kevincox
@kevincox@lemmy.ml
https://kevincox.ca
- 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? 4 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 4 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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.
- Comment on This scammer pretending to be Greenpeace 7 months ago:
It honestly sounds more like someone convincing you that crypto is great than someone convincing you that Greenpeace is great.
- Comment on (In Python) Can you save an object that is in memory to disk and reload it at a later time? 8 months ago:
I don’t want the end executable to have to bundle these files and re-parse them each time it gets run.
No matter how you persist data you will need to re-parse it. The question is really just if the new format is more efficient to read than the old format. Some formats such as FlatBuffers and Cap'n Proto are designed to have very efficient loading processes.
(Well technically you could persist the process image to disk, but this tends to be much larger than serialized data would be and has issues such as defeating ASLR. This is very rarely done.)
Lots of people are talking about Pickle. But it isn’t particularly fast. That being side with Python you can’t expect much to start with.
- Comment on Which one is selected? The "Yes" option or the "No" option? 10 months ago:
Yeah. I like old school tabs that were clearly attached to the thing that they switched.
- Comment on Which one is selected? The "Yes" option or the "No" option? 10 months ago:
I don’t think it is that simple. I think that outline is about the “focus”. So if I press enter it will activate that tab, if I press tab it will move the focus to the “Entire Screen” tab.
The UX issue is that there are two concepts of focus in this UI. There is “which tab is active” and “what UI element will pressing enter activate”. These two are not sufficiently differentiated which leads to a confusing experience.
Or maybe there can just be no keyboard focus indicator by default, but that may be annoying for keyboard power users. But this is generally how it works on the web, you have to press tab once to move keyboard focus to the first interactive element.
- Comment on Which one is selected? The "Yes" option or the "No" option? 10 months ago:
The one that always gets me is GNOME’s screen sharing portal.
a screenshot of the screen sharing dialog.
There is this outline around the “Application Window” tab which makes it seem selected. I use this UI multiple times a week and I need to pause for a sec every single time. I always think “I want to share a window”, “oh it is already selected” then stare at the monitors for a while before I realize why I can’t understand what I am looking at.
- Comment on Which one is selected? The "Yes" option or the "No" option? 10 months ago:
The one that always gets me is GNOME’s screen sharing portal.
- Comment on Why do many search engines seem to ignore operators (e.g. exact phrases, term exclusions, OR, etc.)? Is there a good reason for having a dumb 1997-level search logic that I'm not seeing? 11 months ago:
There are a few reasons. Some of them are in the users’ interest. Lots of people phrase their search like a question. “How do I turn off the wifi on my blue windows 11 laptop?”
While ignoring stopwords like “the” and “a” has been common for a while there is lots of info here that the user probably doesn’t actually care about. “my” is probably not helping the search, “how” may not either. Also in this case “blue” is almost certainly irrelevant. So by allowing near matches search engines can get good articles even if they don’t contain all of the words.
Secondly search engines often allow stemming and synonym matching. This isn’t really ignoring words but can give the appearance of doing so. For example maybe “windows” gets stemmed to “window” and “laptop” is allowed to match with “notebook”. You may get an article that is talking about a window of opportunity and writing in notebooks and it seems like these words have been ignored. This is generally helpful also often the best result won’t have used the exact same words that you did in the query.
Of course then there are the more negative reasons.
- Someone decided that you can’t buy anything if your product search returns no results. So they decided that they will show the “closest matches” even if nothing is anywhere close. This is infuriating and I have stopped using many sites because of it.
- If you need to make more searches or view more pages you also see more ads.
- Comment on How did we switched from "Dinosaur are giant lizards" to "Dinosaur are giant birds" 1 year ago:
I don’t think that is quite accurate.
We discovered many more Pluto-or-larger sized things that were closer to the sun than Pluto. It became increasingly obvious that there was nothing special about Pluto and we either needed to add hundreds of planets or “demote” Pluto.
- Comment on Trying to buy right size bicycle wheel online 1 year ago:
I thought that was the problem at first too. But unless there are fields that are searchable but not visible at all to end users I have definitely found many cases where the term (and no stemmed version of it etc…) was in the listing.
- Comment on Trying to buy right size bicycle wheel online 1 year ago:
Not to mention that Amazon search is happy to ignore most of the words in your search. So you end up sorting through pages of results that don’t match. Absolutely infuriating and one of the reasons that Amazon is my last choice now. Someone decided that it was unacceptable to show “no matching results” and lost my business.
- Comment on Trying to buy right size bicycle wheel online 1 year ago:
What I do is take a capture of the page, then if they haggle on the refund I can clearly show that the product is not the one I ordered.
