LetMeEatCake @ LetMeEatCake @lemm.ee

Posts

0

Comments

94

Joined

2 yr. ago

This is true, but fuel taxes are very low. Most states that are charging an EV "road maintenance fee" (with whatever phrasing they select) are charging way more than an ICE vehicle would contribute in fuel taxes. And while it is true that BEVs are heavier than ICE vehicles, all else held equal, and that road wear and tear is strongly dependent on weight... as I recall reading, the overwhelming majority of road wear and tear is the result of freight trucks and similar vehicles.

I’m all for going electric, but an 8500lb truck is not helping the environment.

The issue here isn't that it's an EV in this case. It's that it's a truck. I'd wager than >95% of people buying trucks in the US would be perfectly served by a four door sedan or comparable sized vehicle. Trucks have largely become expensive vanity items to act as an external signal of a person's cultural identity. Contractors and similar that actually use a truck for truck purposes still exist, but they're comically outnumbered by people buying trucks for no good reason.

In other unbiased polling, the wolf spoke to all the other wolves in the pack and they all prefer that the sheep be eaten.

You can look at it too for looking at what causes people to be conservative.

Conservatism at its core psychological roots is fear of change. In a vacuum, people who are well served by the status quo are the ones least likely to want change. The historical adage of people becoming more conservative as they age was basically a result of that: when you're young you don't have much to lose from change. As you age you gain the opportunity to buy a house, to get married, to have kids, to get promoted at work and see your income go up significantly, to develop some meaningful job security. And so on. Thus, as people age they gained things, status, accomplishments, all the various life goals being accomplished. Even if change would probably make things better for them, they didn't want to risk it. Things were OK.

The reason we see that adage breakdown is because we've seen the core causes breakdown too. Buying a home five years ago was a struggle compared to how it was historically. Buying a home today costs so much that it makes buying a home five years ago look trivial. Many couples are now intentionally delaying or forgoing becoming parents because children cost so much: just giving birth can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that's just to get them to day 1 of existence. Education costs keep going up. Job security is down. Wage increases are seen as something that even the "professional class" has to fight for, requiring a job hop to get a raise instead of getting one as par for the course from staying at an employer.

In light of that breakdown... far fewer people are afraid of the risk of change. The 30-something of today has a lot less at risk from change. Even much of the lower half of the upper middle class of today is far more able to stomach the risk of change.

It's really not a surprise at all.

It's useless for answering a questions that wasn't asked, sure. But I didn't pretend to answer that question. What it is useful for is answering the topic question. You know, the whole damn point?

How much of a factor off do you think the estimate is? You think they need three drives of redundancy each? Ten? Chances are they're paying half (or less) for storage drives compared to retail pricing. The estimate on what they could get with $100m was also 134 EB, a mind boggling sum of storage. I wouldn't be surprised if they're using up on the order of 1 EB/year in needed storage. There's also a lot more room in their budget than 0.34%.

The point is to get a quick and simple estimate to show that there really will not be a problem in Google acquiring sufficient storage. If you want a very accurate estimate of their costs you'll need data that we do not have. I was not aiming to get a highly accurate estimate of their costs. I made this clear, right from the beginning.

If each video was on a single hard drive the site would not be able to function as even the fastest multi actuator hard drive can only do 524 MB/s in a perfect vacuum.

The most popular videos are all going to be kept in RAM, they don't read them all off disk with every single view request. If you wanted a comment going over the finer details of server architecture, you shouldn't have looked at the one saying it was doing back of the envelope math on storage costs only, eh?

Not surprising.

Bioware has spent over a decade chasing mass appeal for their games, to the detriment of what they're good at. They made that work as they shifted from 2D to 3D to action-3D. That stopped working as they went too far, abandoning their core strengths. Bioware hasn't had an unmitigated success since... ME2 in 2010? That's 13 years of them floundering, with the very mitigated successes of ME3 and DA:I early on in that.

That kind of floundering is going to filter down to everyone working there. It's hard to bounce back from that. They know Dreadwolf needs to hit it out of the park if they hope to continue on. Easy situation to end up in development hell with delay after delay...

I wasn't calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn't be surprised if they're paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.

All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.

With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.

It's a superscript. You can see it in the comment editor options. It's: ^text^ which looks like ^text

You can also check a comment's source by clicking on the icon that looks like a dog eared piece of paper at the bottom of it.

Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.

Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn't need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they'll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.

Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don't like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we'll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $15/TB. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they'd be able to buy 6,666,666 of those hard drives. In a single year. That's 6,666,666x20TB = 133,333,333 TB of storage, also known as 133^{note 1} exabytes.

That's a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube's compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That's 768,722 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube's annual revenue.

Note 1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024ⁿ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren't correct. It'd be 115 exbibytes instead.

EDIT: I initially did the price wrong, fixed now.

Aviation is one of the smallest contributions to greenhouse gas emissions as-is: in 2016 it was 1.9% of global emissions.

The danger the rich pose to the planet isn't being first in line for the second generation of supersonic transoceanic flights.

The danger the rich pose to the planet is them keeping coal and natural gas plants open longer because they personally profit from it. It's them keeping their taxes low, reducing our ability to fund renewable energy. It's them fighting tooth and nail against any new energy efficiency regulation (remember the incandescent lightbulb ban fight?) because it "hurts profits." It's them fighting against public transportation.

This? This isn't even in the top 50 of their ills against the climate. The hate for the rich is well placed. Applying that hate to basic science is dangerously misplaced. The rich love when people push-back on funding science efforts.

Faster transportation is quality of life too. Just like cars were, or railroads before them. Yeah, this one is currently worthless for anyone that isn't rich. But if it proves successful it will become useful for more of us. Like you say, there's also just the material and other sciences being done to make it possible that will filter out elsewhere. So much of early space exploration was Cold War dick waving, and now think about how much we rely on satellites. I couldn't navigate anywhere without GPS, personally...

People here take their hate of the rich (which is well placed) and aim it at all the wrong things. Don't like the rich? Tax 'em more. That's what I want. Higher income taxes and even a wealth tax on the top. And way more meaningful inheritance taxes. Instead they're bitching about investments in science.

Technology filters down. Once upon a time only the rich could afford corrective lenses, but that wasn't a waste of resources. How many of non-wealthy people will read this comment and wear glasses or contacts? I do. BEVs were limited to the wealthy at first too, and now are solidly affordable to much of the middle class: dependent more on their access to charging and their driving requirements than on their budget. The first residential fridges cost more than a brand new Model T when they came out: the inflation adjusted 1922 price was ~$13,000 today. Was inventing fridges worthless?

It's NASA developing new technologies. New stuff starts off more expensive, which means it will start off limited to the wealthy. If you don't want any new tech to come out that starts with rich people being the primary users, then you should go find your local luddite club to join.

Not the full answer but an encouraging detail, thanks for the info!

How does stuff like DLSS or similar work with Proton? I remember reading once that it wasn't a straight forward process. That was a few years ago though, I don't know if it's changed (or if I misunderstood what I read — always a possibility).

I suppose it doesn't matter much to me in the medium term, as I use mission-critical software while WFH, which is Windows only. But Linux-ifying my setup is something that always sounds appealing if I can get over the hurdles.

Almost certainly still stuck with their fork of gamebryo. On the bright side, the footage I've seen of Starfield suggests that they've actually gotten around to implementing a better animation system.

I'm not sure on the specifics of how animations work at the engine level (I know there's stuff about animation rigs, but not much beyond that) but all their games up until now have had the same system of character animations and it consistently looked ancient. Straight from the late 90s levels.

Republicans control the house and the senate is still subject to the filibuster and likely will remain that way until the next time there is 52+ dem senators + dem house + dem president simultaneously.

It is and it isn't, the reasons are in my comment.

The problem is that it depends on how you assess it. There are two, both perfectly valid, ways to look at this.

The way you're looking at it is you see it as a state-only contest. B got the fewest votes, B's votes go to C, C wins the state. The end. From an administrative level this is the simplest approach. I don't feel any need to expand on this assessment as you're in favor of it and seem to grok the principles behind it.

The other, equally correct, way to look at it is to assess this as a national contest. In that case, C is the one that actually gets the fewest votes because they have 0 electoral votes in any other state. C is incapable of winning, so C would be eliminated in the first round of the state level contest. After all, one of the points of RCV is to eliminate the impact of spoiler candidates that cannot win. With that in mind, it'd be dumb to design an RCV system that increases the impact of a spoiler candidate that cannot win.

The issue with the first interpretation is the risk of magnifying the impact of a spoiler candidate who cannot win. The issue with the second interpretation is the sheer administrative difficulty (if C were competitive in multiple states then each state needs to take into account how other states are doing their RCV process, etc.). Both flaws would be unlikely to matter >99% of the time, but that one time the flaw would matter could lead to a constitutional crisis or less dangerously result in fundamental dislike of RCV systems. That one time might also become more likely if voters feel more comfortable voting for third parties due to this system.

The problem here is that both systems are fair, logical, and valid; they also each present major issues in edge scenarios. That's why it's important to go for a popular vote first. That way the election is one election, which RCV is explicitly designed for. The current two layer 51-elections that lead to another election that we have for the US presidency is basically a nightmare scenario for an effective RCV system.

Some democrats don't like RCV (see the DC thread from the other day), but many do. NYC has RCV, and I assure you it didn't get there without democrats supporting it. So does Maine.

RCV wouldn't work well for presidential elections as they are anyway, because it's a two-stage election. What would RCV mean in an individual state? Pretend a 3rd party is in contention in that state but has no chance nationally. Candidates A and B are the major parties, and C is our third party. If the results are C=40, A=35, B=25, and B's support transfers to C, and C's support would transfer to C, does that mean B should be eliminated so C can win the state, or should C be eliminated (because they won't win any other states) and B should win the state? There's no obvious answer and it just invites more of a clusterfuck.

RCV is great for popular vote elections, which is what everything else is (mostly... there's... I think it's Mississippi governor?) and what the presidential election should be.

Popular vote first, RCV second.

Which is... never. At least for presidential elections. I can't speak for the marriage proposals.

The Republican party didn't appear out of nowhere in 1860 to win a presidential race. They were formed in 1854 and supplanted the Whig party entirely before the 1860 election. It was a majority party throughout the north before it won a presidential race — it wasn't a "third party."

Likewise, Democrats replaced the Democratic-Republican party in much the same way that republicans replaced the Whig party, and had been a major party from its very beginnings. Literally in their first election there were only two parties running!

There are only three other parties that have won the presidency: Federalists (there from the inception of the party system), Democratic-Republicans (ditto), and Whigs (major party years before first electoral win). There's been no "third party" that has ever won the US presidency. All three have the same story as democrats as starting off in an election with just two parties.

In this case Mozilla likely has staff and contributors working out of France. Chances are they make money from there too. Mozilla would either need to forfeit the above or comply if the law is implemented.

Enforcement from decent sized economies can often be as simple as having too much economic power to ignore, which often isn't that high of a threshold.