ChatGPT being the #5 website in the world is still indicative of consumer demand, as their only product is AI. Without commenting on the Google shims specifically, AI infrastructure buildouts are not speculative.
The graph database market has a deserved reputation for carefully crafting scaling claims that are so narrowly qualified as to be inapplicable to anything real. If you aren't deep into the tech you'll likely miss it in the press releases. It is an industry-wide problem, I'm not trying to single out Neo4j here.
Using this press release as an example, if you pay attention to the details you'll notice that this graph has an anomalously low degree. That is, the graph is very weakly connected, lots of nodes and barely any edges. Typical graph data models have much higher connectivity than this. For example, the classic Graph500 benchmark uses an average degree of 16 to measure scale-out performance.
So why did they nerf the graph connectivity? One of the most fundamental challenges in scaling graphs is optimally cutting them into shards. Unlike most data models, no matter how you cut up the graph some edges will always span multiple shards, which becomes a nasty consistency problem in scale-out systems. Scaling this becomes exponentially harder the more highly connected the graph. So basically, they defined away the problem that makes graphs difficult to scale. They used a graph so weakly connected that they could kinda sorta make it work on a thousand(!) machines even though it is not representative of most real-world graph data models.
I pay a fixed rate up-front for reprint rights, which is a one-time deal. This is mostly because pro rata royalties on an anthology are a pain (I've done this before, it involves sending out lots of tiny single-digit-dollar checks), but also because it's unlikely for me to make back the money I spend on anthology creation (science fiction short stories are a tiny market).
This is a hobby project for me, I'm obsessed with trying to get more people to read science fiction short stories. I spent about $6k creating the anthology (to pay for cover art, reprint rights, proof prints, etc), and I'll probably recoup about half of what I spent? We'll see, I'm currently testing various marketing strategies.
I don't meant to be insulting about it, but I'm a little surprised you would pay for new cover art, but not for a more professional design for the cover in general. The current design seems very obviously 'amateur' to me in a way that I automatically associate with vanity press or other low-quality works, and I think it would have been more beneficial to pay more attention to the layout and typography even if that meant just using stock art.
This is really amazing, I was daydreaming recently and thought how cool it would be to create something like that. I am glad that you've taken the initiative to get it going. Looks awesome will check it out, love Greg Bear too, just recommended Blood Music to a good friend.
I would love to hear more about your point of view. I love science fiction but short stories always feel off the mark to me. Either fluff that shouldn't have been written, or something so good it's bitter-sweet that you read it and nothing more will come of it.
Where did your obsession and love for the format come from?
This is a big part of the appeal of short stories, to me. Either the story is brilliant, or I can skip to the next one quickly; churning through a 400-page book in the hopes of it getting better later is much worse. Or even worse, hearing rumors that it gets better in book #3 of a 5-book series. I hate how current-day publishers feel the need to tell authors to bloat their books because that's what sells. When an author ends up with 1.4 books worth of material, the good answer is to tighten it up, not split it into two books.
Then again, I most love really short stories. It's a challenge I enjoy, to do as much worldbuilding as possible in as few words as I can, while still having a plot and even more to the point telling a story that's bigger inside the reader's imagination that it is on paper.
For example, here's something I wrote way back when, that Joe Stech (the editor/publisher here) published in 2016. 747 words is not even a short story!
I think your feeling is probably the most common one, which is why short science fiction readers are a vanishingly small percentage of the population. One of the reasons novels are much more popular than short fiction (orders of magnitude more popular) is because once you find a world you enjoy you can sit in it for a while. With short fiction as soon as you build up the world in your head it's done and you have to move on to the next one.
I like jumping from world to world more than the average person -- I'm happy getting that new, novel idea and then jumping to the next thing. I understand I'm atypical, but I think there's probably a higher percentage of people like me on HN than there are in the overall population.
Thank you for offering, but I don't have any channel for donations -- I'm grateful that my software work enables me do projects like this without worrying too much about the funding part.
The W is important there. If the DAUs were good, they'd report those. I do generally find that LLMs are a weekly thing at best in a chat bot form (the agentic stuff I use more often).
If I operated a vending machine that spat out a dollar every time somebody pressed a button, I'd have just as many weekly users as I put dollar bills into it. You wouldn't call that a winning business despite the exceptionally high rate of 5-star reviews.
The more appropriate analogy is: you have a vending machine that dispenses a paper slip with your fortune on it everytime somebody presses a button. However you can only get one fortune told per day, but you can pay to get more in bulk.
Turns out people find these fortunes super useful, and many are actually paying real money to get more, and each vending machine is actually making money on this.
But now the vending machine industry has also figured out that bigger, more powerful machines produce tell better fortunes which draws in even more people.
So now the industry is investing heavily to build more, bigger vending machines. However, these machines need tons of expensive parts and power, and oh, we can't slow down because China, and so they are racing like crazy to build more.
Unfortunately, there is effectively only one company making a key part, and there's not enough power for all the machines being built, and so very expensive new infrastructure has to be built to meet the forecasted demand for all the fortunes in the world.
And this requires trillions in funding, which gets very expensive to borrow, and so the US government is being asked to provide loan guarantees, because who better would know what interest payments on trillions of debt look like?
It's a losing company if they aren't making money and have no feasible path to do so, considering amount of outstanding debts they already have and future debt they are planning to take.
> Weird thing to fixate about when the whole industry actually uses MAUs.
Are you kidding me? Like, both Google and Facebook tracked l7, l28 which is the number of days that a person/account logged in over the last 7 or 28 days. Fundamentally, that's the sign of a useful product, in that people keep coming back.
> 800M WAU is a "losing company"?
Not enough information to be sure. If their business model requires selling dollars for fifty cents, then maybe.
I don't doubt the utility of these products (sometimes), but I do doubt the business model behind OpenAI & Anthropic (the "pure" model providers).
Maybe, maybe not. The stat alone doesn't really dictate the answer - it just gives hope they'll be able to turn a profit one day (hopefully soon) without losing their position vs doubt of the same.
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