technobabbler

I'll have to look at it from a computer later. Too small on a phone.

It's some sort of isometric game with speech bubbles, but what is the basic gameplay?

Read the IPCC reports for the scientific context. The on the ground situation changes all the time (keeps getting worse) and the reports are updated every few years. The IPCC is a UN panel of scientists studying climate change over decades and publishing their findings in a pretty easy to understand format. It's all open and free and the methodologies are documented.

Proposed solutions are pretty much nonexistent/irrelevant because it's not a scientific question anymore but a matter of political will, and the pendulum keeps going back and forth between the reds and the blues with essentially nothing getting done over the years. Various authors range from optimistic to doom and gloom but in the end they are just speculating on things that will not get implemented.

This is a terrible website that tells you nothing about the game. What's it like? How does it play? Screenshots or videos?

Maybe Neverwinter Nights in its DM mode? I think there were a few new entries in the virtual tabletop space recently, but I forget what they're called.

So going off that logic, wouldn't mandating end user/consumer serviceability be an objective (repairability) and not a method? People are still free to innovate battery materials how they want, they just can't be locked into the device with no easy way to replace them when they're dead. I still don't see how that hinders innovation.

Sure, a lot of technology has proven socially useful, but usually with regulation (of natural monopolies, for example) and subsidies and such. It's not an either or situation. Companies can and do profit alongside mandatory social contributions that they otherwise would not have done if it meant more profit.

In the electronics space, things like safety regulations, charging standards, warranty protections, etc. have hurt profits but been good for the consumer. There's a balance.

> I could do pretty much everything I needed using ffmpeg (compiled with a customized configuration), video.js running a handful of custom plugins and some other pieces of open source software.

This. That's so many points separate points of failure, and doesn't that mean you have to get a dev involved (or have an in-house automated video pipeline) anytime someone wants to post or update a video? Maybe we just have different thresholds of "complexity". I try to keep clients away from unnecessarily bespoke tools, and keep them on simple GUIs supported by proper vendors... but that's just in my sphere of work. In bigger teams it might make sense to in-house more stuff.

A device can tell when one end of the cable is plugged in by testing the cable's control channel, even without the other end connected yet. It sees that a cable is connected, but there's nothing on the other end, and presumes it's first and should act as the provider. A second later, you connect the other end of the cable to a consumer, and the first device will try to negotiate its role with the second. It's up to the devices to respect each other's role requests.

http://blog.teledynelecroy.com/2016/02/usb-type-c-cable-dete...

Different device types (like a powered hub or desktop monitor) can request different roles, and they'll have to sort it out during negotiation if there's a conflict. Sometimes a user-facing popup will ask you if you want to provide or take power from the other device.

Not necessarily. It can just test the resistance of the port/cable to see if anything is there. The first device (power provider) to detect the cable can say "ok, I got plugged in first" and then tell the other device (the consumer) that when they try to negotiate power delivery. That doesn't require maintaining state in the cable itself, just that the devices be able to detect the cable when it's plugged in (even without the other end connected).

Cable detection: http://blog.teledynelecroy.com/2016/02/usb-type-c-cable-dete...

Overview of USB power delivery negotiation: https://www.embedded.com/usb-type-c-and-power-delivery-101-p...

And then after the initial connection, the devices can renegotiate their roles if you want to reverse the charge.

It's great when it actually works. In the real world there are so many incompatible implementations that USB-C is a real clusterfuck.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Why would allowing battery replacement hinder development of battery tech? If anything it should spur a battery aftermarket using different charge controllers, chemistries, etc. that are user-swappable for the OEM ones.

It just sounds like a generic antiregulatory complaint ungrounded in reality? It's not like li-ion tech has advanced dramatically absent such regulations. The bottleneck seems to be chemical, a matter of energy density, not a regulatory chokehold on innovation.

It's just part of a bigger right-to-repair war, whether it's batteries or cars or operating systems. Manufacturers are increasingly moving to rent-seeking behaviors and X as a subscription, which is great for their profits but not so good for consumers or societies.

Big tech is already on the verge of supplanting governments across the world, the last thing they need is more freedom to "innovate". They don't do it for the social good, just for their profits, and regulation is always playing catch-up to try to limit the social and environmental damage from their actions. At least the regulations have some measure of democratic buy-in, vs the what, 2-4 big tech companies that alone determine the future of tech? They don't have your interests at heart, at all.

How did you power it from the vehicle? Not from the 12V outlet, right? Don't those stoves draw hundreds of watts?

FWIW the portable ones are great when you live in cheap apartments with shitty stoves. One of the few good investments I made in college...

Lol, spam-as-a-service?

Why would they do that when they could sell you the dishwasher AND the razor blades? Unreliability is service profit.

Eh, if battery tech ever gets there, they can just update the law. Big deal?

In the meantime it'd prevent needlessly thin phones and laptops designed around planned obsolescence.

What is normal is that people aren't really able to grieve for millions they don't know. Whether it's a pandemic or war or genocide or famine or disease, out of sight out of mind. A lot of virtue signaling and political maneuvering but at the end of the day our in groups just aren't that big and we'll say "oh that's sad" and then move on with our lives.

There's 8 billion of us, millions are always going to be dying, and realistically nobody outside of their friend circles really care.

I think the covid deaths are usually reported as excess deaths, ie deaths over the normal expected annual.

A lot of people died from covid who otherwise wouldn't have (yet). That's not to say I agree with our failed strategy, but if we can't even believe that covid did kill a bunch of people, eh... nevermind. The country is doomed anyway lol.

It's supposed to be able to do that.

In Android there is a "Charge connected device" setting that you can turn on or off. Mine is off by default.

I dunno, maybe the localized increase over background levels? As they say, "dilution is the solution to pollution"... a little oil or radiation here and there will be reabsorbed by the ecosystem without much incident. Seemed like Fukushima was basically dumped into the sea and we didn't end up with Godzilla (too bad, really).

Likewise, some slow underwater seepage probably just gets washed away? But if you add a whole bunch of oil on a seashore that normally doesn't have much, it'll kill a bunch of cute animals and make your PR team have to work weekends.

If you drastically increase the background radiation near a suburb by piling spent fuel near it, the residents won't scientifically analyze the risk, they'll just try to keep you away. If you try to build a new plant, every politician within bribing distance of some special interest goes haywire.

Yucca Mountain might've been an option but that got shot down too.

A mix of precaution and NIMBYism, some of which is good science, some of which is just junk politics, and much of which is just people being primates. We're not evolutionarily equipped to make these sort of large scale long term decisions, only to live and die by our tiny, intimate lives.

Yeah, exactly. I am so grateful hosts like that exist :)

Personally, yes? I'd had it silently fail for a few weeks (I misconfigured the expiration alerts somewhere, or maybe the mailer daemon wasn't set up right on that particular vhost, or some package it relied on failed, and it couldn't renew for several weeks but I didn't hear about it until the cert expired and the page failed). On more than one occasion it was an issue.

And when you need wildcards, it gets even more complicated.

Obviously I'm not a very good sysadmin, but that's the point... I don't want to be and don't need to be, not when someone else can do it better and faster.

It's not an ideological thing, just a personal preference for making user-facing features as opposed to tinkering with the backend. Some people enjoy that sort of work. But users don't see it or care about it unless it breaks, which it often does in my experience as a mediocre full-stack dev with increasingly front-end leanings.

Edit: And on newer-generation serverless/Jamstack hosts (Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, etc.) you might never even get a shell to tinker with Certbot on. Which is arguably a good thing, especially compared to the bad old days of having to quadruple-configure HTTPS across your CDN, Varnish, Nginx/Apache, Certbot, and maybe cPanel or similar too. Yikes. Every single part of the intermediary chain was prone to frequent breakage. HTTPS these days isn't for authentication anyway, just for preventing drive-by MITM. Even EV certs aren't a good guarantee. So why do it yourself?

> The only thing I really needed to hire was a CDN.

Unless somebody was bookmarking your video directly (does that really happen, as opposed to a HTML page / app), this IS what the video hosts offer, just at a higher level. Vimeo isn't a social video platform the way YouTube is, it's just a video host for the most part, including whitelabeling options. What is the vendor lock-in concern?

At the last educational place I worked for, we hosted our videos on YouTube, Vimeo, our own host, and a few other places. Nobody ever knew or asked which was which, except the YT and Vimeo videos were smoother experiences. They were all whitelabeled or else unlabeled.

I'd argue that for most content producers and users, YouTube (for the social network and the wide compatibility across devices) and Vimeo (for the ridiculously cheap pricing and ease of use) are the best choices AS CDNs. Both offer superior developer/producer experiences than a self-hosted stack too.

> had a high degree of control over my platform and could even develop some on-premises customizations that would be simply impossible had I relied on third-party, internet-only solutions.

But I'd love to hear about these cases. What justifies that complexity for you?

Hah! As soon as you posted this, my first thought was, "I bet they're getting overcharged by some shitty LMS". A lot of those companies resell video hosting for an insane markup. Glad you're trying to find them a better deal.

If you need to be able to charge PPV or per month or whatever, Vimeo also offers a billable solution: https://vimeo.com/ott/pricing (OTT is apparently "over-the-top", as in PPV that bypasses cable/satellite/etc... according to wikipedia. Must be a cable-era term.) There are a bunch of other providers in this space... here is one list by a company: https://www.dacast.com/blog/how-does-white-label-video-strea...

Or you might be able to API-integrate Cloudflare Stream (or a similarly low-level CDN offering) with the LMS system directly, if they offer such interconnects.

My guess is that ease of use would probably get you a better ROI than strong piracy protections in this case and it's probably not worth it to go for DRM or rental models? IMHO only.

> Some people have ideological reasons for wanting to self-host, and I wouldn't want to discourage them unnecessarily.

Off the top of my mind, there are only two web things I would strongly discourage people from self-managing whenever possible... video and HTTPS. Of course both are doable, and might be fun as a learning experience or a matter of ideological purity... but otherwise, their ROI is so, SO low it's not worth it (as in, you'll spend way more time and money fixing things than you would ever save having a pro do it).

I don't know your exact use case. If you tell us more, we can help you better.

We used Vimeo to serve an approx 30 sec video to about a million viewers a month and it was great. We noticed some minor downtime (few minutes at a time) but that was acceptable to us.

Cloudflare might be more reliable, not sure? Network infra is their bread and butter, and I tremendously admire them, but their streaming offering was overkill for our basic needs.

Ultimately their target markets are different. Cloudflare is an infrastructure company targeting devops teams, Vimeo targets small-to-medium content-driven businesses who don't want to do devops. Probably Vimeo's control panel is easier to use for content producers, whereas Cloudflare might have better APIs for devops types?

At a few thousand viewers a month, it's a pretty trivial use case and either company (or any other professional video host) would probably be just fine. It comes down to your own pipeline/production or business needs, probably.

As for being able to switch from one host to another, hopefully you're promoting a landing page of some sort and not a direct video URL. In that case you should be able to switch video providers at any time without interruption. Just keep the old version up alongside the new one for a few days, in case anyone has the page cached.

It's important to note that Cloudflare charges by the minutes served ($1/1000 min). If your video is a short looping background or product teaser, it's probably affordable. But if you're streaming entire demos or movies or such, it can get expensive pretty quick.

Vimeo is a flat $20/mo, subject to fair use (approx 2 TB/mo). Worth doing the math to see which makes more sense for you.

Can you say which PaaS they are using? It's hard to believe any modern PaaS doesn't have video delivery included as an option of some sort.

FYI we use Vimeo to serve about a million views a month, for $20/mo. It doesn't get much cheaper than that.

None of this is impossible to do, just a lot more work than clicking "upload" on Vimeo and letting it take care of there rest for you, for what, $20 a month? Those 4 steps are already work that most won't bother to do. Because why? What would the advantage be?

Things that could go wrong: The end-user's frontend (a 4-year-old phone browser, a crappy smart TV, a Chromecast, Microsoft's browser abortions, whatever) has to support your protocol of choice. HLS is more and more common but it's not a guarantee, whereas the Vimeo and YouTube players have years of legacy and fallback support and have their CDNs pretty stabilized. With HLS you might still need a frontend JS player and then have to manage the distribution and packaging for that. And if you care about the video player UX, things like supporting user-chosen resolutions (overriding network speed), theater mode or easy full-screen or subtitles, 1.5x+ speed, etc. And you have to invalidate and re-CDN a bunch of separate files every time your source file updates.

But really, again, it's not that you CAN'T recreate what Vimeo and YouTube etc. have done, but why would you want to? It's a lot of effort to end up with an inferior UX, higher bandwidth charges, and a whole new pipeline (if not stack) that you have to maintain. No reason to reinvent the wheel for such a common use case.

Edit: And you STILL have to CDN it in the end, unless you have the phattest pipes in all the worlds. So you still have to subcontract with a third party in the end. Why not just put it there to begin with? It's silly.

It's one thing if you're Google-scale and need to in-house everything because you're dealing with a billion viewers a day, but when it's just a few thousand (the OP said that in a different comment), it's really not worth your time or bandwidth charges to reinvent that infrastructure.

You're gonna get cut off from your host after a few hundred views, not enough for it to go viral.

If you're lazy, just put it on YouTube as an unlisted video and embed it wherever. It'll be way more reliable (not to mention transcodable for different mobile viewers) than self-hosting on a web server.

The ad networks probably host their own videos. It's different when the videos can subsidize themselves through ad clicks.

Here's one of Google's: https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/6086451?hl=en

It's unlikely a single devops person or team can scale cheaply. The big CDNs have HUGE economies of scale (read: peering agreements) that make them much, much cheaper than trying to run your own edge network.

Hell, even if put your video on an established peer to peer network (similar to bittorrent streaming), the support nightmares would probably cost more than just putting it on an already established CDN.

There is really no reason to self-host videos these days. They are write-once (or very rarely), invalidated very rarely, and can be trivially cached everywhere, sort of a best-case scenario for big CDNs. Even if you didn't have to touch a single line of code, trying to reestablish just the business deals yourself across many countries and data interconnects would be ridiculously expensive.