** Everybody

If they could get people to give up $20 in exchange for ESPN and ABC Sports that is the best deal they could possibly make. Most of YouTubeTV's customers pay for the sports package. They could get the other content somewhere else for less. YouTubeTV is hoping that they can stave off the mass exodus as people realize that they won't be able to watch the games that they signed up for, and that their cable TV replacement is basically worthless.

You have this almost completely backwards. Sports fans currently subsidize scripted television to an almost outrageous extent. I used to work for Sling. Disney doesn't have to push ESPN and ABC Sports on the providers. It has to convince them to carry (and pay for) the rest of the channels. If sports fans could get access to the games that they wanted without having to pay for scripted television scripted television as we know it would disappear overnight. What we would be left with is the sort of thing that is currently available on Youtube.

As an example, Apple has spent over $20 billion on content over the last 6 years. Amazon Prime, on the other hand, spends just over $1 billion a year for Thursday Night Football. That's basically the worst possible NFL football game, and it still regularly has about half as many concurrent viewers as Apple TV has total subscribers. That's basically the case across the board. Sports is why YouTubeTV currently costs about 4 times as much per month as the most expensive Netflix package or 5 times what Disney+ costs. Sports fans are willing to pay for their television in a way that other viewers simply aren't willing to do. Disney and the other networks are doing their best to keep sports tied to the rest of their empires. It will be interesting to see how things end up.

For most people paying for live television ESPN (and ABC Sports) is the part that they actually want. That's why these negotiations always happen during Football season. Disney is trying to get YouTubeTV to pay for a bunch of channels whose viewership drops every year and they use the access to the live sporting events that people care about as a club.

The DVR revolution was a huge deal, and it also created a split between scripted and unscripted television. Once DVRs came out they quickly became a very popular way to watch scripted television. Since you were already time shifting your programs, it made sense to also skip over the ads. Live sports (and news), on the other hand tend to be watched live. People might wander off to get a snack when the commercials come on, but they rarely miss all of the commercials. Some sports fans will record a game and watch it later, but in those cases where they can't watch the game they mostly just watch the highlights. This is so popular that highlight news shows (with advertisements that generally don't get skipped, or are embedded in the content) are basically the most popular type of news.

Heck, for many sports fans the ads are basically part of the experience. They tune in early for pre-show events where there is nothing but advertisements. The talking heads either promote later shows, or they do product placement spots literally for hours.

Viewers of scripted shows, on the other hand, often go to great lengths to skip the ads. They set up VCRs and later Tivos and other DVRs. They bought (or rented and ripped) DVDs so they could own a pristine copy. Heck, as you know that's literally how Netflix started their business.

That's why Hollywood complained (at every step) about these technologies, while the sports people largely didn't care. They worked for the same companies, but their realities were very different. Moving into the modern era it is becoming more and more clear that sports fans have been subsidizing other television fans for decades. As the needs and wants of these two groups grow further and further apart expect interesting things to happen.

Right now Disney capitalizes with every negotiation on the fact that many YouTubeTV subscribers are actually sports television subscribers looking for a reliable way to ESPN and ABC Sports. If they can't watch ESPN on Saturday and miss their alma mater play the big game they aren't going to be mollified with a $20 on their bill. They are going to cancel. So the average sports consumer pays for hundreds of channels that they never use, and their money pays for 90% of the television that gets produced, despite the fact that they don't watch it. As this disconnect becomes more and more apparent expect Hollywood to have an even harder time funding the creation of content.

I definitely tend to speak in hyperbole. I actually appreciate that reminder. That sort of thing really doesn't help make any of my points.

The reality is that there are lots of people that have televisions on all day long, and there are plenty of businesses (for example restaurants) where they might have multiple televisions on all day long. Television is still a very powerful way to reach a fairly wide audience, even if live television has fallen a long. Heck, much of the content that gets the most views on platforms like YouTube also tend to be established television shows. So even if people aren't watching the content live it is still getting watched in a timely manner. And to advertisers (and viewers) that definitely matters.

My point is that most people, especially most people on /., have absolutely no idea how much sports carries our current television programming. Netflix was originally able to buy rights to so much VOD (video on demand) content in the early days because no one thought that it had any value. Streaming pre-recorded shows is technically easy, and even in the era of cable there were only so many channels that were feasible. Netflix showed that you could turn this into a business, if you had a big enough portfolio. Even still a premium Netflix package costs $25, and you probably get it subsidized with your phone carrier. A cable subscription, with live television, and Disney pushing up the fees is at least double that. If you want ESPN it's probably closer to triple that.

Not only are people willing to pay money for sports, but sporting events have a proven track record of putting people in seats, and even keeping them there during commercials. That's why Superbowl ads are so ridiculously expensive. Advertisers realized that people were actually watching the spots during the games.

To give you an example of how skewed the numbers are individual NFL football games regularly have more viewers than Apple TV has subscribers, and they air three to four competing NFL games basically every Sunday. We think of television in terms of Hollywood and the shows that they produce, but the reality is that most of the television that we watch is just filler for the next sporting event. Since the commercialiation of television these two types of shows have worked together to build the market that collectively we call "television," and serials got most of the credit for the growth. Hollywood has always been very good at self-promotion. However, it has always been live sports that has had the largest audiences. People come together to watch Superbowls, Olympics, etc. As our modern way of watching increasingly divides live television from scripted television we are likely going to see far less money going towards scripted television. My Apple TV is germane. Apple has spent billions of dollars trying to create a scripted television service that people will pay money for, with very limited success. Amazon Prime did far better by paying $1 Billion a year for Thursday Night Football.

If you really like scripted television, you might want to consider paying more for subscriptions to some of Hollywood's services. Personally, I like watching people restore old sailboats. That's pretty niche, but in a world where YouTube has made publishing content so inexpensive there are content providers that apparently can make a living that way. So I tend to agree with your opinion that it is fun to watch evil tear away at evil.

Disney does this every time it negotiates its contract, and it is always during Football season. I used to work for Sling they did this to us twice while I worked there.

This is how live television actually works these days. Disney has a pile of channels that they can't hardly give away. Remember, we aren't talking about shows (although most shows don't matter either). We are talking about channels. When was the last time you channel surfed trying to find something on the air? My guess is that it was decades ago. Well, all those channels still exist, and the live television providers still pretend that someone cares whether re-runs of Wizard of Waverly Place is playing on whatever channel reruns of that show play on these days.

It's 2025. Sane people watch pre-recorded stuff when they have time. The industry calls that Video on Demand. They stream these shows from someone that let's them watch when they want to watch, and that keeps track of where they are when the stop. They don't tune in every day at 3:30 PM and watch reruns of their favorite show. If you are old enough, like me, you probably remember sitting down with all of your friends every week to watch the newest episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, or whatever. Remember how terrible that was. You had to make an appointment to watch television or you missed an episode and you couldn't watch it until it was in re-runs.

Well, those days are so dead no one even mourns them any more.

Disney knows this, and YouTubeTV knows this as well. Everyone involved in live television knows this. The only reason that people even have live television subscriptions is so that they can watch sports while the game is happening live. And in the United States that means that mostly boils down to watching football.

So every few years each of the live television companies (all of the cable companies, essentially) have to renegotiate with Disney. Every year the story is precisely the same. Viewership on everyone's live channels is down at least 25%. The market is shedding customers like crazy. Disney wants to raise prices at least 30%, and they also want the companies to carry (and pay for) a wide array of channels that absolutely no one watches. Meanwhile, the broadcasters just wants access to ESPN and ABC Sports. The reason that people pay money for YouTubeTV is that want to be able to watch the live sports content, and to a lesser extent the live news. Even that basically amounts to the sports news. They want to watch the College football games on Saturday, and the NFL games on Sunday. They want to be able to have a baseball game playing in the background, or catch their NBA team play. They want to hear the talking heads talk about sports, and they want to see the highlights. To accomplish this they are willing to pay approximately 4 times the cost of the fanciest Netflix subscription, maybe more if they have to rush out and sign up for another service because YouTubeTV no longer has access to ESPN and ABC Sports.

Before you think that YouTubeTV is probably gouging their customers you probably should know that YouTubeTV almost certainly pays basically every penny that their customers pay them directly to the content providers like Disney. All of the providers do this, but Disney is by far the worst. In Disney's defense they have the content that people actually want to see. Sling used the entirety of the proceeds from its subscribers to pay the various provider fees, and I actually suspect that YouTubeTV was subsidizing its customers. With the packages that they carry I suspect that they sold packages at a loss. So when Disney comes back and asks for more, with the overall pie shrinking every year. It is no wonder that YouTubeTV opted to turn out the lights.

One thing is certain, this definitely isn't about Jimmy Kimmel. That sort of content has already been moved irrevocably to normal YouTube. Absolutely no one is watching it on live television. Jimmy's return had just over 6 million viewers and was basically a miracle. Now it is back to around 1 million viewers and it probably gets more actual views from the spots on YouTube than on all of the cable providers combined. To give you a frame of reference, the worst NFL games are the Thursday Night Football games and even poor outings have 14 million viewers.

'Max' learned their lesson, why can't anyone else learn from that mistake? Why throw away years of marketing and branding? I know who Grammarly is. It's a unique name, I understand what they're trying to do.

'Superhuman' is so generic. What does 'Superhuman' DO? From the name, I can't tell. I certainly wouldn't think it has anything to do with writing or editing papers.

I hope they fail. I don't even hope they learn their lesson and switch back, I hope they're just wiped off the face of the Earth as a lesson to everyone else that you can't just AI slop your way to success.

I agree with basically everything you said, other, obviously, than the part where you said my reasoning was laughable. I honestly would have thought you were responding to someone else, but you quoted my entire original post. What I said was entirely factual. If I would have saved $50/week for the last 30 years at 8% (the SP500 would have done better than that) I would now be sitting on a pile of cash that is larger than the median net worth of people 45-50 years old in the United States. That's just from that one theoretical investment. As someone that has been saving this sort of modest amounts for more than 30 years I can personally attest that, at least during my lifetime, this sort of small incremental investment makes a huge difference over time. So, while past performance may not indicate future returns, telling me that my advice is laughable is pretty disingenuous. I am literally just laying out a basic math equation. It is possible that future people will not find investments that deliver these sorts of returns, but just about any reasonable stock market investment in your lifetime (assuming you are 30 years old) would have delivered at least those sorts of returns.

I didn't say anything about buying a house, although I did imply that spending 10% of your rent (that apparently the original poster had trouble paying) on takeout was probably a poor choice.

Loyalty programs and credit card use are fully evil. I couldn't agree with you more on either of those points. I also agree that home ownership is far more expensive now than it was when I purchased my first home. My oldest child just bought a house, and my next oldest is piling up money for a down payment, and so I am aware of what things look like. That being the case I still tell them that they should be investing for the future while they are young. It doesn't take much if you start while you are young enough.

The problem is when an answer is long and involves nuance, and that doesn't work in debates.

The problem with not engaging, however, is that if you don't engage with an issue, you'll just get endlessly sniped on it. And the alternative approach - embrace the opposite side's positions to shut them up - also doesn't work, because you get the worst of both worlds (you tick off your side, while not winning over votes from the opposite side). It's a strategic error to run from difficult conversations.

A lot of people misunderstand the market for the DGX Spark.

If you want to run a small model at home, or create a LoRA for a tiny model, you don't want to do it on this - you want to do it on gaming GPUs.

If you want to create a large foundation model, or run commercial inference, you don't want to do it on this - you want to do this on high-end AI servers.

This fits the middle ground between these two things. It gives you a far larger memory than you can get on gaming GPUs (allowing you to do inference on / tune / train much larger models, esp. when you combine two Sparks). It sacrifices some memory bandwidth and FLOPs and costs somewhat more, but it lets you do things that you simply can't do in any meaningful way on gaming GPUs, that you'd normally have to buy / rent big expensive servers to do.

The closest current alternative is Mac Studio M2 or M3 Ultras. You get better bandwidth on the macs, but way worse TOPS. The balance of these factors depends greatly on what sort of application you're running, but in most cases they'll be in the ballpark of each other. For example, one $7,5k Mac M3 Ultra with 256GB is said to run Qwen 3 235B GGUF at 16 tok/s, while two linked $4,2k DGX Sparks with the same total 256GB are said to do it at 12 tok/s, with similar quantization. Your mileage may vary depending on what you're doing.

Either way, you're not going to be training a big foundation model or serving commercial inference on either, at least not economically. But if you want something that can work with large models at home, these are the sort of solutions that you want. The Spark is the sort of system that you train your toy and small models on before renting out a cluster for a YOLO run, or to run inference a large open model for your personal or office internal use.

Agreed. My interest in this product has nothing whatsoever to do with its small size. It could be 10x larger and I'd still want one.

It happens so easily to these snowflakes.

Let's look at the very DEI policy in question in the article you're responding to, the one that caused them to have to miss out on a government grant, and go through it line by line. You tell me which part is racism and some horrific thing.

"he Python Software Foundation and the global Python community welcome and encourage participation by everyone." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"Our community is based on mutual respect, tolerance, and encouragement, and we are working to help each other live up to these principles." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"We want our community to be more diverse: whoever you are, and whatever your background, we welcome you." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"We have created this diversity statement because we believe that a diverse Python community is stronger and more vibrant." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"A diverse community where people treat each other with respect has more potential contributors and more sources for ideas." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"Although we have phrased the formal diversity statement generically to make it all-inclusive, we recognize that there are specific attributes that are used to discriminate against people. In alphabetical order, some of these attributes include (but are not limited to): age, culture, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, national origin, physical or mental difference, politics, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and subculture. We welcome people regardless of the values of these or other attributes." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"The Python community welcomes people no matter what languages they are fluent in. (Although core Python development is done in English.)" - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
" The Python community encourages the creation of user groups in all locales, and many of them are listed at http://wiki.python.org/moin/Lo..." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?
"Many of these user groups also have mailing lists in the locally preferred language." - Is this racism? Is this horrific?

This is what DEI is. What the living hell is wrong with you if you think this is some horrible thing that warrants massive government censorship to fight against it?

This. It's just amazing how much they project. The one thing that drives me crazy is how they keep saying "Democrats keep taking about identity and 'social issues" (*cough* trans people *cough*) rather than things that matter like the economy and healthcare!". When the reality is that Democratic politicians keep trying like hell to not have to talk about identity and trans people, to talk ONLY about things like the economy and healthcare (and abortion, and other "strong suits"), but with conservatives constantly talking about identity and trans people, as their primary sources of rage. Seriously, pull up a random Harris speech and count how much time she spent on "identity" or (ahem) "social issues" vs. other things. It will be "little to literally-zero".