kevincox
@kevincox@lemmy.ml
https://kevincox.ca
- Comment on Is it worth investing if I can only contribute $50 a month? 1 day 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 5 weeks 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? 1 month 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? 3 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? 3 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? 3 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? 3 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? 5 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" 5 months 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 5 months 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 5 months 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 5 months 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.
- Comment on Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms • The Register 6 months ago:
Most credit card issuers don’t issue credit cards to random apps by solo developers.
- Comment on Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms • The Register 6 months ago:
- I can usually pull out my phone faster than taking a card out of my wallet.
- Phone-based cards typically have significantly higher limits than physical cards. (I can tap hundreds of dollars with my phone, only about $100 on my card.)
- The phone needs to be unlocked which is safer than the card which just needs to be tapped with no other authentication.
- One less thing to carry around.
- Comment on Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms • The Register 6 months ago:
Because to implement this you need to negotiate with individual credit card issuers. Basically how this works is that your phone is being issued a virtual card with the keys locked inside the phone’s HSM. Then it can be used to make NFC payments just like any physical card. So you need 1. contracts with many card providers, 2. card issuance processes with these providers 3. huge amounts of compliance bureaucracy. At the end of the day it isn’t really worth it unless you are a huge company and expect to have tons of users or see it as an essential feature of your phone OS.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
It’s not “inherently insecure” at least not to that degree. (Once could argue that lack of E2EE is insecure.) If you stand up an unrelated instance you shouldn’t be able to access private messages that don’t relate to an account on your instance. So only bugs in your instance, or your conversation partner’s instance, will be able to leak those messages.
- Comment on Lemmy Mods: How do you keep track of the reports you receive? 6 months ago:
It would be great to have an RSS feed of reports in a community. This way it can be piped into external tools and notification mechanisms.
- Comment on Why is currency so essential? 7 months ago:
A lot of cultures ended up with effective currencies. Whether that was grains of rice or chickens there ended up a small number of items that had a well understood value and ended up being the default item of trade, not because the receiver needed those items but because they were known to be easily exchanged with others.
- Comment on How does harddrive failure work when there's multiple partitions? 7 months ago:
Yup. I would try to stop using it if at all possible. As soon as you can dump a full disk image to some other storage. Tools like ddrescue can be useful as they will try to re-read failed sectors to get a more complete image.
Once you have the data (or at least as much is available) to a reliable medium then you can start sorting through it and discarding or saving individual bits.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 7 months ago:
Are you a lawyer?
I am not. Are you?
Including a link to a Creative Commons license in a comment footer will not do that.
It is when you give it a different name which doesn’t reflect the actual behaviour of the license.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 7 months ago:
Ok. So you should probably frame your license like that. Instead of saying “Anti Commercial-AI license” say “Pro Non-commercial-AI license”.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 7 months ago:
No, it is more. You aren’t restricting anything, it is just a superset of uses. If you want to explicitly license your comments for wider use that is fine, but don’t misrepresent it as “Anti Commercial-AI”. Just frame it as licensed for non-commercial use.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 7 months ago:
Pasting a copypasta is probably actually copyright infringement. Same with memes.
The thing about copyright is that it really only matters if you choose to enforce your protection. Presumably the owners of the copypasta don’t care enough and the owners of the memes think it brings more popularity to the move than any licensing costs they could possibly gain from selling the stills.
(Some memes may be considered transformative enough to be fair use, but some of them almost certainly are not.)
Video game streaming is a clear example of this. Almost certainly live-streaming or doing full gameplay videos are infringing the game owner’s copyright. The work is often commercial, is often a replacement for the original (at least for some people) and very rarely transformative. But most game publishers think that it is worth it for the advertising. So they don’t enforce their copyright. Many publishers will explicitly grant licenses for streaming their games. A few publishers will enforce their copyright and take down videos, they are likely well within their rights.
Tom Scott has a fairly good overview of basic copyright knowledge: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
I don’t know if I would say the internet is opposed to copyright. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of not caring. If the average internet commenter posts a meme it is of such minuscule cost to the owner of that work that it doesn’t make sense to go after them. So it sort of just happens. This makes people think that it is allowed, even if it probably isn’t. Most people would probably also agree that this is morally ok. But I don’t think that means that they are against copyright in general. I think if you asked most people. “Should I be allowed to download a CGP Grey video and reupload it for my own profit” they would say no. Probably similar for “Should I be allowed to sell cracked copies of Celeste for half price”.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 7 months ago:
I should add that there is one approach that could be taken here. Take this with a huge grain of salt because I am not a lawyer.
When you are posting on Lemmy you are likely granting an implicit license to Lemmy server operators to distribute your work. Basically because you understand that posting a public comment on Lemmy will make it available on your and other Lemmy servers it is assumed that it is ok to do that.
In other words you can’t write a story, post it on Lemmy, then sue every Lemmy instance that federated the comment and made it publicly available. That would be ridiculous.
There is a possible legal argument that twists this implicit grant to include AI training. Maybe you could have a disclaimer that this wasn’t the case. I don’t know how you would need to word this and if it would actually change anything. But I would talk to a lawyer.
