• 14 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Most of the bots on Lemmy have been well meaning, but ultimately annoying.

    The issue is there isn’t really a lot of traffic on Lemmy. And from the people that are here a lot of them are lurkers, just consuming, maybe upvoting once in a while, but that’s it. This leads bots that reply to a lot of comments/posts to become a large part of the traffic and thus the experience for the users. There isn’t enough for the bots to get lost in the noise. This also leads to the user experiencing the feeling of only interacting with bots, instead of other people. Most people commenting are looking for people interaction and get annoyed when they think they have such an interaction only for it to be a bot.

    Lemmy is also very focused of an audience at the moment, which leads to bots not really being necessary. People here are usually very tech savvy and know how to do most of the things. A bot that explains how to do things people already know how to do comes across as unneeded.




  • It’s just an electric field man, we create those all the time. The interesting part is that we figured out how this field is created that causes the outflow of particles at the poles. That outflow has been known for a long time, the field has been theorized to exist for a long time (how else would the outflow occur?), they’ve now just confirmed it does in fact work the way they thought it worked.

    While this is cool science and very interesting for people that study for example geology, it isn’t changing the world or anything. Don’t let your head be turned by sensationalist media. This isn’t new physics, the field is very weak and it’s a normal EM field just like the ones we use every day all day.

    In principle it’s possible to launch something into space using an EM field. That’s called a rail gun and the military has prototypes that shoot projectiles at hypersonic speeds. However due to the forces and currents involved, the thing is massive, requires a whole lot of power and cooling and as a bonus self destructs after one or two shots. The acceleration also means that it’s great for shooting at stuff and destroying it, but not that useful for transport.

    A rocket on the other hand can be very small (the Electron rocket is only 14 meters and can put 300kg into LEO), easy to transport, easy to maintain and fuel and with a much smaller chance of self destructing. Thus we use rockets to put stuff into orbit.

    Beyond the solar system is totally impossible with our current tech. Voyager 1 and 2 might be considered interstellar probes, but they are tiny and took 50 years to get there. And they are going so slow, that while they have left our solar system, they aren’t really going anywhere. It will take them tens of thousands of years to even make it to the Oort cloud of our solar system, which by some metrics is still inside our solar system. We are currently struggling getting humans to the moon for a few days, so beyond the solar system is firmly in the realm of fiction.




  • Thorry84@feddit.nltopics@lemmy.worldHubris
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    2 days ago

    I still cringe every time a news story is posted about this. It always says the occupants are presumed dead, but no bodies have been recovered. Sometimes it even says no bodies have been recovered yet.

    To quote xkcd “You would just stop being biology and start being physics.”. There are no bodies, these people simply ceased existing. An implosion at that depth means everything inside gets pulverized.




  • No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn’t matter where in the video you use those seconds.

    So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.

    In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.

    And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it’s just a matter of making it harder. If it’s beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it’s good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.



  • Yeah I’m thinking of a system like this:

    A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn’t a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a “credit” with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.

    One way to get around this is to have something in the background “watch” the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it’s available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There’s ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.

    The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they’ll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn’t anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn’t care if a percentage of users doesn’t watch the ads, as long as most of them do.

    My point was, there’s ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.



  • I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.

    This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.

    Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads.

    Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.