RickRussell_CA @ RickRussell_CA @kbin.social

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59

Joined

2 yr. ago

held accountable

Ah ha ha. Thanks for that laugh.

That's a paddlin'

Context, sweet sweet salty context!

video streaming on mobile data is everywhere and ISPs responded by fattening up their networks with newer, better, faster tech, like 4g/5g

Yeah, but streaming from your phone to a streaming service, or whatever, hands over the job of distribution to the streaming service.

Streaming may be 'everywhere' but how many phones are streaming at any given moment? 0.01%? It's probably not even that many. Now how many are watching TikTok? How much more bandwidth would they need if the TikTok client was also serving videos to other TikTok clients?

Now, could you obfuscate the video with encryption, etc. to make it nearly impossible for cell phone companies to stop it? Probably. But, you'd need the cooperation of the Google Play & Apple stores to make that happen (on non-rooted devices), and it seems likely they would take the side of their cell provider partners.

wat

But that also makes it incredibly easy for communities on defederated servers to set up shop elsewhere.

And those communities may be the sole reason that the server was defederated in the first place.

I think a possible outcome is that the larger instances would have to put a stop to open creation of new communities, to prevent toxic groups from setting up shop and moving all their objectionable content and users into the space.

l’œuf!

Sure, but people generally aren't downloading torrents on cell phones. Apple devices make it very difficult (torrent clients are explicitly excluded on Apple Store for iOS), and while you can get torrent clients on the Google store, people aren't using them for live video as far as I know.

Cell phone TOS usually explicitly prohibit peer-to-peer sharing, and I got my so-called "unlimited data" Sprint service cancelled back in 2010 for exactly that.

As long as peer-to-peer on phones is rare, nobody will notice, but if somebody spun up a competitor to TikTok that depended on serving video FROM phones to the rest of the Internet, and it started to get significant traction, I think the cell phone companies would bring an end to it.

most of the time infamous for its abundance of “linux distros”

What the heck does that have to do with watching viral videos on cell phones? We're talking about a competitor to TikTok. With respect, Linux is like 3% of the desktop market, anything happening on Linux endpoints is noise to the big players.

I don't know if you mean Apple IIs, or the scene in the movie.

If you want to learn how computers work, the Apple II was, and arguably still is, a great platform. 8-bit programming is still fairly comprehensible to the novice, and the MIPS assembly language that is used in academic textbooks draws a direct lineage from the Motorola 6502 instruction set.

I learned basic 6502 programming on my Commodore 64 in the 80s, and I was shocked when I took a computer engineering course in 2010 that used MIPS assembly for the examples. It wasn't just easy to understand, it was the same in virtually every respect. I had no problem at all following the code.

using both Torrents and Instance data storage

IMO, anything based on peer-to-peer sharing is a nonstarter, not with the kind of video bandwidth demands that a TikTok or equivalent would put on cell phone networks. You might get it working on desktop, but I'd bet good money that the cell networks & Apple & Google would move to lock that s down ASAP.

I think you misread the previous commenter. I think their point was: the assertion that nobody will leave TikTok despite its abuses is very similar to the assertion that nobody will leave Twitter for Mastodon, or Reddit for Lemmy, etc despite their abuses.

Yet, it is happening. Whether it will be a large or lasting migration to open, less intrusive platforms remains to be seen, but the fact that we are talking about it here, and not on reddit, would imply that it's at least possible. The challenges and possibilities are similar.

But, I generally share the concern that the high cost of video storage and distribution is a major barrier to success.

Really look at that computer. The OP is in his fifties.

Apple II and its variants were used in schools well into the 90s. It was still selling pretty well even then. There's a great scene about it in the Fassbender Steve Jobs biopic.

I have back problems, high cholesterol, high blood pressure

As someone who waited way, way, way too long too lose weight, let me recommend that you review your situation with a doctor.

I've lost significant weight in my 50s and it's completely turned my health around. Cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, almost every indicator was dangerously of whack. I was on a boatload of medications, it was doing jack squat.

Now I get tested and everything is where it's supposed to be. I'm down to small maintenance doses for blood pressure and triglycerides, and I'm off the diabetes medical entirely.

I don't know if weight it a problem for you, but if it is: you can get it under control.

Exactly. Break something, and the fun stops for now, but TIME FOR AN UPGRADE!

He's doing the old racist two-step, acting like "white nationalist" means a patriot who happens to be white, but he perfectly well knows exactly what it means. "No, I've been misconstrued by the librul elites again!"

Sure man.

Part of it is looking back through rose-colored glasses. Sure, there was joy, but there was that time you stubbed your toe and you got so emotionally disregulated that you cried for an hour, or the time your parents put the wrong color socks on you and you screamed a bad word at them and refused to leave the house, or... etc.

You learned to regulate your emotions. That's mostly a good thing, but it also means that you learn to control yourself in the moment, and you don't tend to lose yourself in joy like you did as a child.

And that's OK. I enjoy things differently now, than I did then. Back then, when I played with a toy car, it gave me great joy but if something broke, or things didn't go my way, I also suffered uncontrollable anger and frustration. Today, when I take my TRX-4 trail truck out on the trails, I feel a different kind of joy that is mixed with intellectual understanding of the engineering of the machine, an appreciation of the beauty of the natural world that I didn't have as a child, etc. And if something breaks, it's not an emotional thing any more. I know I can fix it, I have the ability and the desire.

Heck, it's enjoyable to break things, take them apart, and fix them again. That certainly wasn't true when I was 6.

Enough is enough!

I almost became a meteorologist! 2 years of grad school, but decided to quit before I became the bitterest person on Earth.

That's why you start with so-called "small talk". It's rare that anybody really cares to talk about the weather, or notable local news, or the performance of the regional sports teams. But these subjects are safe. They give your conversation partners an opportunity to give an opinion and hint at their real interests (their families, their hobbies, etc) without broaching subjects that others might find exceptionally unpleasant or offensive.

So, don't "jump from one topic to another that has nothing to do with the previous". Give your conversation partners opportunities to change the subject, in a way that feels natural.