GamingChairModel
@GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 3 days ago:
What I’m saying is if YouTube is sharing $10 million of revenue with channel owners in a month that has 1,000,000,000 total views across YouTube, that’s a penny per view.
Then, if the next month the reconfigure the view counts to exclude certain bots or views under a particular number, you might see the overall view count drop from 1,000,000,000 to 500,000,000, while still hitting the same overall revenue. At that point, it’s $0.02 per view, so a channel that sees their view count drop in half may still see the same revenue despite the drop in view count.
If it’s a methodology change across all of YouTube, a channel that stays equally popular as a percentage of all views will see the revenue stay the same, even if the view counts drop (because every other channel is seeing their view counts drop, too).
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 1 week ago:
Isn’t that the formula? They take all of the revenue, set aside the percentage they’ve set for revenue share, and then divide that among all channels based on viewer counts. Dropping viewership for all channels proportionally means that the same amount of revenue will still be distributed to the channels in the previous ratios.
- Comment on Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs 1 week ago:
Most 4k streams are 8-20 Mbps. A UHD runs at 128 Mbps.
Bitrate is only one variable in overall perceived quality. There are all sorts of tricks that can significantly reduce file size (and thus bitrate of a stream) without a perceptible loss of quality. And somewhat counterintuitively, the compression tricks work a lot better on higher resolution source video, which is why each quadrupling in pixels (doubling height and width) doesn’t quadruple file size.
The codec matters (h.264 vs h.265/HEVC vs VP9 vs AV1), and so do the settings actually used to encode. Netflix famously is willing to spend a lot more computational power on encoding, because they have a relatively small number of videos and many, many users watching the same videos. In contrast, YouTube and Facebook don’t even bother re-encoding into a more efficient codec like AV1 until a video gets enough views that they think they can make up the cost of additional processing with the savings of lower bandwidth.
Video encoding is a very complex topic, and simple bitrate comparisons only barely scratch the surface in perceived quality.
- Comment on WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed 1 week ago:
Article is paywalled for me.
Does it describe the methodology of how they use the transmitter and receiver?
What specifically are they transmitting? Is it actually wifi signals within the 802.11 protocols, or is “wifi” just shorthand for emitting radio waves in the same spectrum bands as wifi?
- Comment on WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed 1 week ago:
Yeah I’m with you.
“Using this technological advancement to improve health care is good”
“Not in countries where health care is publicly run”
“What” is the correct response here.
- Comment on FTC chair Andrew Ferguson warns Google not to filter or suppress emails sent by Republicans over Gmail 2 weeks ago:
“The only difference between the two emails was the link,” the memo said. “ActBlue delivered. WinRed got flagged. That is not a coincidence.”
It could also be that winred is more often associated with spam because emails with winred links use a style more associated with other actual spam. Like if spammers use words like Trump a lot to try to scam victims, and a lot of those emails get flagged as spam, then the word Trump itself becomes more highly correlated with spam. And since the word Trump is highly associated with winred links, maybe winred gets caught up in the rule set/heuristics that associate Trump fundraisers with spam.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
You were talking about $1.34 in damages, which doesn’t sound like downtime or disruption.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
you will get prison for DDoS in USA
Who said anything about DDoS? I’m using ad blockers and saving/caching/archiving websites with a single computer, and not causing damage. I’m just using the website in a way the owner doesn’t like. That’s not a crime, nor should it be.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
Thats a crime yeah and if Alphabet co wants to sue you for $1.34 damages then they have that right
So yeah, I stand by my statement that anyone thinks this is a crime, or should be a crime, has a poor understanding of either the technology or the law. In this case, even mentioning Alphabet suing for damages means that you don’t know the difference between criminal law and civil law.
press charges for the criminal act of intentional disruption of services
That’s not a crime, and again reveals gaps in your knowledge on this topic.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 3 weeks ago:
No, but it is a starting point for passing some kind of sanity check. Someone who was making $81k in 1990 was making an exceedingly high salary in the general population, and computer-related professions weren’t exactly known for high salaries until maybe the 2000’s.
bls.gov/…/white-collar-pay-private-goods-producin… with government statistics showing that in March 1990, entry level programmers were making on average about $27k. Senior programmers were making about $34k. Systems analysts (which I understand to have primarily been mainframe programmers in 1990) were making low 30s at the entry level and high 60s at the most senior level. Going up the management track, only the fourth and highest level was making above $80k, and it seems to me that those are going to be high level executives.
So yeah, $81k is a very senior level in the 1990s tech industry, probably significantly less common than today’s $200k tech jobs.
- Comment on do what you love 3 weeks ago:
I was a dual major Electrical Engineering/Philosophy. The rigorous logic in some branches of philosophy was very helpful for programming principles. And the the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of mind has overlaps with and supplements modern AI theory pretty well.
I’m out of the tech world now but if I were hiring entry level software developers, I’d consider a philosophy degree to be a plus, at least for people who have the threshold competency in actual programming.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 3 weeks ago:
You have to expect that OP, who is well established in his field, to compare accordingly, not with average pay of 1990.
I’m talking about a number that is 1.4x the 95th percentile generally. It’d be weird to assume that programmers were getting paid that much more than doctors and lawyers and bankers.
According to this survey series, median IEEE members were making about $58k (which was also the average for 35-year-olds in the survey. Electrical engineering is a closely related discipline to programming.
So yeah, an $81k salary was really, really high in 1990. I suspect the original comment was thinking of the 90’s in general, and chose a salary from later in the decade while running the inflation numbers back to 1990, using the wrong conversion factor for inflation.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
I’m gonna continue to use ad blockers and yt-dlp, and if you think I’m a criminal for doing so, I’m gonna say you don’t understand either technology or criminal law.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 3 weeks ago:
Who is making $165k out of college?
Computer science and engineering grads at the top of their class at top schools who choose not to go to grad school. This thread claims to cite Department of Education data to show median salaries 3 years after graduation, and some of them are higher than $165k. Sure, that’s 3 years out, but it’s also median, so one would expect 75th or 90th percentile number to be higher.
Anecdotally, I know people from Stanford/MIT who did get their first jobs in the Bay Area for more than $150k more than 10 years ago, so it was definitely possible.
But this NYT article has stories about graduates from Purdue, Oregon State, and Georgetown which are good schools but also generally weren’t the schools producing many graduates landing in those $150k jobs as that very top tier. I would assume the kids graduating from Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley are still doing well. But the middle is getting left behind.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 3 weeks ago:
Were people getting paid $81k in 1990? This site shows that 95th percentile in 1990 was $58k, and doesn’t have more granular data than that above the 95th percentile. So someone making $81k was definitely a 5 percenter, maybe even a 2 percenter.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
to decide for what purpose it gets used for
Yeah, fuck everything about that. If I’m a site visitor I should be able to do what I want with the data you send me. If I bypass your ads, or use your words to write a newspaper article that you don’t like, tough shit. Publishing information is choosing not to control what happens to the information after it leaves your control.
Don’t like it? Make me sign an NDA. And even then, violating an NDA isn’t a crime, much less a felony punishable by years of prison time.
Interpreting the CFAA to cover scraping is absurd and draconian.
- Comment on Reddit is using AI to determine users beliefs, values, stances and more based on their activity (posts and comments) summarizing it to Subreddit Mods. 3 weeks ago:
What counts as an algorithm? Surely it can’t be the actual definition of algorithm.
Because in most forum software (even the older stuff that predates reddit or social media) if I just click on a username, that fetches from the database every comment that the user has ever made, usually sorted in reverse chronological order. That technically fits the definition of an algorithm, and presents that user’s authored content in a manner that correlates the comments with the same user, regardless of where it originally appeared (in specific threads).
So if it generates a webpage that shows the person once made a comment in a cooking subreddit that says “I’m a Muslim and I love the halal version” next to a comment posted to a college admissions subreddit that says “I graduated from Harvard in 2019” next to a comment posted to a gardening subreddit that says “I live in Berlin,” does reddit violate the GDPR by assembling this information all in one place?
- Comment on Reddit is using AI to determine users beliefs, values, stances and more based on their activity (posts and comments) summarizing it to Subreddit Mods. 3 weeks ago:
I don’t understand.
If someone writes a reddit post and says “I’m fasting for Ramadan,” can I not infer from that public post that the user is probably Muslim?
- Comment on Shit like this is why we need open source printers! 3 weeks ago:
To be precise, the “lossless” compression is still a compression algorithm. They just didn’t implement the steps that actually make the compression algorithm lossless.
From the write up:
JBIG2, the image format used in the affected PDFs, usually has lossless and lossy operation modes. Pattern Matching & Substitution„ (PM&S) is one of the standard operation modes for lossy JBIG2, and „Soft Pattern Matching“ (SPM) for lossless JBIG2 (Read here or read the papery by Paul Howard et al.1)). In the JBIG2 standard, the named techniques are called „Symbol Matching“.
PM&S works lossy, SPM lossless. Both operation modes have the basics in common: Images are cut into small segments, which are grouped by similarity. For every group only a representative segment is is saved that gets reused instead of other group members, which may cause character substitution. Different to PM&S, SPM corrects such errors by additionally saving difference images containing the differences of the reused symbols in comparison to the original image. This correction step seems to have been left out by Xerox.
- Comment on Shit like this is why we need open source printers! 3 weeks ago:
He’s written up his findings in English, for anyone who prefers English over German or text over video.
But basically the JBIG2 image compression algorithm used in those scanners looked for certain repeating patterns, and incorrectly compressed certain portions of the image into “close enough” blocks of pixels. Unfortunately, that meant that scanned number data wasn’t guaranteed to be accurate, even when the decoded output clearly looked like a number with no distortion or noise.
It’s worth the full read.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
They prosecuted and convicted a guy under the CFAA for figuring out the URL schema for an AT&T website designed to be accessed by the iPad when it first launched, and then just visiting that site by trying every URL in a script. And then his lawyer (the foremost expert on the CFAA) got his conviction overturned:
www.eff.org/cases/us-v-auernheimer
We have to maintain that fight, to make sure that the legal system doesn’t criminalize normal computer tinkering, like using scripts or even browser settings in ways that site owners don’t approve of.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
That doesn’t logically follow so no, that would not make an ad blocker unauthorized under the CFAA.
The CFAA also criminalizes “exceeding authorized access” in every place it criminalizes accessing without authorization. My position is that mere permission (in a colloquial sense, not necessarily technical IT permissions) isn’t enough to define authorization. Social expectations and even contractual restrictions shouldn’t be enough to define “authorization” in this criminal statute.
To purposefully circumvent that access would be considered unauthorized.
Even as a normal non-bot user who sees the cloudflare landing page because they’re on a VPN or happen to share an IP address with someone who was abusing the network? No, circumventing those gatekeeping functions is no different than circumventing a paywall on a newspaper website by deleting cookies or something. Or using a VPN or relay to get around rate limiting.
The idea of criminalizing scrapers or scripts would be a policy disaster.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
gaining unauthorized access to a computer system
And my point is that defining “unauthorized” to include visitors using unauthorized tools/methods to access a publicly visible resource would be a policy disaster.
If I put a banner on my site that says “by visiting my site you agree not to modify the scripts or ads displayed on the site,” does that make my visit with an ad blocker “unauthorized” under the CFAA? I think the answer should obviously be “no,” and that the way to define “authorization” is whether the website puts up some kind of login/authentication mechanism to block or allow specific users, not to put a simple request to the visiting public to please respect the rules of the site.
To me, a robots.txt is more like a friendly request to unauthenticated visitors than it is a technical implementation of some kind of authentication mechanism.
Scraping isn’t hacking. I agree with the Third Circuit and the EFF: If the website owner makes a resource available to visitors without authentication, then accessing those resources isn’t a crime, even if the website owner didn’t intend for site visitors to use that specific method.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 weeks ago:
Fuck that. I don’t need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn’t want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an “inspect element” tag.
- Comment on Allie, an AI chess bot, learns to play like humans from 91 million Lichess games 3 weeks ago:
How does this compare to Maia, which is a similar project for an engine that’s supposed to play more human like?
- Comment on The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) 5 weeks ago:
The value a thing creates is only part of whether the investment into it is worth it.
It’s entirely possible that all of the money that is going into the AI bubble will create value that will ultimately benefit someone else, and that those who initially invested in it will have nothing to show for it.
In the late 90’s, U.S. regulatory reform around telecom prepared everyone for an explosion of investment in hard infrastructure assets around telecommunications: cell phones were starting to become a thing, consumer internet held a ton of promise. So telecom companies started digging trenches and laying fiber, at enormous expense to themselves. Most ended up in bankruptcy, and the actual assets eventually became owned by those who later bought those assets for pennies on the dollar, in bankruptcy auctions.
Some companies owned fiber routes that they didn’t even bother using, and in the early 2000’s there was a shitload of dark fiber scattered throughout the United States. Eventually the bandwidth needs of near universal broadband gave that old fiber some use. But the companies that built it had already collapsed.
If today’s AI companies can’t actually turn a profit, they’re going to be forced to sell off their expensive data at some point. Maybe someone else can make money with it. But the life cycle of this tech is much shorter than the telecom infrastructure I was describing earlier, so a stale LLM might very well become worthless within years. Or it’s only a stepping stone towards a distilled model that costs a fraction to run.
So as an investment case, I’m not seeing a compelling case for investing in AI today. Even if you agree that it will provide value, it doesn’t make sense to invest $10 to get $1 of value.
- Comment on Startup Claims Its Fusion Reactor Concept Can Turn Cheap Mercury Into Gold 1 month ago:
The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day.
But how much can be caught?
From the sun, the angular diameter of the earth (12,756 km wide, 149,000,000 km away) is something like 0.004905 degrees (or 0.294 arc minutes or 17.66 arc seconds).
Imagining a circle the size of earth, at the distance of the earth, catching all of the solar wind, we’re still looking at something that is about 127.8 x 10^6 square kilometers. A sphere the size of the Earth’s average distance to the sun would be about 279.0 x 10^15 square km in total surface area. So oversimplifying with an assumption that the solar wind is uniformly distributed, an earth-sized solar wind catcher would only get about 4.58 x 10^−10 of the solar wind.
Taking your 130 billion tons number, that means this earth-sized solar wind catcher could catch about 59.5 tons per day of matter, almost all of which is hydrogen and helium, and where the heavier elements still tend to be lower on the periodic table. Even if we could theoretically use all of it, would that truly be enough to meet humanity’s mining needs?
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 1 month ago:
It’s like the relationship between mathematics and accounting. Sure, almost everything accountants do involve math in some way, but it’s relatively simple math that is a tiny subset of what all of mathematics is about, and the actual study of math doesn’t really touch on the principles of accounting.
Computer science is a theoretical discipline that can be studied without computers. It’s about complexity theory and algorithms and data structures and the mathematical/logical foundations of computing. Actual practical programming work doesn’t really touch on that, although many people are aware of those concepts and might keep them in the back of their mind while coding.
- Comment on What is piefed? 1 month ago:
People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
I think any kind of reputation score should be community specific. There are users whose commenting style fits one community but not another, and their overall reputation should be understood in the context of which communities actually like them rather than some kind of global average.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxi Stops Mid-Intersection After Running a Red Light… The Influencer Onboard Calls It “Impressive” 1 month ago:
Gears have powerbands, CVTs are always in the sweet spot.
Isn’t that basically true of automatics with 8+ gears, too?