jqubed @ jqubed @lemmy.world

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6

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945

Joined

2 yr. ago

I’ve been thinking that ever since that dumb “submarine” sank at the Titanic. I don’t feel particularly sorry for the people who died (other than the kid who apparently didn’t want to be there in the first place), but the outright glee I saw a lot of people express online was surprising.

It seems like there was a largely unspoken agreement among the wealthiest in the West throughout the middle of the 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of the Depression, World War II, and the rise of communism, that they wouldn’t try to extract the absolute maximum of wealth from the workers and try to keep a stable, happy middle class and even lower class that had a relatively comfortable existence without feeling too at risk of losing everything. As you get to the end of that century and into this century, the wealthiest forgot why that policy existed, newcomers didn’t understand it, or they decided they wanted to see how much more extraction they could get away with thinking they’ll be able to reign in any unrest before it gets too bad; probably some combination of those and other factors. It’s a dangerous game to play, though, and it seems like explosive moments are closer than the wealthy powers realize.

Not that I think there’s any real organizing power behind the scenes, just that in the past a lot of people came to a collective understanding of a system that could bring a lot of financial stability to a lot of people.

An unnamed FBI official was quoted in the same report as saying that phone users "would benefit from considering using a cellphone that automatically receives timely operating system updates, responsibly managed encryption, and phishing-resistant" multifactor authentication for email accounts, social media, and collaboration tools.

(Emphasis added)

I assume by “responsibly managed encryption” they mean something that still has a backdoor, even though backdoors seem to be a significant part of the problem?

As an alumnus, this is very concerning.

I don’t think those of us on the Internet have enough info to truly jump in one way or another. The only area I would really be concerned about the age gap myself would be if the age gap is being used as a power imbalance to induce the younger one into dangerous behavior, like a sexual relationship, drugs, or taking advantage of them financially. Do you think anything like that is happening, or do you have the vibe that something like that could happen?

If it’s just that you can’t imagine hanging out with someone so young, you might want to consider that this guy is at a different point in life than you, even if he’s about the same age as you. If you’re around 40 but already have an 18-year-old kid in college. That would mean you became a father in your early 20s. It probably means you were married, perhaps fresh out of college. You’ve lived life as a parent for a couple decades now, in fact you could be just a few years away from becoming a grandparent. In contrast, if this guy’s been hustling to make money from a young age and an impoverished background, and is only just now starting college, he’s probably had to put a lot of those life experiences on hold. I’m guessing he doesn’t have kids himself since it’s pretty challenging to pay for college and med school of you also are paying to raise children. He might not even be married. I got married relatively later, in my mid-30s. As I got older I hung out with a wider age range, older and younger, but primarily single people. As my friends got married I saw them pretty rarely, not because I didn’t want to hang out with married people but mostly because married people tend to do things with other married people or just themselves. Now that I’m married I try to reach out to my single friends, but frankly it’s hard as a married parent to fit them in.

All that’s to say, just because you can’t imagine hanging out with someone that much younger than you, it doesn’t mean no one else can for completely innocent reasons. This guy might even see it as an almost mentor-like relationship, seeing this awkward kid who doesn’t get out much and helping him grow socially and find interests he enjoys. There are some areas where an older friend can be helpful in ways a parent simply can’t be.

Where my in-laws live in northern Quebec multiple companies offer driveway snow removal services where they send a large tractor. On one end is a large (expandable) blade that they use to pull the snow down to the street and on the other end is an auger they use to throw it up into the yard. They come multiple times to allow you to move cars or just keep up with ongoing snowfall.

I’ve never seen that anywhere else; is that a service in your area?

I keep them in a bag that’s tied off until I can wash them, but try to wash them as quickly as possible. The bag can also be a useful way to get the bananas to ripen faster if they’re too green.

I enjoyed it, although I’m not sure it really added much. I mainly played Mario Kart 7.

There’s some like that on here but they also clearly identify themselves as bots posting the RSS feed from Hacker News or other sites, which seems fine to me

I haven’t seen sports content being taken by bots to another Lemmy instance, but I have seen an instance that was trying to be the home for sports fans across a variety of sports, with pre-built communities for most North American pro teams and a lot of college sports, at least Power 5 conferences. Some of those teams had more active communities elsewhere, but I liked the general idea of having a home instance focused on one topic. In general it doesn’t seem like there are enough Lemmy users yet for a lot of these teams to build a vibrant, active community the way Reddit did. There’s been some better luck just with general leagues or sports communities.

Burn it down! Burning people. He says what we're all thinking.

Are you unable to get to a store for another 7 days or is there no longer room for chips in the budget?

I’m assuming the engine would need some modification to run propane? If not to the cylinders themselves, to the fuel supply? I assume propane would be largely similar to LNG vehicles? I really only see that on city buses and assumed there was a range reason for that.

Feels like this also needs to be about people abusing DMCA complaints

It’s not exactly showing correctly for me in Mlem

“I know you got other speakers, so I’m not gonna take a lot of time.”

Proceeds to take up nearly ten minutes of the show just fumbling around

Didn’t Netflix try a live event earlier this year that also couldn’t handle the number of viewers?

Broadcasting and the Internet work in fundamentally different ways. With Broadcasting a transmitter sends radio waves out into the world (and beyond). It does not care how many receivers there are; there could be millions or there could be none—literally broadcasting into the void. There is a bit of a disconnect between the transmitter and the receiver. The transmitter doesn’t need to know anything about the receiver; its transmission is ultimately independent of the receiver. The receiver can tune in or not, much like a boat raising its sails to catch a passing wind. One receiver generally will not impact another, just as many boats can sail on the same wind.

This is a really efficient way to get a lot of identical data to many people at once. Especially when we switched to digital television this became easily apparent. ATSC 1.0, the standard the US switched to about 15 years ago, was able to carry about 19.3 mbps of data over a normal TV channel. Because the system was designed in the 1990s this is MPEG-2 video (the same as used on DVDs), but it still works pretty well for 1080i or 720p. In fact as encoders improved we could usually fit two HD streams in there at 6-8 mbps that looked pretty decent and still have room for one or two more SD streams.

At the same time we were able to pretty significantly reduce the power of the transmitters. I think the last station I worked at was something like 125 kilowatts out of the transmitter in the analog days but with the switch to digital we were at 28 or 40 kilowatts (it’s been about a decade since I left television engineering). In the analog days a huge percentage of the power usage was to keep an adequate picture at the very fringes of our broadcast license, which effectively meant an increasingly crummy picture was pushed well beyond our license area (this was factored into how the system was designed). With digital, you either get enough of a signal to produce the picture or you don’t; there’s not really an in-between (other than a picture that keeps freezing up). This means a weaker signal far away from the transmitter that would produce a marginal signal in the analog days can produce a picture that looks just as good as it does much closer to the transmitter with a stronger signal.

All of this means that with just 19.3 mbps of data coming from the transmitter, potentially millions of people can see the same video in real-time. Satellite is basically the same thing except instead of an antenna on top of a tower that’s 3,000 feet tall and can cover an area maybe 150-200 miles in diameter, the antenna is placed 22,000 miles high and can cover an entire continent. Cable works pretty similar except instead of transmitting through the air, the coaxial cable carries the entire spectrum protected from outside interference. It pushes all the signals out of its “transmitter” (called the head end) down a cable and then splits that cable and amplifies the signal (and then splits and amplifies again and again and again) as needed until it reaches all the customers. There can be some complications with digital cable, but that’s the basic concept.

In contrast, the Internet very much designed for one-to-one communication. This works fine for everyday communication, but if you have something where a lot of people want to see the same thing, each of those people have to make their own connection to the server. Even if the video stream is only 5 mbps, if 100 different people want that same stream at the same time, you now need 500 mbps of bandwidth to handle all those connections. You also need a computer that can handle all those connections simultaneously. If you have thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people trying to stream the same video at once you can see how much of a problem this becomes. It’s one thing if the video is already recorded, like a movie, you can just distribute it to many servers in advance. But if it’s a live event that’s ultimately coming from one source you have to set up multiple servers to connect to the source and then forward that, perhaps to other servers that will forward to other servers that forward to other servers until you have enough servers and bandwidth for the end customers to connect to. If you have a million people trying to watch your 5 mbps video one might think you need 5 million mbps of bandwidth, but actually you need even more to connect all your servers back to the source, plus many servers. This is a hugely intensive usage of resources. Streaming companies will try to setup in advance for the number of viewers they expect, but if they guess too low they’ll have to scramble to increase capacity. I suspect this is more challenging for companies like Netflix that rarely do live video as opposed to companies that do it every day like YouTube or Twitch.

This isn’t even getting into complexities like TCP vs UDP for the protocol. At the end of the day, the way the Internet is designed each client needs to be sent their own personal stream of data. It just can’t compete with the efficiency of everybody sharing the same stream of data that comes from broadcasting. In that sense, for big, shared experiences, it’s kind of a shame that broadcasting is dwindling away. How many people do you know who still can get a TV signal from an antenna or cable/satellite?

You call that a pressed ham? Walt, hit the retaliate button!

They look very unhappy about it!

That’s not the submission deadline, that’s the priority date for this particular patent, basically when it was first filed. If people can find other published information describing what the patent covers that predates the filing it would help invalidate the patent.