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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • On purchasing servers; I don’t know about Google specifically, but most media partners I’ve worked with doesn’t have global acquisition as an option for hardwares — not because they don’t have the purchase power/volume, but rather the vendors have region specific distributors with their own sales teams and pricing. Even if you have the personal contacts of VPs high up the chain, someone from IBM China cannot even sell to companies in Canada, and vice versa, for example.

    On people side of things… With YouTube specifically, you’re also not only dealing with their own DC but getting their hardware into local ISPs centres. Logistics around that is not something cheap remote labor can arrange, need actual boots on the ground to facilitate.

    Ad sales is also something that’s kind of localized. YouTube has American teams selling American creator inventories for example. Not something that’s outsourced out.

    So yea… Although from the outset it’s all just “YouTube.com”, there’s actually a lot of localized touch points that creates different costs to provide service in different regions.



  • Service provider must acquire hardwares for the data centre at local vendor pricing.

    Service provider must hire someone local to work in your local data centre.

    Service providers need to pay local electricity and bandwidth rates.

    List goes on. Just because you don’t interface with the local aspects of business doesn’t mean they don’t exist and add extra costs.

    If you want to pay lower rate, as I stated earlier, make your narrative work: use local payment methods, billing address and use the service locally to the locality you’re paying in. Then they’ve got nothing to argue against you as you’re using services in that lower cost region.


  • Operation costs differently in different regions. Advertising spend differs in different regions. You’ve moved from a region with cheap operating expenses and no ad spend to another region with more expensive operating expenses and higher ad spend. Congratulations on your move, now the cost to provide you service is different, and you’d need to pay more to cover the operating expenses + expected margin.

    Alternatively, procure a local credit card (I.e. the same one you used back home), billing address (i.e the last place back home), and always do everything through a VPN back home. Then you’re at least using services from where the operating expense reflects the pricing.

    This is just business, and should be expected. Food is dirt cheap back in Asia, they’re more expensive here in North America. Like it or not, if I’m living here, I need to pay the prices here. If I don’t want to pay the prices here, I can move back to Asia.



  • Apple offers first party E2EE messaging for their clients, via iMessage.

    As part of China’s certification requirements, Apple has been tasked to support RCS, which, per the spec, does not have E2EE feature.

    I’ll say this again: RCS does not support E2EE.

    If that’s not registering: RCS does not support E2EE.

    Come to the think of it, it would actually be surprising if China is mandating an E2EE capable implementation, but I digress.

    In order to comply with this requirement, Apple implemented RCS per the specs of RCS. Again, RCS does not support E2EE. There is no specification of RCS that supports E2EE at this time.

    Google runs a proprietary system that they’ve built based off of RCS, but is not RCS. This proprietary protocol, which is not RCS, has custom extensions of their own to offer E2EE. Apple is under zero obligation to implement against this, because this is not RCS. In fact, as demonstrated, even other Android systems don’t do this. They use the carrier RCS, which while fragmented and incomplete, consistently does not have E2EE, because, again, RCS does not support E2EE.

    There are plenty of cross platform E2EE solutions available: Matrix, Signal, and WhatsApp, are a few major players that popped to mind. I’m sure there are plenty of others that I didn’t call out. They are cross platform which means they already exist on both iOS and Android platforms.

    Neither Apple nor Google have any reason to implement those protocols, as, again, they already exist on platform.

    How is Apple not implementing Google’s proprietary extension malicious compliance as you called it?


  • COPPA is pretty straight forward — the tl;dr is that websites are not allowed to collect personal info from children under age of 13.

    If TikTok have users under the age of 13, and they’re profiling those users the same as they are with adult users (adult users of TikTok? This sounds so weird and foreign to me; I must be too old), then they’re in hot water. I don’t see how there’s any minority report style of thought crime going on here. It’s pretty cut and dry…


  • Honestly I think this is a standards issue not an Apple or Google issue.

    Apple needs to serve their clients and iMessages is great for that. Google needs to serve their clients and they’re putting forward their RCS extension, which could be good if they can gain traction, but their reputation precedes them, so thats going as well as anyone would expect. Neither parties really have obligations beyond, as the standard beyond their own offering is SMS MMS which they both support.

    GSM is responsible for the next evolution of the carrier level messaging, which is RCS (without the E2EE extension Google is putting forth), and it’s their job to make that the standard implemented by all carriers. It’d be great if they add E2EE to the standard, but the fragmentation ant carrier level isn’t going to magically resolve if they cannot get carriers to implement it properly.





  • Very much as expected… fragmented, incomplete, and highly dependent on carrier. Google’s non standard E2EE extension will likely only work if messages are routed through their servers, which based on the observations here, even from the Android side it doesn’t seems to be routed through Google. Larger file means better quality pictures via green bubbles, anyone who’s sent/received a garbage and cares enough knows to send via third party messaging apps anyway, so nothing life changing here.

    Let’s see if Apple applies pressure and push everyone to use Google’s servers for E2EE as they move towards iOS 18, but other than that… I’m still inclined to think the down play during keynote is apt.



  • Other ramifications aside, it wouldn’t be that costly to splice real time.

    YouTube has standard profiles of video and audio quality levels. As long as the video stream is the same quality, the stream can basically be concatenated one after another without any meaningful over head. Try it: ffmpeg -f concat -i files.list -c copy output.mp4 for two files with same codec (audio and video) was processed at over 900x speed for me with just CPU.

    So all YouTube would need to do is transcode the ads they’d intend to splice in into the standard formats they’d offer the stream at (which they’d already have the video transcoded into), and splice the ads they’d want to show in realtime at request time.






  • From the article itself:

    The researchers found that Sky was also reminiscent of other Hollywood stars, including Anne Hathaway and Keri Russell. The analysis of Sky often rated Hathaway and Russell as being even more similar to the AI than Johansson.

    I’ve watched Her many years back, and I’ve been following a lot of Johansson’s work in the MCU franchise; I don’t hear her in Sky beyond both voices being similarly aged “female” (can’t really assume the gender of the AI model) voices.

    If there are statistical analyses that says otherwise, and aligns with at least some anecdotal evidence, then it isn’t “very obvious”.

    Also, people calling out dissimilarities from their anecdotal observations, along with statistical evidence against your personal view doesn’t equate to siding with the company, or against some popular celebrity; but rather, simply calling out their observations. This is just a discussion as to whether or not the voice is similar, try not to get too personally attached to either parties.