kevincox
@kevincox@lemmy.ml
https://kevincox.ca
- Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada 2 days ago:
Only rail. Toronto has an excellent bus network that is not pictured here.
- Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada 2 days ago:
There is not even enough money for proper maintenance let alone new construction! Of course new construction looks good politically so it will get separate budgets while the existing infrastructure slowly crumbles. Look at the “reduced speed zones” that have lasted for years because the rails can’t properly be maintained.
- Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada 2 days ago:
But the 1 line did get longer. So total capacity is probably higher overall. That being said the 1 line is already insufficient for the capacity needed downtown so I’m not sure making it longer helps that much. Maybe in a decade when the Ontario Line opens it will get the long needed relief.
- Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada 2 days ago:
It’s a disaster until you compare it to most other North American cities. Like what is better? NYC and Montreal? I’m sure there are a few other cities that I can’t think of.
But its true that it has been neglected for decades. Thankfully that has changed a bit recently with 2 new lines being in construction. However the maintenance budget is continually insufficient to keep everything in good repair. Only new projects make your government look good I guess. (But we need both new projects and maintenance)
- Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada 2 days ago:
I live in Toronto and was in the Chengdu metro a month ago. I didn’t do a close inspection but it was fine. Honestly probably better than Toronto. The trains had AC and the terminals that I went to were not crumbling.
I think this meme is pretty reasonable. Toronto had a great start with subways, and still has huge ridership. They also have an excellent bus network. But the funding is very tight and the city has long prioritized inefficient personal vehicles. But it is a good point that you are comparing cities that an order of magnitude apart in population. Toronto also has 2 train lines (one light rail that should be opening within a year, and one subway that is probably 10 years away from opening) which are great to see, finally showing some investment in public transit. But the rate is nowhere near what the political will in China allows and also has a huge focus on new projects rather than keeping maintenance of existing infrastructure.
In many ways this is a wakeup call. If we wanted this level of infrastructure we could have it. But we need to actually commit rather than continuously slashing budgets so that we can let the rich pay less taxes and continue to subsidize car ownership.
- Comment on What makes a fart dry vs wet? 5 days ago:
This is one of those things that must have been an absolute shit thing to discover the first time. Sure now we are ready and can prepare. But having to diagnose and improvise a solution would not be pleasant.
- Comment on What is this shit? I have to be signed in to watch any video now? 6 days ago:
This helps protect our community.
I hate when companies lie to my face. Watching a video anonymously is not harming anyone except maybe a fraction of a cent of cost to Google. If I was posting a comment or something maybe, but oh, you already need to be logged in for that.
- Comment on What are the privacy risks of exposing IP adresses? 1 week ago:
Does someone connecting to this have an IP highly correlated with your non-open network? Because if so then yes, that is fairly concerning.
- Comment on Belkin is killing off parts of the Wemo Line 1 week ago:
EV is negative. Difficult decision.
- Comment on Belkin is killing off parts of the Wemo Line 1 week ago:
Yeah, if you can reflash it you are completely in control. This is the optimal state.
- Comment on What are the privacy risks of exposing IP adresses? 1 week ago:
I think this is a little confused. Unless your WiFi is open someone seeing your network can’t find out what the WAN IP is.
And getting your ip can connect the people directly to your box
“Connect” is a strong word here. Yeah, they can send traffic at it. But that shouldn’t do anything.
A trace route command to this IP could return intermediate equipment of your isp, helping to pinpoint your town or even your street.
This is the most reasonable concern. Depending on your ISP and location the IP itself or packet tracing you can get a pretty good idea of the user’s location.
- Comment on What is everyone's favoured domain name provider these days? 3 months ago:
This is what I moved to after Gandi started becoming shit and I have nothing bad to say about them yet.
- Comment on Can I still consider myself a “young woman” after I turn 24? I turn 24 in March (next month). 4 months ago:
You can consider yourself whatever you want for however long you want.
If you feel young and people thing you are weird for saying so that is their problem. Young is a feeling not a number.
- Comment on What can I actually do with 64 GB or RAM? 5 months ago:
IIUC it isn’t censored per se. Not like the web service that will retract a “bad” response. But the training data is heavily biased. And there may be some explicit training towards refusing answers to those questions.
- Comment on New Youtube Web Update Requires HTML5 Canvas 5 months ago:
It would be wasteful to upload the full size image only to throw most of it away. JPEG compression is very cheap, especially at low resolutions (I assume that image search uses a pretty low-resolution source image). Doing it this way is actually what I would do for best user experience. (Not saying that they aren’t doing other malicious things, but doing the resizing on the client is actually a good idea)
- Comment on Not enough people buying Premium, eh? 6 months ago:
the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.
But they post resolutions, which are arguably less interesting. The “general public” has been taught to use resolution as a proxy of quality. For TVs and other screens this is mostly true, but for video it isn’t the best metric (lossless video aside).
Bitrate is probably a better metric but even then it isn’t great. Different codes and encoding settings can result in much better quality at the same bitrate. But I think in most cases it correlates better with quality than resolution does.
The ideal metric would probably be some sort of actual quality metric, but none of these are perfect either. Maybe we should just go back to Low/Med/High for quality descriptions.
- Comment on Why is daisychaining multiple extension cords considered unsafe, even if only done to the length of a standard cable? 6 months ago:
The circuit power doesn’t matter for the example. I was just picking easy numbers. You can have the same problem as long as the rating of the extension cord is less than the circuit breaker. (And as you pointed that out this is a very common case due to the frequently low rating of extension cords.)
- Comment on Not enough people buying Premium, eh? 6 months ago:
100% vibes based. I’ve been noticing very atrocious artifacts. It could also be things like different encoding settings that are producing a worse result. Or I could be making the whole thing up and confirmed it in my mind for 1080p when the launched the higher bitrate and then was primed to see the higher resolutions drop in quality after.
- Comment on Why is daisychaining multiple extension cords considered unsafe, even if only done to the length of a standard cable? 6 months ago:
Yeah, there are two components here
- Adding extra length.
- Adding more outlets.
2 is the main problem, but you need a little of 1 to have it fail in an unsafe way (ie. not just tripping the circuit breaker).
If you just add a lot of extra outlets and plug lots of stuff in then you will simply trip the circuit breaker. (Assuming that everything is properly set up according to code.) In order to create a problem you need some extra wiring that is rated for less load than the wall wiring. (Now in practice every splitter has some amount of wiring, so these can be the same device, but most power bars are rated to be “fully used” or have a fuse internally). So the problem looks something like this:
- Have a 20A wall circuit.
- Plug a 10A extension cord into it.
- Plug a power bar or other splitter into the extension cord.
- Put enough devices into the splitter to generate 15A of current.
Now you are overloading the extension cord and risking fire.
- Comment on Why is daisychaining multiple extension cords considered unsafe, even if only done to the length of a standard cable? 6 months ago:
Yes, you will have double heat output due to twice the resistance which causes twice the voltage drop and more or less the same current. But this heat output is spread across twice as much wire, so unless the extension cables are coiled together on the ground each will heat up the same amount as a single one would.
- Comment on Why is daisychaining multiple extension cords considered unsafe, even if only done to the length of a standard cable? 6 months ago:
To clarify a bit, the benefit of the UK system isn’t the end device having a fuse, but the cable itself having a fuse.
In the US the setup would be something like
- Wall has 20A wiring.
- Electrical panel has 20A fuse to avoid the wire in the wall from overheating.
- Extension cord is designed for 10A
- You plug in 2 10A devices to the extension cord.
- The wall wiring is fine, it can take 20A.
- The circuit breaker doesn’t trip as it is also 20A.
- The extension cord overheats and starts a fire.
In the UK the 10A extension cord will have its own 10A fuse in the plug. So when you turn on the two 10A devices the fuse in the extension cord will blow and prevent the extension cord from overheating.
- Comment on Why is daisychaining multiple extension cords considered unsafe, even if only done to the length of a standard cable? 6 months ago:
But unless coiled up on the ground the longer cable also has more area to dissipate heat, so the longer cable doesn’t change anything here. The heat output will be consistent for any section of the cable no matter how much more cable there is on easier side of it.
The only think that the different resistance would affect is the voltage drop to the end device. But voltage drop varies wildly so you are unlikely to have a meaningful difference caused by a few extension cords (unless maybe you are already a bad case like an apartment building to start).
- Comment on Not enough people buying Premium, eh? 6 months ago:
The worst part is that this doesn’t seem to be some sort of better quality. All of the other qualities seem to have tanked in the past year, so at best this just restores the previous 1080p bitrate.
- Comment on Is it worth investing if I can only contribute $50 a month? 6 months ago:
The others have made great points about how any amount adds up. Especially with compounding.
But the most important reason me just be making it a habit. If you are saving $50/month you have a place to put your savings and an investment strategy for that money. The next time you get a pay raise or get rid of some recurring spend it will be natural to start saving $60/month, then $100 and more and more. It is much easier to improve an existing habit than starting a new one. So as soon as you have the chance start that got habit.
- Comment on 1080p viewing experience 7 months ago:
I wouldn’t call a nail hard to use because I don’t have a hammer. Yes, you need the right hardware, but there is no difference in the difficulty. But I understand what you are trying to say, just wanted to clarify that it wasn’t hard, just not widespread yet.
- Comment on 1080p viewing experience 7 months ago:
which is hard to decode using hardware acceleration
This is a little misleading. There is nothing fundamental about AV1 that makes it hard to decode, support is just not widespread yet (mostly because it is a relatively new codec).
- Comment on 1080p viewing experience 7 months ago:
Just to be clear it is probably a good thing that YouTube re-encodes all videos. Videos are a highly complex format and decoders are prone to security vulnerabilities. By transcoding everything (in a controlled sandbox) YouTube takes most of this risk on and makes it highly unlikely that the resulting video that they serve to the general public is able to exploit any bugs in decoders.
Plus YouTube serves videos in a variety of formats and resolutions (and now different bitrates within a resolution). So even if they did try to preserve the original encoding where possible you wouldn’t get it most of the time because there is a better match for your device.
- Comment on 1080p viewing experience 7 months ago:
From my experience it doesn’t matter if there is an “Enhanced Bitrate” option or not. My assumption is that around the time that they added this option they dropped the regular 1080p bitrate for all videos. However they likely didn’t eagerly re-encode old videos. So old videos still look OK for “1080p” but newer videos look trash whether or not the “1080p Enhanced Bitrate” option is available.
- Comment on 1080p viewing experience 7 months ago:
It may be worth right-clicking the video and choosing “Stats for Nerds” this will show you the video codec being used. For me 1080p is typically VP9 while 4k is usually AV1. Since AV1 is a newer codec it is quite likely that you don’t have hardware decoding support.
- Comment on 1080p viewing experience 7 months ago:
I’m pretty sure that YouTube has been compressing videos harder in general. This loosely correlates with their release of the “1080p Enhanced Bitrate” option. But even 4k videos seem to have gotten worse to my eyes.
Watching a higher resolution is definitely a valid strategy. Optimal video compression is very complicated and while compressing at the native resolution is more efficient you can only go so far with less bits. Since the higher resolution versions have higher bitrates they just fundamentally have more data available and will give an overall better picture. If you are worried about possible fuzziness you can try using 4k rather than 1440p as it is a clean doubling of 1080p so you won’t lose any crisp edges.