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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • AI drives 48% increase in Google emissions

    That’s not even supported by the underlying study.

    Google’s emissions went up 48% between 2019 and 2023, but a lot of things changed in 2020 generally, especially in video chat and cloud collaboration, dramatically expanding demand for data centers for storage and processing. Even without AI, we could have expected data center electricity use to go up dramatically between 2019 and 2023.


  • The eyebrow raiser in the Slate’s base configuration is that it doesn’t come with any audio systems: no radio antenna/tuner, no speakers. It remains to be seen how upgradeable the base configuration is for audio, how involved of a task it will be to install speakers in the dash or doors, installing antennas (especially for AM, which are tricky for interference from EV systems), etc.

    I’d imagine that most people would choose to spend few thousand on that audio upgrade up to the bare minimum expectations one would have for a new vehicle, so that cuts into the affordability of the package.



  • 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).


  • That’s kinda always been how technology changes jobs, though, by slowly making the job one of supervising the technology. I’m no longer carving a piece of wood myself, but I’m running the CNC machine by making sure it’s doing things properly and has everything it needs to work properly. I’m not physically stabbing the needle through the fabric every time, myself, but I am guiding the sewing machine path on that fabric. I’m not feeding fuel into the oven to maintain a particular temperature, but I am relying on the thermocouple to turn the heating element on and off to maintain the assigned equilibrium that I’ll use to bake food.

    Many jobs are best done as a team effort between human and machine. Offloading the tedious tasks to the machine so that you can focus on the bigger picture is basically what technology is for. And as technology changes, we need to always be able to recalibrate which tasks are the tedious ones that machines do better, and which are the higher level decisions best left to humans.




  • 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.













  • 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.