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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • First thing that comes to mind is Lamborghini which would not exist today if it were not acquired. It was on the verge of bankruptcy and ended up getting passed around a few times before being acquired by Volkswagen/Audi. I think the general consensus is that access to Audi’s technology brought some sophistication in the form of AWD, traction and stability control, and a bump in quality and reliability. I know they only make obscenely expensive cars that few people ever get to enjoy, but they were able to maintain a headquarters and factory in Italy with a few thousand employees which would have definitely shut down without the acquisition.

    Edit: On the topic of cars, another example would be Red Bull Racing which originated as a small F1 team started in the 90s. It was bought by Ford and rebranded to Jaguar F1. Ford didn’t have much success with it, so they sold the whole team to Red Bull for $1. Red Bull went on to dominate from 2010 to 2013 and again from 2021 to present day.


  • With a neural network, you wouldn’t be able to mathematically prove that the signal is perfectly recovered 100% of the time for all possible inputs. That is the case with PNG and FLAC. If you’re just listening to music and need a good compression ratio, then sure, it won’t be a big deal if a couple of bits are wrong. But that’s also why we have lossy compression. If the goal is to make signal degradation imperceptible to a human, then you could get a much better compression ratio using neural networks. If it’s truly critical that the signal isn’t corrupted, it would probably be better to just use the original method.




  • The original thread was started by Neil deGrasse Tyson saying that Maverick would be “splattered” during ejection at mach 10. Scott Kelly responds saying he went on a space walk from the ISS at mach 25. The gardener is technically right that mach numbers don’t really apply in a near vacuum. It’s also kind of off topic because we know the Darkstar is in the atmosphere and not in space, and therefore there is no “re-entry”. But Scott is right that the real issue would be heat and not getting splattered.

    I also want to point out that we don’t actually see Maverick eject, and it’s likely that he would have been ejected in a capsule (like in several real aircraft like the B-58) rather than just thrown out of the plane in his pressure suit as Scott suggests.







  • Damn, i can’t believe how many people immediately jump to the astroturfing accusation instead of discussing the points you raised. I think we can all agree that meta is evil and we shouldn’t trust them. The solution should be to build a network that’s resilient to bad actors rather than thinking we can just block all the bad actors. As long as there are independent fediverse servers supported by their communities, it’s hard to see how meta could totally take over the entire fediverse.

    My bigger concern is that meta could gain influence over the activitypub standard, but that’s not a battle we can win by simply blocking meta servers.


  • I agree, threads connecting to the fediverse seems like it would be a positive step for everyone. I’m not sure how meta could kill the fediverse as long as independent servers exist. If meta is flooding the fediverse with spam or other influencer bs, then we can all just defederate.

    I have an alternate theory that threads is never planning to support the fediverse. They are trying to attract users who are looking for a Twitter alternative, and right now the most compelling option is mastodon. But if threads announces activitypub support, then some would-be mastodon users might join threads instead, thinking it will all be connected. But if threads ends up winning all those users anyways, then they’ll just say fuck it, we don’t need activitypub.



  • It’s strange, but the 3 day poop challenge meme that swept through lemmy the other day reminded me of what Reddit used to be. It felt like an actual community where people were actually interacting, and sometimes bizarre posts turned into legends. I hadn’t noticed the slow transition to just endless bot reposts. With all the spez drama, i decided Reddit was dead to me, and that was sad to acknowledge the sudden end of an era like that. But lemmy showed me that the things that made me love Reddit have been gone for a long time, and I feel more at home here.