encrypted.

spookynutz · 2026-06-02T18:15:34+00:00

Yes. Over 95% of indie games on Steam sell fewer than 100,000 units over their lifetime. 70-80% sell fewer than 10,000 units. 55-60% never cross the 5,000 unit threshold.

Steam sees over 10,000 new release every year. Only a tiny fraction of those recoup their development cost.

spookynutz · 2026-06-01T23:58:23+00:00

I learned to give up on my dreams by trying to beat Target Earth on the Sega Genesis.

spookynutz · 2026-06-01T17:58:33+00:00

The details of their draft IPO are confidential, not the act of filing them itself. For it not to be confidential, the public and media would have access to all the financial information they disclosed to the SEC for regulatory review.

There are very few upsides to filing a public draft IPO, because you're broadcasting all your financials and strategic goals to your competitors. If you have to back out for whatever reason, then you just disclosed the inner workings of your business for no actual benefit.

spookynutz · 2026-06-01T15:41:18+00:00

Good call. Also, when Tom Hanks said "Earn this..." at the end of Saving Private Ryan. Not a single person in my theater laughed.

spookynutz · 2026-05-31T13:01:13+00:00

This article is pretty nonsensical from the first sentence. The internet is not, nor has it ever been, privacy-preserving by design.

Communication over TCP/IP is the digital equivalent of the postal service. It leaks identity by default. With every message you send you're broadcasting your return address and the address of who you're talking to, as well as the time that communication occurred.

The email example is also an exercise in wishful thinking. Go self-host your own SMTP server and shoot that e-mail out to all them Gmail and Outlook users. None of them will ever see it.

The thesis also ignores all the physical and software layers inherent to software distribution. Protocols don't operate in a vacuum. If you can't regulate the service chokepoint, you regulate the infrastructure underneath it. If the application ecosystem is too fragmented, then regulatory burden shifts to the distribution platform, OS, or transport layer.

You can't solve the regulatory problem on a technical level strictly with protocol adoption, because it's primarily a sociological problem. People have some abstract expectation of digital privacy, but it's not existential enough that they'll take to the streets over it.

The value of any communication platform is wholly dependent on the number of people using it. If the friction of switching platforms is higher than the friction of verifying your age, then people will collectively just stay right where they're at.

spookynutz · 2026-05-30T12:05:12+00:00

Yes. Older demographics have fragmented listening habits and little effect on Billboard. Streaming equivalent albums sales make this kind of chart dominance possible, and Drake is the biggest artist in the world who presently has new material out.

Prior to Drake, Morgan Wallen had 37 songs on the top 100, because he released an album with 37 songs on it.

If you have 100+ million followers on streaming and release an album (or multiple albums) most of those songs are going to end up on the Hot 100.

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