LetMeEatCake

@LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games Cutting 870 Jobs, 16 Percent Of Its Workforce, also selling Bandcamp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  That and the EGS seem to be where Epic funneled all their profits from the height of Fornite. That neither has worked out puts them on shakier ground. How many billions of dollars has been spent on EGS with it being way behind their revenue targets?

  As things stand, Epic has very little in the way of a next big revenue source when Fortnite starts to fade as something new takes its place. That (probably) isn’t right around the corner but it will happen eventually. Their bet was on running major digital storefronts; that hasn’t worked out. UE will continue to make good money but not anywhere near enough to sustain the company as it is. UE is simply far smaller than something like FN.

  This is likely them realizing this in conjunction with what you said. They need a new big revenue source in the pipeline, since digital storefronts won’t be it. Whatever that next thing is will need lots of money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan stepping down in March⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Curious why everyone in the comments (as of my own comment) is happy about this?

  Sure, he exudes C-suite personality and doesn’t act like he’s a gamer. But that doesn’t matter. He oversaw Sony’s rise to dominance in the console market. That dominance is built on the foundation of their first party AAA games — which is a less than ten year old change for them. Sony porting their big games to PC was a project that was fully embraced under his leadership.

  Point being, as a gamer it seems like he’s done a fairly decent job. I don’t care how boring his interviews or speeches are or that he looks and acts like he belongs in a board room — they’re all like that anyway even if their public persona says otherwise. I care about games and treatment of consumers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ridley Scott Has a ‘Fantastic’ Cut of ‘Napoleon’ That Runs Four-and-a-Half Hours and Features Way More Joséphine⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The movie made sense IMO, its main issues are that so much of the crew are hollow. Their characters are threadbare, they’re on screen for the express purpose of dying. Even if we don’t pick up on it specifically we pick up on it subconsciously and they feel off. The geologist and biologist that die early on have basically one trait each (biologist is fake tough guy, biologist is nerdy-nervous). They don’t feel like real people.

  I liked Prometheus a lot, but the very-real problems with it would in my estimation require way more than a director’s cut to fix. Unless there’s a lot of filmed character development out there, I suppose. The insignificant characters needed to be replaced with a far smaller number of significant characters to join the handful of existing significant characters. Basically requires a rewrite.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will youtube eventually run out of storage?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s far from useless.

  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?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will youtube eventually run out of storage?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will youtube eventually run out of storage?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a superscript. You can see it in the comment editor options. It’s: ^text^ which looks like ^text^

  You can also check a comment’s source by clicking on the icon that looks like a dog eared piece of paper at the bottom of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will youtube eventually run out of storage?⁩ ⁨⁨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 $13.64/TB. Call it $14 even to keep the numbers easy. 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 7,142,857 of those hard drives. In a single year. That’s 7,142,857x20TB = 142,857,140 TB of storage, also known as 142^note^ ^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 900,558 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube’s annual revenue.

  1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024^n^ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren’t correct. It’d be 123 exbibytes instead.