cbarrick
@cbarrick@lemmy.world
- Comment on X Payments delayed after Musk’s X weirdly withdrew application for NY license 2 weeks ago:
What could Twitter possibly offer to make me switch banks?
What could Twitter possibly offer to make me switch brokers?
What could Twitter possibly offer to make me switch from Venmo and PayPal?
Which Americans are not in a similar position?
X Payments is doomed to fail. He missed the boat. The market is already saturated, and they’ve lost all brand loyalty.
- Comment on HBO should use a different bumper for streaming. 1 month ago:
That’s a good idea. They could probably do something similar for the audio.
They’d have to code around the rest of the animation and audio effects, but the size of that code would certainly be smaller than the rendered audio and video.
- Comment on HBO should use a different bumper for streaming. 1 month ago:
Video codecs mostly work by tracking movement, predicting which pixels will change, and striving to only encode the pixels that actually change or change dramatically. In other words, compression looks for patterns.
All of that goes out the window when you try to compress static. There are no patterns. It simply can’t be compressed. This isn’t a matter of the algorithms not being good enough. It’s a fundamental limit of information theory.
Anything fancier amounts to embedding the intro into the compressor as a well-known pattern. And at that point, you’re better off just caching a 4K version of the intro as a standalone video file directly in the app.
- Comment on Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic 1 month ago:
What are you going on about? Have you ever ridden in one of these?
They do have these buttons…
- Comment on Don't let the media and the masses fool you, It is possible to visualize 4D 1 month ago:
I see. Yeah, obviously the world only has 3 spatial dimensions, so you can’t represent 4D data spatially.
My general point is that we have additional senses that we can use to represent additional dimensions. And that totally counts as “visualization”.
- Comment on Don't let the media and the masses fool you, It is possible to visualize 4D 1 month ago:
And it is not possible to “visualize 4D”
Sure it is.
- 3 spatial dimensions + time
- 3 spatial dimensions + 1 color dimension (grayscale)
- 2 spatial dimensions + 2 color dimensions
- etc
And that’s not even counting projection. All the time we interact with 3D data that’s projected to 2D (almost every video you’ve ever watched). There are similar ways to project 4D to 2D.
- Comment on All Windows users should immediately update their computers. An exploit rated 9.8/10 (CVE-2024-38063) compromises all devices running Windows with an IPv6 address. 2 months ago:
Where I work, everything is on IPv6. Both the infrastructure for the software services that we run, and our own internal corporate network.
My ISP also provides publicly routable IPv6 prefixes over DHCP. Any layman in my city with this ISP will be on IPv6 by default.
I also use IPv6 for my LAN.
Like, it’s just kind of the default in my neck of the woods…
- Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content 4 months ago:
They can’t even be punished.
robots.txtis just a convention, not a regulation. It’s totally not enforceable.The only legal framework we have is copyright law. Those who oppose this behavior will have to demonstrate copyright violation, and that may be difficult to do since the law hasn’t caught up.
- Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content 4 months ago:
This comment is copyrighted by me licensed to the public under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. If you intend to use this comment for commercial purposes, you must secure a commercial license from me, which will cost you a lot of money. If you violate the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 without securing an appropriate license, I will send my army of lawyers that I totally definitely have to defend my copyright against you in court.
- Comment on 5 months ago:
In addition to questions of end-of-life, Existentialism also deals with questions of purpose-of-life. Which can be mind racking even if you’re not afraid of death.
Still not super interesting questions to me though.
- Comment on 5 months ago:
I was gonna say this.
Existentialism is kinda boring IMO. But the philosophy of language, knowledge, and ethics are all super interesting.
- Comment on If you rearrange 2 letters in Queen Latifah's name, it becomes Queef Latinah 5 months ago:
Queen Latifah (Dana Elaine Owens) got her start as a rapper in the 1980s and began acting in the 1990s.
She is probably most known for her roles in Chicago, Hairspray, Bessie, and the Ice Age series.
These days, she stars on the CBS drama The Equalizer.
- Comment on What is the point of Xbox? 5 months ago:
Nintendo has shown they have no interest in making real console hardware
Ah yes, the no true Scotsman argument.
Nintendo doesn’t make hardware to compete with Sony and Microsoft, despite having the best selling console hardware all-time, among the current generation, and among several previous generations.
You don’t have to be a graphical powerhouse to compete with PlayStation and Xbox…
- Comment on Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why! | itsfoss.com 6 months ago:
If caching is properly configured, the cache (Cloudflare) will see thousands of requests, but the VPS should only see one request.
- Comment on Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why! | itsfoss.com 6 months ago:
Just put the site behind a cache, like Cloudflare, and set your cache control headers properly?
- Comment on Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’ 6 months ago:
Munich is cheaper for Google than literally any city in the US.
Software developer compensations are insanely high in the US, at least at these multinational corporations.
- Comment on Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’ 6 months ago:
Compared to software developer compensation in California, Germany is waaaay cheaper.
Heck, Munich is cheaper for Google than literally any of their US offices. You would make more by working for Google in Raleigh, North Carolina than in Munich.
The only European city that pays as well as the US is Zürich. The pay is really good there, about the same as Seattle.
- Comment on Ever notice mammals never seem to come in green? 6 months ago:
Damn. I never knew that these were mammals…
- Comment on The Quest to Beat Trackmania's Hardest Tower Map 6 months ago:
Wirtual makes great videos.
Glad to see him releasing more to his main channel.
- Comment on Mastodon Incorporates as a Non-Profit in the US 6 months ago:
Fair. That was overgeneralizing German bureaucracy to the entire EU.
But I think the point that tech companies in Europe rarely survive still stands.
- Comment on Mastodon Incorporates as a Non-Profit in the US 6 months ago:
The EU is terrible at maintaining good tech companies.
Like, they have some really important and innovative consumer protection regulations, but they are really shooting themselves in the foot with this one…
- Comment on A new NES emulator was briefly available on the Apple App Store 6 months ago:
Right. But there is no copyright infringement in an NES emulator, as long as no copyrighted games are distributed.
Emulation itself is not copyright infringement.
The recent issue with the Switch emulator was that they were distributing encryption keys along with the emulator. I don’t think that was a copyright issue (encryption keys are not expression, therefore not copyrightable) but probably a CFAA issue.
None of that applies to the NES.
- Comment on This is a Test 7 months ago:
#retribution
- Comment on There is no EU cookie banner law 7 months ago:
Even if they were such a thing as a cookie banner law, and there is none, companies in the USA would not have to comply in their country.
It would be only for Europe.
This is a pretty naive take.
If you operate in Europe, you must comply with GDPR. To selectively show a cookie banner, you have to be able to identify the (location of) the user.
It is totally reasonable for a company to operate in Europe but not wish to implement a full identity or location detection system. And so they just show the opt-in prompt to everyone.
And you can’t just implement that by using the browser’s location API, because European users can totally choose to not share their location with you using that API. But you still need to comply for those users.
There has been for years a proposal for a standard, designed in 2009 (!), still available in all the popular web browsers (except safari) that can make for a seamless experience: the DNT header.
The diversion about the DNT header is irrelevant.
Firstly, it is not codified in law that the DNT header is canonical. What if a user forgets to check the box? What should the default be? What kind of UX should be presented to users? This stuff needs to be spelled out in law for DNT to be a valid way to express opt-in.
Secondly, it’s not a robust per-site permission. Browsers only let you set it globally.
Thirdly, it’s actually bad for privacy. By making your headers different from the majority, you are easier to fingerprint. This is why Safari does not implement it.
Be mad at companies
I get the spirit of the article.
But the GDPR has pushed the problem of consent to the users, and they haven’t done anything to make this easy or convenient. Therefore cookie banners are inevitable. Like, you can’t blame companies for acting in their own self interest; that is entirely counter productive.
The EU needs to solve this.
First, go after the data brokerage industry so that it is no longer profitable to sell user data.
Second, regulate how websites can seek permission. Ideally by specifying a consent API and requiring browsers to implement a sane UX.
It will be much more productive to try to solve this with the handful of Browser vendors than trying to regulate each and every consent banner.
- Comment on VR Headsets Are Approaching the Eye’s Resolution Limits 7 months ago:
But nowhere close to the human eye’s dynamic range…
- Comment on Leaked SpaceX documents show company forbids employees to sell stock if it deems they've misbehaved 7 months ago:
It’s private equity. So presumably they have more discretion around buy backs than public stocks.
- Comment on Facebook and Instagram are currently down. 8 months ago:
Meta has SRE. Not just a Google thing, even if Google invented it.
- Comment on Facebook and Instagram are currently down. 8 months ago:
Pouring one out for the SREs at Meta
- Comment on Thanks to OpenAI, it's never been clearer that Sundar Pichai is Google's Steve Ballmer 8 months ago:
Gemini👏Gemini👏Gemini👏Gemini👏Gemini👏
- Comment on Here's a collection of playable through web browser games. 8 months ago:
The Internet Archive also has a collection of Flash games: archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_games
(OP posted a collection of arcade games preserved by the Internet Archive, played with an emulator in the browser.)