They're not publicly traded (they appear to be pre-IPO "startup", made out of acquisitions), but it seems weird to me that there can be such a thing as secret layoffs.
My local karate school used them in the COVID era to build an app for practicing at home. I've used it off and on, though the occasional oblique reference to COVID is a bit amusing sometimes. Never mentioned by name but there's an occasional reference to "as we're stuck at home" and such. They use Vimeo to whitelabel the service.
Whatever they're paying for it, it is too much. Video availability drops in and out. Sometimes the video works. Sometimes it doesn't work at all and gives a weird error. Sometimes it doesn't work and it claims that it "can't guarantee the security of my connection", even though other videos work fine. Sometimes videos that didn't work yesterday work today. I've been tempted to go to their app developer and try to show them how to just host it themselves in S3 or something, which would probably still be much cheaper than what Vimeo is charging. The Vimeo player embedded into the app is extremely minimalistic, for instance, it can't cast to anything, which is a pretty useful feature for something you don't want to be staring at your phone for.
I found I can Favorite a video, which then makes me log in to a Vimeo account, then it adds it as a Favorite to my Vimeo account despite being private, and then I can view it through the Vimeo app proper, although that also seems to have lost the ability to cast to anything in my house lately. Casting is a clusterfuck of its own with the mismatched capabilities matrix of what can cast to what under what circumstances anyhow, but Vimeo seems distinctly behind on that front. It's honestly significantly worse now than the default video player a browser offers at this point.
But it was probably relatively easy for them to set it up ~5 years ago, before Vimeo collapsed.
A notable difference to their (somewhat) contemporary, Nebula. Nebula made the choice to develop their own services, to also own the customer billing relation. Dropout relies on Vimeo for all that.
Are there other services doing whitelabel video sites? (Apart from porn, I'm sure there is a few) I only know of Floatplane providing whitelabel for William Osman's sauceplus.com recently.
I know this wasn't an entirely honest question, but yes, absolutely. You probably see Vimeo videos every day without realizing it, because most of the viewing isn't done on vimeo.com. It's videos on other sites, and the customers can pay to have their branding, not Vimeo's, so if you're buying something online and it has a product video... might be Vimeo. Or one of those websites that have big header splashes with full-video backgrounds. Or a subscription "channel" like Martha Stewart TV with mobile and smart-TV apps. Or a million other things.
Once at Vimeo, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was working on putting out the fires of an extremely weird operational issue where a bug in a cloud provider's software-defined networking stack led to corrupted HTTP responses, which got stored in CDN caches, causing persistent playback issues for users (playback not starting, or locking up in the middle). The cloud provider had reported it as a "packet loss" issue, because for the most part the misdirected packets would get rejected by the receiving TCP stack for having the wrong sequence number or whatever, but one time in a billion they would get through and wreak havoc... and we were moving enough traffic that those one-in-a-billion flukes were happening constantly.
I was musing in the shared chat with one of our CDN partners that, with no real way to tell what files were affected, the only way to fix the playback issues for everyone (short of waiting a month for all the cached objects to age out) would be to simply purge the whole cache. I immediately got a bold all caps DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT in response. If we flushed the whole cache, the origin traffic to refill it would have saturated some internet links to the point of DoSing other customers and probably getting on CNN that evening. And that was then. Traffic levels got significantly higher later on.
They have 1000s if not 100s and 1000s of customers. I know because my company is an edtech platform and we have a lot of customers using vimeo as their video host.
I recently used it to watch "Revolution of our times", a documentary about the 2019 Hong Kong protests. As far as I could tell, this is the only legal way to stream the movie.
If they're hiring performance engineers then they're hiring for exactly these sets of skills.
It's a take-home test, which means some people will spend more than a couple of hours on it to get the answer really good. They would have gone after those people in particular.
They maybe have an rhlf phase, but I mean there is also just the shape of the distribution of images on the internet and, since this is from alibaba, their part of the internet/social media (Weibo) to consider
With today's remote social validation for women and all time low value of men due to lower death rates and the disconnect from where food and shelter come from, lonely men make up a huge portion of the population.
I'm still not following. Ads for a pickup truck are probably more likely to feature towing a boat than ads for a hatchback even if they're both capable of towing boats. Because buyers of the former are more likely to use the vehicle for that purpose.
If a disproportionate share of users are using image generation for generating attractive women, why is it out of place to put commensurate focus on that use case in demos and other promotional material?
I mean things that take hard physical labor are typically self limiting...
I do nerdy computer things and I actually build things too, for example I busted up the limestone in my backyard in put in a patio and raised garden. Working 16 hours a day coding/or otherwise computering isn't that hard even if your brain is melted at the end of the day. 8 - 10 of physically hard labor and your body starts taking damage if you keep it up too long.
And really building houses is a terrible example! In the US we've been chronically behind on building millions of units of houses. People complain the processes are terribly slow and there is tons of downtime.
> It's incredibly clear who the devs assume the target market is.
Not "assume". That's what the target market is. Take a look at civitai and see what kind of images people generate and what LoRAs they train (just be sure to be logged in and disable all of the NSFW filters in the options).
Considering how gaga r/stablediffusion is about it, they weren’t wrong. Apparently Flux 2 is dead in the water even though the knowledge it has contained in the model is way, way higher than Z-Image (unsurprisingly).
Z-Image is getting traction because it fits on their tiny GPUs and does porn sure, but even with more compute Flux 2[dev] has no place.
Weak world knowledge, worse licensing, and it ruins the #1 benefit of a larger LLM backbone with post-training for JSON prompts.
LLMs already understand JSON, so additional training for JSON feels like a cheaper way to juice prompt adherence than more robust post-training.
And honestly even "full fat" Flux 2 has no great spot: Nano Banana Pro is better if you need strong editing, Seedream 4.5 is better if you need strong generation.
Most everyone I knew there was just laid off, with a skeleton crew that’s been asked to stay on until April.