I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

You poor TDS sufferer. A post about how science advanced by admitting new information and you go off ranting about Trump and Christians. Have you considered that America isn't the country for you? We are a Christian nation and our constitution s fit for no other. Leave us. You do not belong here. We desire neither your arms nor your counsel. Go now and lick the hand that feeds ye, and may history forget ye were our countrymen.

If they plan to actually generate movies in Saudi Arabia, their morality police are going to restrict them heavily. I doubt most of the rest of the world would be interested for long.

If their plan is only to make the software, will those contracts ban anything forbidden by the Saudi morality police? Will the software have hidden restraints? It would be easy to detect forbidden scenes. It might not be so easy to detect more subtle restraints, such as ideological bias.

I'm convinced of it. You'll supply a script, cast, and style and it will generate the movie. At some point, you will also be able to interact with the movie, talking to the characters ("your other left"), talking to the generator ("skip this scene").

Famous actors will sell their personas, famous writers will sell scripts, famous directors and producers will sell styles, but I think most people will pay less for B-list and C-list and Z-list content that they can tweak to get something different every time.

You will also be able to add your overlays to scripts ("more cowbells"), personas ("more witty") and styles ("fewer explosions"), and you will be able to add random variations.

It's going to be fantastic. Hollywood democratization will be like a breath of fresh air.

What happened to slashdot? At one time this racist alt right trash world have been modded down to -1. But instead it's at +5 and This post is at -1. Trump voters are just plain stupid.

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

The entire EU is a protectionist bloc Canada is protectionist coffee. Tariffs are wonderful, useful tools when other countries use them. But when Trump does them they're bad. As are so many other policies like deporting illegal aliens. Obama and Biden did more and entire states and cities did not rebelv and nullify federal authority like it was fort Sumter 1865. Pure TDS.

He used to win these market timing games because no one was paying attention to huge short positions. You could quietly bet against a company, or, better yet, you could quietly amass a short position and then release stunning negative news that you had uncovered and watch the stock price tank.

These days it is more likely that online investors will notice a large short, and drive the price of the stock up until the person holding the short gets margin called and loses all of their money. The shorters then provide the liquidity you need to get out of the position. There used to be good money in shorting terrible companies, but in an age where hordes of armchair investors can drive the price of GameStop to the moon that strategy is just too risky.

I've been using a TCL NXTPAPER for reading for a couple of years, and haven't used my kindles since. The screen has no glare at all, none. It's night right now, can't tell you about reading in bright sunlight. I haven't found a phone yet which is any fun in bright sun, so this NXTPAPER is probably not great either. But none of my house lights drown it out.

I have one, #11 I believe, which I use instead of Kindles. Zero glare, zero lag while paging. Works OK for general use too, but it beats the pants off Kindles and all other tablets I've tried for readability. Had it for a couple of years now.

I've noticed this kind of thing a LOT lately. Evidently this book is out called Nudge that tells its readers to annoy the shit out of their customers until they 'install the app". Because evidently running in the background and draining your battery constantly harvesting your data and monitoring your location is more profitable than actually selling the service.

I booked air tickets on a website and it was deliberately irritating, pausing for a long time between screens, showing a QR code and saying, 'tired of waiting? our app is much faster!" Hell, even Youtube is unwatchable without a Google account and giving them your real name, address, phone number for 2FA, email, backup email to cross-check databases. And once you've done all that. the jack-in-the-box pops open and it's like, let's get your social, your tax return info for last year, last three places of employment, and then upload a photo of yourself holding your ID. And your selfie cam photo wasn't clear, our facial recognition can't read it. Nice try scammer, your application has been denied. We'll be keeping the info you already entered, though.

China is like this, an entirely real-name internet. You can't so much as order food delivery without all of this. Simply entering the country requires facial scan and fingerprints.

1984 was a warning, not a role model.

Savages? What? Excuse me? Racist much? Hey, could you give us your opinion on people from India? Or tasmanian aboriginies? Or the Jews? Enlighten us! Once upon a time you'd be at -1 flamebait. But I guess it's true if you don't kick out the natzees your bar becomes a natzee bar, too. And while you're at it tell us about slt right hero and Googler James Damore, too. Go read his famous anti diversity screed again, you'd love it.

Nothing would make it “help get a little closer to making it a reality” if it’s not physically possible, and there’s a very strong argument that that’s the case. If nothing else, the maximum specific tensile strength allowed by covalent bonding - which is fundamental physics that we can’t change - combined with the reality of defects in a 36,000 km cable - is far below what’s needed to build a space elevator in Earth gravity. It might be possible to build a space elevator on the Moon or even (in the far future) on Mars, because their gravity is such that real materials could potentially do the job. But doing that involves bootstrapping an entire offworld industry, which is far beyond anything even the most advanced nations are capable of currently, let alone a technologically stunted oil state.

There’s no chance they’d actually succeed in building a space elevator. The Line is at least theoretically physically possible with current technology, even if it was always an obviously spectacularly bad idea. A space elevator is not.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.