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Cake day: January 1st, 2024

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  • And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.

    I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.

    So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.


  • Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it’s nearly unavoidable anymore. It’s a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you’re unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I’d pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of “watching YouTube” for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube’s servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don’t want to “watch YouTube” anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.








  • In a very basic sense a “clock” is just a fixed oscillation. In CPUs, for instance, all your data is carried by bursts of electricity that you can think of like Morse code. Bits are delineated by the clock, which is one wire that lights up on a regular interval and does nothing else (the “clock signal”). Every other process uses that clock signal as a reference point to know when one piece of data ends and the next begins. Essentially the time between one clock signal and the next is one “frame” of CPU time and you’ll usually have a few million or so of those every second.

    So if we think of this in a physics sense instead of a computer science sense, a physics clock could be any particle or particle interaction that happens repeatedly on a regular schedule. It could even happen on an irregular schedule, there’s no law saying the clock has to be consistent. I think it’s probably on a regular schedule, but for all we know the pico-femto-Planck or whatever the basic unit of time ends up being defined as might have slight variance caused by who knows what. But the important idea to take away is that a “clock” in a fundamental sense is basically just any action that repeats. It could be or look like anything. Maybe time is tied to quantum foam fluctuations, or gravity in a general sense, or specifically the up quark doing something. I have no idea and I think this researcher probably doesn’t either.




  • Just collate them based on edit/deletion date… Each post will have a last-edited attribute that can be used for sorting. Even more so once the AI is bootstrapped enough to start recognizing the standard protest edit messages. At that point you hardly even need human oversight anymore, because the bot will be able to recognize “that’s a fuck spez edit, ignore that; this post looks good; that’s a Shreddit/PowerDelete edit, ignore that” and so on. Can even have it fetch the previous edit automatically when it comes across something like that, to a point where a comment removed by a PowerDelete tool is nothing more than a cover letter that states “there was once a real human-generated comment in this location”.





  • This is good advice. Most people aren’t weird enough to be happy. Pay attention and you’ll notice most of the super weird people, that project their weirdness and wear it openly, are pretty joyful people. They have shed societal expectation to simply exist as they wish to be.

    Now there is a balance there, too far in that direction and you sometimes end up unemployed and homeless. But hell, even most van hippies are pretty happy people. You’ve just gotta find where your own balance is on the scale.



  • It isn’t a waste if people buy it. Putting M4s in the iPad lets them market it to rubes who think bigger number is better without reading the spec sheet or understanding their own requirements, and if they’re already manufacturing M4s to put in other things, that’s one less production line that needs to run. Sure, they could release an iPad Cheapass Edition with an M1 in it and sell it comfortably at a profit for like $80, but the market for those is likely to be small, they won’t make nearly the overhead profit that the M4 iPad will, it requires an entire extra production line setup, and most importantly it isn’t flashy enough for Apple. They don’t want to release a product that feels cheap, even if it was specifically intended to be cheap. It’s bad brand optics and they care about that a lot. Let China sell a bunch of bootleg tablets to people that want them, they’re gonna do that anyway regardless if Apple gets in the train or not, and this way Apple isn’t tarnishing their product lineup with a PoorPad^TM