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

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  • I don’t understand how the system in the US works at all. It seems like a very small amount of people with a very specific background vote on people. So there’s a ton of people getting elected all the time. But somehow the people who are elected make international news all the time? They seem very much not important and only represent a small part of the population.

    Am I missing something? Why are these clowns like Bobo The Clown and Magic The Gathering getting so much attention? Who cares what some random idiots do, if they don’t actually have that much power to begin with.












  • The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.

    Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.

    The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.

    And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.

    I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.


  • A Hyperloop would just be an inverted extension of this

    That “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. This is the real world we are talking about, you can’t just take another concept, invert it and “just” scale it up a few orders of magnitude. That’s not how any of this works.

    I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you are just a young person who is dreaming about cool sci-fi stuff. And not the other case where you are simply dumb, a huge troll or a combination of both.

    Please think about this stuff for real and then comment. Don’t parrot what idiots like Musk say. And if people tell you there’s huge physics issues, think about that instead of waving it away and say “it’s just engineering”.


  • I don’t think AR/VR will play a big role, I was talking about the acceptance and incorporation of digital systems in our every day lives. Corporations more willing to see digital meetings (even if it’s just chat or voice) as a viable alternative to physical meetings. The integration of e-mail in business processes and corporate communication. AR/VR isn’t needed at all, that’s just a gimmick to sell shit. But the techniques employed today have already reduced the need for people to be on a given location fast for work to such a low level, there really isn’t a need for any higher speed transport.

    A comment on Lemmy really isn’t the best place to start a discussion about all the advances needed to make something like a Hyperloop possible. Plus there’s already plenty of resources online that go into great detail about all the things that are totally impossible. I’d also like to point out the burden of proof is on the people claiming a Hyperloop can actually exist. If you think it can exist, please tell us how to build one, without going all hand-waivy and saying that’s just engineering. Because it really isn’t, as soon as you even start to contemplate this you run into huge issues.

    If you’d like to envision a fictional world where we have free energy in the form of nuclear fusion and are mining resources on the Moon and have working Hyperloops. Great! Go for it, write a book about it. I love reading sci-fi. But keep in mind it’s totally fictional.

    As a little aside: I’m not sure where the whole nuclear fusion = cheap (almost free) and clean energy thing comes from. A nuclear fusion energy facility wouldn’t be that different from a nuclear fission facility. They would be huge, very expensive to build and maintain, with plenty of safety concerns. They still need fuel, they still produce nuclear waste. You’d still need to jump through all the hoops and get all the permissions that make nuclear fission facilities so expensive. You still need a whole bunch of water and have to deal with the same pollution / environmental impact issues a fission plant has. It would be cleaner and better than what we can do with nuclear fission in principle, but in practice we’ve had 50 years of experience with nuclear fission and the first fusion plant that produces energy in a usable way is still decades out. So in reality the difference might not be that big in the short term. A big advantage may be the unwarranted fear people have towards nuclear fission, which prevents a lot of them being built over the past 40 years and even has some perfectly fine facilities shutdown (looking at you Germany). If nuclear fusion can brand itself in a different way, maybe the publics fears would subside enough to let those facilities actually be built. But at the end of the day, the power wouldn’t be that much cleaner than we can get out of nuclear fission plants and would certainly be more expensive than current nuclear power (which is pretty cheap, but not free by a long shot). There is a big advantage in the fact nuclear fusion plants wouldn’t have the proliferation issues nuclear fission has. But on the other hand we know only the richest of rich countries in the world would have access to nuclear fusion and they already have nuclear weapons. So in that regards it’s kind of a non issue.

    Again this points to me a blurring of lines between sci-fi and real life. I know in sci-fi small nuclear fusion plants are used as a literary device to explain to the reader why impossible things are possible and even practical, without needing to actually solve the problem or go into a big explanation that detracts from the main story. But let’s keep in mind sci-fi is fiction and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the real world.


  • This is very wrong. Hyperloops aren’t practically possible.

    It’s not true that if something is theoretically possible, it is somehow also practically possible given enough engineering effort.

    I know it’s easy for futurism fans and tech bros to say bruh it’s just engineering, but in reality we would have no real idea of how to build such a thing. You’d need advancements on so many levels and so many different fields, it’s not even in the ballpark of being possible right now. Engineering is putting existing techniques into practice, creating an optimized design and plans on how to build something. But engineers aren’t in the business of developing new techniques or materials. That’s up to the researchers and scientists to first figure out the basics, then develop it into something that could be useful, then create prototypes and then hand it over to the engineers to put it into practice.

    And even if they were possible to build, the amount of energy, effort and resources far out way any problem they aim to solve. Not only can’t you ever make money on them, the timelines are too long for any government to keep such a project going if by some weird miracle it would be started at all.

    Long story short: Hyperloops are a pie in the sky futurism sci fi concept which don’t even work in fictional scenarios. They can’t exist in the real world and even if they could, they shouldn’t.

    I’ve also never heard anybody explain what problem Hyperloops intend to solve. It’s a solution looking for a problem. We can move people around the world plenty fast enough. And except for recreational use, the need for people to physically be at some location fast has gone way down over the years due to the internet and increasing digitalization of our society. And I for one hope we can get rid of the recreational part in the future, the amount of pollution caused by the use of jets and cruise ships doesn’t way against the benefits of going a long way from home for a holiday imho. But seeing the pollution has increased in these sectors let’s me know I’m the minority there. And anybody who says freight knows nothing about logistics and should perhaps look into that before speaking any further.