Micro-SD cards almost don’t make sense to me. I’m not saying I don’t believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They’re the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that’s over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they’re 3mm thick, that’s a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.
I remember my parents talking about some thing or other in star trek that would be impossible because you’d need “terabytes of storage, and that’s probably not possible”. And now you can go buy 1 tb of storage and lose it in your couch cushions.
Poor Keanu Reaves gave up his childhood memories in Johnny Mnemonic to store something like 100GB of data in his brain. I don’t remember the Star Trek storage callout cause they were generally pretty good about just fabricating their own units for stuff (future sci-fi writers should take note, it’s always easier to make up units then deal with pedantic people on the internet).
How about the new 2Tb m.2 drives? Not only vastly larger yet still, transfer speeds are also insane. I once had a computer with a 20Mb hard drive, current drives transfer 600-1200mb per second.
Actually, that’s true! It’s not significant enough to affect the throughput directly, but when you transmit data on parallel leads, they have to be roughly the same length in order to keep the signals synchronised with the time frames when they are received. Otherwise part of the data might not arrive in time. The higher the throughput (and shorter the frames), the greater the leads’ lengths affect the timing. This is why you often see long squiggly leads on circuit boards - they extend the shorter leads to roughly the same lengths.
Eh, parallel hasn’t been used for a while already. SATA literally means “Serial ATA” and no longer uses parallel connections. I haven’t seen parlallel connectors since like a decade or so
I wasn’t talking about connectors, I was talking about circuits inside the devices. Even if something is as simple as a clock and a data signal travelling in parallel, timing is still an important factor.
Individual “bits” on a SD card are electron buckets that are either “full” (they have an electron) or not. 8 bits to a byte ~1 trillion bytes to a terabyte.
I really get the feeling that this question isn’t being asked seriously but here goes.
Floppy disks are an older removable storage format for a computer. The media inside the disks was flexible like a piece of paper, hence the term “floppy”. There were three different common sizes, there was an 8", a 5.25", and a 3.5". The 8" and 5.25" had the flexible media in a sort of heavy fabric and plastic sheath that was itself flexible, amd the 3.5" disks had a hard plastic cover on the outside, with a sliding metal door, and some people erroneously called these “hard disks”.
It gets better. The size of the SD card isn’t the storage area. Look carefully at the back of an SD card and you should see how a tiny square area in the middle is a bit ‘thicker’ than the rest; that’s the actual chip, that tiny bump!
SD cards make sense to me. Hard Drives… Now there is some spooky technology.
The reader head on a hard drive changes direction so fast, that it experiences accelerations like that of a bullet being fired, hundreds of times a second.
The “Fly height” or distance a reader floats above the platter is so tiny, that it would crash into a thumbprint.
The actual magnetic media that stores your data is a layer of iron a few atoms thick deposited on to a ceramic or glass platter, with a single atom layer of a protective metal coating (typically rhodium) in top of it.
Despite these incredible tolerances, they damn things are dirt cheap, and surprisingly reliable.
I actually think a lot is the opposite. If you think an event like this, attended by the likes of Bezos and Musk, is countercultural, or even “brings positivity into the world”, I have a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Of course most Burners have jobs, it’s a techbro’s dream. Plus, tickets are more expensive than they were in the old days, so real hippies can’t go. If people want to laugh at the suffering of rich people who cosplay as revolutionary, I’m generally ok with that. One big caveat: I’m very sorry someone died, and I don’t think mocking that’s cool, especially if we don’t know anything about them.
I’m sure billionaires have once enjoyed every activity you love, which if you were to be consistent, somehow taints all the things you enjoy. Very weird to think that way
An event isn’t an activity. And yes, if an event I loved turned into a meeting place for those people, I’d find a new event.
If Elon Musk and I both enjoyed cycling, for instance, fine. That doesn’t put me in the same space as him. Which is fundamentally different than going to a weeklong party he’s attending. Have your fun, just don’t pretend it’s revolutionary or creating a better world.
Thank you, seriously wasn’t trying to make fascist arguments, I promise. Just trying to make a comparison and why certain things can’t always be grouped together
You mean it has a several well developed left wing voting cities between the huge stretches of backwater redneck hellscapes? I’d love to know what makes Texas not southern…
I mean, it’s certainly disgusting white trash enough. It’s got a lot of similar characteristics. Although I think eating horse turds to celebrate a championship is pretty unique. So they’ve got that and the throwing batteries at Santa thing to separate themselves. Fuck Philly.
Okay, not my point. The point is that part of the human condition is that the more urban you are the more liberal you will be.
Someone in a rural environment does not see the problems that someone in an urban environment does which means the two groups have different priorities, look at New York. You see the same trend of blue in the cities and great big swaths of red everywhere else. Same for Washington State, same for California, really just pick a state and you’re going to see this trend.
It’s in no way a uniquely Southern thing. It’s just the fact that if your closest neighbor is 3 miles away and you know everyone in town, the scope of your problems are going to be pretty limited. That’s because you don’t know anyone who has the problems the city folk are complaining about, so the magnitude of the problems are lost on you.
Depends. Texas exists as a state in part because southern US farmers ran out of land to grow cotton in. A good chunk of Texas is just an extension of the south. Then again, a good chunk is an extension of Mexico. Tejanos don’t get the credit they are due for the formation of the Republic.
I actually like the recommendations. I usually only get content that's relevant to my interests, and I'm always finding new channels that are interesting and worth my sub.
Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing differently from everybody else, because I never see much of the spammy/irrelevant content everyone else seems to be getting. Or maybe I'm just easy to please.
I also have a good experience with it and am American. But I also pay for premium for my family and I wonder if it's not pushing contentious shit to maximize watch time because they already have my money?
I’m American. I use adblockers extensively and do not pay for premium. I’ve always enjoyed my recommendations and they have always been very relevant to my interests. I don’t get spammy content.
Same. I usually find something in the first 4 results that are relevant and interesting. Only thing I wish it did more is expand a bit. It heavily favors stuff related to what you’ve watched very recently. There’s some channels I love but completely forget about because I haven’t played them in a little where.
My recommendations are broken. It just repeates what I’d been watching and never nothing new. I don’t know why my algorithm is broken. I have gotten to the point of watching more movies and tv shows at this point.
I love long form comedy content but it does nothing but recommend 30 second clip content. It’s absurd. I just can’t like and interact with the videos I actually like enough.
Then tell it you don’t like those channels and thumbs down the short stuff you don’t want, and thumbs up the long stuff you do.
Remove the “shorts” section entirely (I know you can with vanced, forget about vanilla) if those are the 30 sec videos you mean. I hate them and ignore them entirely. Simple.
It’s really not hard to get YouTube to be a pretty damn good recommendation engine. You just have to give it some constraints.
I do a search for a specific comedian with the words "full set" in the search terms. I do the search outside of the YT app (e.g., using DDG) and watch it either on Firefox with UBO or I search for it in Newpipe. And then subscribe in Newpipe ( and in the regular YT app so they get a little engagement; I also go in and randomly like a few of their videos).
I don't know what kind of comedy you're into but here's a full Matteo Lane set (I think he's hilarious) - enjoy:
Do you actually tell it what you do and don’t like? If it keeps recommending a channel you don’t like, click the “no more from this channel,” or “don’t recommend things like this” or whatever those options are.
If you do that, as well as thumbs up/down, you get good recommendations. Really not very hard.
I have the opposite experience. YouTube is always pushing dumbass recommendations. I only go to YouTube when someone links to a video I'm interested in, say some neat demonstration of a old analog synthesizer, and there'll be a couple of slightly interesting suggestions on synths, I'll click on that and then the recommendations are like "Woah!!! Check out what happens when I stick a synth cable into my butt!!!" And it's not because I ever watch videos like that, in fact that shit is what makes me close the YouTube window and never go back until some other website links me directly to an actually good video again.
I only go to YouTube when someone links to a video I'm interested in
I wonder if this is part of the discrepancy, as I use YouTube pretty much all day long. I work from home and pretty much always put some YouTube videos on my TV while I'm working. Maybe YT just has a more robust dataset for my account to filter recommendations better.
"Woah!!! Check out what happens when I stick a synth cable into my butt!!!" And it's not because I ever watch videos like that
You don't gotta hide it. We're all friends here. ;)
I’m in the same boat. The recommendations don’t bother me too much, except when it recommends me videos I’ve seen in the recent or distant past. Also, when I watch one video from someone, then come to find out they’re part of some right wing culture and end up getting recommended the right wing rabbit hole videos for a few weeks.
Same. I like the recommended stuff, it actually matches my background noise preferences and has changed over time too and landed some shots in the dark.
It has one drawback: Repetition. I watch a dumb and savage 10s clip from an old cartoon, I get 20 clips recommended. And if one was particularly popular, it recommends that one 20 times. Thing is, it switches gears fast, specially if I tell it I’m not interested. It’s the only algorithm that just seems to GET the concept of “give me DIFFERENT trash”.
Same for me. Sure there’s crap in there sometimes and because I like some Atheist/Philosophy vontent YT kinda likes to shove Prager U and other religious channels down my throat from time to time. But hesides that, I’m usually quite happpy with my recommendations
NOT illegal, and not crazy shocking weird. But niche enough that when I find content I like, I do try to download it because finding it again on the typical streaming sources can sometimes be a crapshoot.
My current partner usually complains that my porn is not hentai or not weird enough for their taste. 🙈 I suppose they’d stop at the movies out of boredom.
The current work week, there is no need for it to be that long with the advances in technology. Capitalism, its a pyramid scheme that is unsustainable.
I am noticeably more efficient on 4 day weeks, it just doesn’t feel like a grind as much as the 5 day week. 5 day weeks I’ll get bored, stare at the clock, and just want to be over. 4 day weeks I actually feel rejuvenated after the weekend and I’m ready to come back. We really need to rethink that
People have lost sight of how much of our “free” time is actually just resting and recuperating in order to perform better during “work” time. Like, the 8 hours a day I sleep isn’t really my time. The commute to and from work isn’t my time. The basic maintenance and upkeep stuff, the unwinding from a stressful day, all that isn’t truly my time, it’s just preparing for and recovering from work time.
A two-day weekend makes this exceptionally clear. At least one of the days is usually spent catching up on all the stuff you couldn’t do because you were working. The second day is rushing to try and get any enjoyment out of it before you go back to work. There’s barely any actual agency or freedom, it’s all part of the cycle of producing value for someone else.
Even worse if you’re in a job without set schedules or weekends, like most service industry workers.
Every weekend feels like by the time I’m unwound from work then the weekend is almost over. Like tonight is Friday night, so I’m like “I need to do something to take advantage of it”, but I’m already zonked from work. Before you realize it you have Saturday which you’re right day is spent doing projects or things that need to happen because we get so little free time, and then maybe go out if you have energy, then Sunday all day is “Can’t do too much, we have work tomorrow.”
Imagine you’re running a very long relay race. Just after the race starts, members of the other team jump out of the bushes, beat up your runner and tie them up. This happens for several laps until someone decides that this is probably bad so they stop beating and restraining you. But the race doesn’t stop and the positions aren’t reset, but the other team is like 20 laps ahead and allowed to finish. Is that fair?
Reparations would theoretically allow your team to catch up but former slaves and their descendants have never been allowed that. What’s more, in the UK, former slave owners were paid for the inconvenience of no longer owning slaves (edit: up until 2015!!!) while the former slaves got to continue living as second-class citizens for a while.
Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn’t work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth, advanced infrastructure and old laws that specifically aim to disadvantage black people (whether they were abolished or still on the books the effects are still felt). Imagine your great-granddad was able to build up a fortune, how likely would it be that your family would still be rich? Imagine your great-granddad lost every cent, how likely would it be that your family would be still poor? Sure, it’s possible that situations drastically over time but that’s the exception and not the rule. There are reasons why things are the way they are.
I believe that reparations should not be any lump sum of money but in the form of education, investment opportunities, resources and infrastructure. That way all persons living in former slave countries can benefit and pass those benefits down to their descendants.
Edit: I believe that up to last year Barbados went after Richard Drax for reparations due to his family’s direct involvement in slavery in that country. I don’t know how successful that was, but I support it.
Your analogy and argument is very well organized so I wonder how you think universal basic income could mitigate the negative impacts of generational wealth/poverty? In my mind, it is part of a solution to many social issues but I’m still learning. I know there are arguments that capitalism will just buffer against any implementation but I’m still forming my opinions.
Thanks, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time since it was a big discussion topic in my circle for a while.
I haven’t given the same level of thought to universal basic income, but I guess it would be a start. What people really need is a way to not only survive but to build wealth and pass that wealth on to their descendants. Like I said in my previous comment, education, investment opportunities, infrastructure upgrades, etc. will go a long way towards that goal. In my mind, a universal income could be a part of that but not the whole solution. And yes capitalism will find a way to ruin it but we can always hope.
Another part in my mind would be estate taxes. If generational wealth wasn’t as impactful on our lives then UBI could serve a bigger purpose. If the playing field were more level for everyone, then hate or fear couldn’t errode it as easily. It’s not something we can see in a lifetime, but I hope that I can see us aiming at a useful target while I am still around.
I think UBI could help with the problem. It won’t be solved without other things though. If we pay for UBI by increase estate and inheritance taxes, that could go a long way. Basically make it so generational wealth slowly decreases over time. Obviously it’ll never be zero, because education, social connections, and things are also generational wealth, but it’d be an improvement to the way things are.
Basically, it’s not fair that someone is rich because their parents were rich and someone is poor because their parents were poor. The rich person should be less rich and the poor person should be less poor (on average).
Hell, this is the best and most comprehensive argument for the generational debt we as the global north and winners of colonialism owe the global south I’ve ever read.
I’ll definitely use this analogy whenever this issue comes up in my peer group.
Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn’t work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth
In addition to that, slavery was never ‘abolished’. Just go take a quick look into the mining or cocoa industry.
Don’t want to risk making the workplace unpleasant (twice)
Wrong race that would upset my parents (twice)
Lives too far away (twice)
Age gap (once)
Me being exposed to porn at a very young age (first time I was 3 or 4, and I grew up with unsupervised internet access) gave me a completely broken sexuality and I don’t want to bring other people into this mess
Feeling inadequate, ugly or uninteresting (I used to be very fat so you can imagine how I grew up)
Feeling that my interest in the other person is not genuine and that I only see her as a sexual object
In the end, I’m 32 and single, my friends are getting married and starting their own families and I have this dreadful feeling that I missed out on something important in life, I drown this feeling in work, video games and all sorts of projects, but when I’m alone and I can’t think of anything to do and I start thinking about the future, I want to kill myself.
It’s never too late, man. Get therapied up, and you got a whole life ahead of you. My grandmother didn’t remarry until 76, and she’s been married 16 years already.
Your parents aren’t going to date your partner, so their opinions on her race mean absolutely nothing. It’s like going to a restaurant with a friend and they tell you you can’t order salmon because they don’t like it. It’s not their food, so what they say doesn’t matter since they’re not eating it.
Feeling that my interest in the other person is not genuine and that I only see her as a sexual object
This felt a little too real to read. I know that feeling, and it’s not nice. I got no advice here, just letting you know you’re not alone in feeling it.
I have this dreadful feeling that I missed out on something important in life
The best part about life is that you get to define what’s important to you. Some people may find meaning in having a family, but it’s not the only objective way of finding meaning/purpose. You could find joy in creating things, exploring the world, even just working. There’s no secret formula or shortcut to finding it, and there’s definitely no hard rules about what it can be. I hope this helps you feel better.
Your parents aren’t going to date your partner, so their opinions on her race mean absolutely nothing
Thank you. I am Filipino and have experienced racism my entire life living in the US and growing up in the south. I wasn’t sure what to say but when I see comments like not dating someone of a specific race - obviously its enraging.
You’re completely right. Her race does not matter and parents get no say in who you date as an adult.
My 90-yo stepfather skyped me recently to introduce me to his new girlfriend. She’s 69, younger than me! It’s never too late. And you are really young, lol.
I’m 37 and am just now starting to have some of the best sex of my life. Still single, but feeling more and more confident in myself and seeing major changes in how I approach my own sexuality, what a relationship is, and what I would want out of one.
Therapy was paramount.
There is no shame in getting help for yourself. Get the help you need and take time doing it. Confidence adds to sexiness.
Cars = getting a job to pay for the gas, the taxes, the repairs, the taxes, the annual state inspection, the taxes, the (usually) annual registration fees, and the taxes!
(Although, you are still able to go places further away without having to get a ride from someone else. In that sense, you are still more free.)
Not sure that there is many ground types that turn onto proper, flat and wild road when hundreds of kilos of vehicules roll over two small tire-large paths. But who knows ? Maybe that’s just that my region soil that’s not car-friendly compared to other places.
It is now a minimum of, $1,000 in gas, $1,200 in insurance, and maintenance for a single year. At $2,200 a year, and I road a bus for 3 years at $28/mo or $336/year. I saved that $6,600 and purchased a car. Now I’m fucked with $2,200 year in expenses again. BUT I can drive to the beach if I wanna at a moments notice, so I guess I have that going for me.
The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.
If you want kids you should have them. You can let fear of the ifs keep you from doing that. I say this being generally opposed to children as well lol
Yeah, only recently have I been opposed to having children outside of the Alzheimer’s question. We could afford to have them, but it would truly be paycheck to paycheck which I wouldn’t be comfortable with. Plus there are plenty of humans already on this poor planet.
Also, my partner is very against having children. Which I understand, but it’s a different place to be in life when I always imagined having them. Now I’m trying to decide if I truly want to have them and the boat is sailing since I’m 36.
It’s interesting to have gone the distance without having kids. Very few of my friends who had them seemed to enjoy the experience in the moment, but those few that did really did. Also, a couple of them lost the Russian Roulette and had kids with significant issues that currently can’t be fixed; they are staring down a potential lifetime of dealing with mental health and/or addiction issues in adult children.
I’m fundamentally a risk-taker, but the returns have never seemed worth the commitment and possibility of wildly adverse outcomes, particularly living under the American social and economic models.
Yeah moving into 36 years old and I’ve never felt like I need to rush into having kids because that’s just what you do. I know I would be a good dad, but if it’s not a burning desire should it be really something to take on? I feel like that should be an innate quality when making the decision to have kids.
Hi, I am from a family with a lot of autoimmune conditions like Crohn’s, Ankylosing Spondylitis, MS, and Alzheimer’s. My father started to “lose it” in his late 50s, retiring a little early. He lived a long life until early 90s but the last ten years were hard on everyone. But my mother took care of him and we will tried to help.
I was 38 when our child was born. I was very concerned about passing on anything and he probably is going to have Crohn’s or IBD.
But here’s the thing. All of my family has done our best to live our best lives and yes it isn’t the best physical condition at times but we have loved, taken chances, l made mistakes, had laughs, etc. That’s worth it.
I’ve also known people who were ironman triathlon champs having heart attacks.
Only you can decide on kids. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here to tell you the chance that you or they might have Alzheimer’s doesn’t have to be the deciding factor.
Also, there are pilot studies in Alzheimer’s vaccines and other treatments.
One thing I don’t see mentioned here at all is the financial burden incurred by caring for a family member with serious problems like this. Obviously this is very dependent on the country in which you live but at least in the United States it is very possible to be buried in debt for caring for someone else. Personally, I will be trying to pay off medical bills from taking care of a family member in their final days probably for the rest of my life barring a miracle.
I’d rather not potentially saddle my children with the same if I can avoid it.
Good point. I’m Canadian and it didn’t really enter the picture. It would have if my father wasn’t able to stay at home. It was very difficult but wasn’t costly. Sending him to a long term care facility would have cost a small fortune.
If you decide to have kids and choose to have a co-parent, rather being a single parent, choose a co-parent who also wants kids. Having kids with someone who doesn’t want them is cursing the kids to be raised by someone who doesn’t want them, which can have significant emotional consequences.
I’d you want kids you should think carefully if you’re ready to raise them as better persons than you and to work for a better world that the one they received before you have them
Netflix, and when they said I’d have to pay for password sharing for my stepkids, because they use my account when they’re at their dad’s.
That was the last straw. I cracked the shits, bought a couple of ex-enterprise servers, and setup … something different. I then cancelled all streaming services (I got wind of the second Disney hike coming).
The cool thing is they now email me with cheap rejoin offers, telling me about all the cool shows I need to be aware of. ;)
How are your kids coping with, uh, something different? I imagine it’s a tad less convenient, even with your server. Also, I haven’t done something different since the rise of Netflix. Is the quality of something different generally higher with streaming services just putting their content on the internet themselves?
I admit, last time I tried something different years ago, it wasn’t that good, but thought I’d give it another go. I’d bought a lifetime pass way back, so had nothing to lose by trying.
The kids are coping fine - the apps for something different are all pretty rock-solid now - macOS, iOS, Android, Chromecast GTV. Plus I’m on a decent fibre internet connection, so even full high quality things work just fine when they’re not at home. Honestly, there’s not a lot of difference, except my catalogue of things is better than any single service.
Plus I take requests. :D Actually, I allow automated processing of requests, within certain limits.
It doesn’t compress video more on mobile devices, that’s all I need to know. When I connect an iPad or iPhone to the home cinema setup, the compression is much worse then on an old laptop.
Mine are handling oit perfectly fine - and we have the added difficulty of having German as mother tongue, and wanting to keep the English language content in the kids library low. Finding german language torrents is rather tricky.
I started again since a year or so. And decided to set up a home server (from an old pc) with the whole *arr suite this summer. Automation these days really is marvelous. You just tell it once which show you want to watch. It fetches you all the shows that are already out and also fetches you each new episode every week. And it’s all in good quality. And you can set automatic subtitles straight from the app’s interface.
That and it’s a tire-screeching exit from the abusive road we thought gaming was going down. Microtransactions, lootboxes etc. Baldur’s Gate 3 is refreshing from that perspective and, like me, I think many are amazed that it’s actually working.
I see nothing revolutionary about a game not having things like microtransactions and loot boxes. Those are mostly restricted to multiplayer games, and the industry never stopped making good single-player games without that bullshit.
Only played the first one which was pretty good. It’s super big on character customization as it has a million race/class combinations. A bit more extreme than the rest
kbin.life
Top