distract8901

I wonder at what point will Google start splicing ads directly into the video feed? Surely there's a way to do it without transcoding the entire file again.

There seems to be an arms race happening between YouTube and uBlock. Every few days the nag shows back up and I have to update my unlock lists again. But it does work usually

If you do something even slightly unusual you can quickly get into a situation where you spend more time debugging your toolchain than writing code.

I really hate the state of modern software. We have so many layers of utterly unknowable abstractions that it isn't even possible to understand what your code actually ends up doing.

And that's how we ended up with Electron, which I think is the pinnacle of shitty software driven by the unsustainable paradigm of libraries on abstractions on libraries.

Streaming to twitch involves two parties. First, the service provider twitch, second the user uploading the video. Streaming to a second service introduces a third party.

Sorry, I don't respect people who murder innocent civilians without cause or due process. Or people that can arbitrarily seize any amount of your property, forever, with no possible recourse.

Or really tacticool guys in general. They're pretty much always absolute assholes.

Absolutely incredible

Jeez, that signal must have been absolutely infinitesimal. How do you even notice something like that? Guess I should read the article

That was the original reason. Back in my day we had interactive Flash ads that could run basically any code they wanted while flashing bright lights and scantily clad women at you. One of the major reasons we had ad blockers was because it was so easy to get a virus from a malicious ad.

For any number of reasons, I'm not willing to put up with Google's advertising or business practices. I also don't want to give google any money because a) they really don't need it and b) google only gives a fraction of the ad revinue to creators.

Why use YouTube then? There really isn't much of an option. Some creators I subscribe to don't post anywhere else. Some do post on peertube or LBRY, so I'll watch there if available.

I view it the same way I view piracy. I'd be willing to pay for more media if it were available, from a company that won't spy on me, without DRM, and my money went to the people that made the thing instead of some rent seeking business sitting between me and them.

I don't have a problem paying for stuff, I have a problem with paying Google specifically.

And ultimately my use of ad blockers accounts for an infinitesimal fraction of a percent of any one creator's ad revinue. It costs Google a lot of money to serve the video, and the creator earns only very slightly less. If there's a sponsored segment (as there always is these days), that more than makes up for the disparity.

It hurts Google and is virtually unnoticeable to the creator. Sounds good to me.

Writing dumb little programs to automate some trivially annoying task is one of my favorite things to do. I get to play around with UI design, or build some hideous monstrosity out of reflection and polymorphic generic classes. I get to play with parts of the language I don't normally use. Who cares if it's ugly or slow? It runs once a week, it doesn't matter so long as it works.

I wouldn't really call these programs useless, but I could definitely live without them. The way I like to think about it is making little programs that make my computer suck less.

I'd characterize it as employers being extremely adversarial to unions because their goal is exploitation of workers. Unions have to be aggressive in response.

Sure, I'll agree that our union system is not great, but I place the blame for this situation on employers.

....why?

This horse has been beaten to a fine pulp, cloud gaming just isn't going to happen.

Yes, they did. It wasn't every machine, but it did in fact happen.

I remember being excited for windows 7. I stayed up late on a school night to grab a beta iso because there was a limited number of downloads. It was an enormous improvement over XP. But I think that's where Microsoft really lost the plot.

They started forcing 7 users to upgrade to 10 without user input or consent. They kept adding on more and more spyware and ads, removing local accounts and any sort of control you have over your machine.

If I went into work tomorrow and found my machine had updated itself to 11, I'd probably just nuke it and install Linux. I'm so tired of these games and the total disrespect from Microsoft. I'll never be excited about windows again. I'll never want to use windows again.

Linux isn't perfect, but at least it respects me and my choices. It will let me turn off updates. It won't reboot itself in the middle of my work to update the calculator app. It won't sideload bloatware like "Xbox game bar" through the security update channels. I have control of my Linux machines, for good or ill. What I do on my machines is my business and I expect the machine to do what I tell it to, even if it's something like `rm -rf /`

Linux may not be as good an operating system as windows is (was), but at least it isn't actively antagonizing. It doesn't try to control me or sell me something, or mine my personal data to sell. And even if all that were the case, I could still build my own Linux system from scratch.

This slow death spiral is really agonizing for everyone in the tech industry. I wish Microsoft would either just die already or get their shit together. I'm tired of the current situation and I want it to be over already, one way or the other

Lots of the southeast and probably elsewhere. In Kentucky and west Virginia, it's common to see black license plates on cars with a "coal keeps the lights on" slogan. People pay extra for them.

People here seem to be fundamentally incapable of considering the future in any capacity. Climate issues aside, we're simply going to run out of coal at some point. I'd wonder what those people think will happen then, but I know they just don't even consider it a possibility. Or at most it's a problem for a future generation that clearly doesn't concern them.

I think it's in the cable. The user manual shows a cable with a big chunky adapter that slots into a modular port on the back of the meter. It seems that port also supports a Bluetooth module, so I'd guess it does direct digital signaling and the adapter in the cable contains the optical isolation.

First, RF emissions from phones really don't affect airplane equipment. They haven't for a long time, if they ever have.

Airplane mode is one of those things that sticks around because people think it's important and they expect it. It doesn't really help airplanes, it's more of a general "disable radios" mode now.

Typically airplane mode does turn off all radios in your device, but modern devices allow you to turn WiFi or Bluetooth back on while keeping the cell radio turned off.

I think the reasoning here is that while in a plane, your phone will try really hard to find a cell tower to connect to. The output power of the radio will get turned up to max, which ends up being a lot more RF power being sent out than your WiFi or Bluetooth radio puts out. Hypothetically this can interfere with safety-critical electronics in the plane, but in reality those systems are incredibly robust and very well shielded.

The worst is trying to repair one end of an existing cable and having to think really hard about whether to use A or B wiring.

I don't remember the details, but they explored some different field geometries which were more useful, but required an impossible amount of energy. Like, more energy than the entire universe.

It's pretty much what it says on the tin. A field which warps nearby space into a different shape.

What that means is complicated to explain, but the gist of a warp drive is that you expand space behind you and compress space in front of you. The normal space in between gets pushed forward, ideally at speeds faster than light. There's lots of good explainers on YouTube if you want to learn more.

The static warp field doesn't allow you to go faster than light because it doesn't move relative to the generator. You can drag the field around at sublight speeds but that's about it.

Though IIRC they played around with some different geometries that did move, but the energy required was many times more than the entire universe contains.

Yeah, I'd expect that almost any code would react badly to modifying a ctor argument in parallel. That seems like a very bad thing to do in general.

>Theoretical warp physics -- the real kind, like Alcubierre, not the Wesley Crusher kind -- proposes that a source of negative mass would be critical to the creation of a warp field.

Well, yes, that's always been the crucial missing component from Alcubierre's design, but I've never seen anyone suggest antimatter would have negative mass or energy before now. The talk has always been about some hypothetical exotic matter

It's been really weird seeing all these warp drive and antigravity people crawling out of the woodwork in response to this result.

I have never heard of antimatter proposed for anything other than an energy source/storage. Not even in the oldest SciFi stories. Where did this idea even come from? It seems to have just appeared from nowhere as a way to feel bad about an otherwise inconsequential result.

Very strange

>That said, I don't follow it closely, but didn't somebody recently worked out one that works without negative mass matter?

Yes. There was recently a few papers published showing that a static warp field is mathematically possible without negative energy. However, the field doesn't move or impart acceleration on its own. The best you can do is drag the warp field behind your ship with normal thrusters. Such a field seems to be pretty useless right now, but maybe that research will lead to something else in a few years

I'm sure that I could have fixed it, but I gave up after spending multiple evenings on it. Have you ever spent hours debugging a system exclusively in text mode? It isn't fun. Reinstalling the OS takes less than 30 minutes. It's a clear choice for me

I'd guess that juicing total review scores for a product results in more sales

I tried bumblebee again recently, and it works shockingly well now. I have a thinkpad T530 from 2013 with an NVS5400m.

There is some strange issue with some games where they don't get full performance from the dGPU, but more than the iGPU. I have to use optirun to get full performance.

It also has problems when the computer wakes from sleep. For whatever reason, hardware video decoding doesn't work after entering standby. Makes steam in home streaming crash on the client, but flipping to software decoding usually works fine.

The important part is that battery life is almost as good with bumblebee as it is with the dGPU turned off. No more fucking with Prime or rebooting into BIOS to turn the GPU back on.

My Arch system would occasionally boot to a black screen. When this happened, no amount of tinkering could get it back. I had to reinstall the whole OS.

Turns out it was a conflict between nvidia drivers and my (10 year old) Intel integrated GPU. But once I switched to an AMD card, everything works flawlessly.

Ubuntu based systems barely worked at all. Incredibly unstable and would occasionally corrupt the output and barf colors and fragments of the desktop all over my screens.

AMD on arch has been an absolute delight. It just. Works. It's more stable than nvidia on windows.

For a lot of reasons-- but mainly Linux drivers-- I've totally sworn off nvidia cards. AMD just works better for me.

If anything bad happens, I'm sure the Rigel will bail us out. This time for sure