• 2 Posts
  • 101 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Is YouTube doing it with small creators actually in mind? Who knows, other than them?

    I am pretty confident in guessing that they are not doing it for selfless reasons. Imo the reason is that the less information they give the user, the more you are beholden to the algorithm choosing for you.

    But depending how they hide it it actually might not just be users, but also companies that e.g. buy ads from them. The less information they get, the more they need to trust whatever metric google offers them


  • I recently read a plausible reason that I hadn’t thought of yet:

    Apple would need to include a specific flexible cable rated for continuous movement with the mouse. If the port was in the regular spot, then people would ofc also use it wired at times. However if buyers would use regular charging cables, then the experience would both be worse and the cables might get damaged over time from bending.

    I still think the main reason is simply that they value form over function, otherwise the shape would be more ergonomic, but it’s another interesting factor to consider.


  • I’m sure if bigger batteries sold better there would be more (any) options. The issue is not enough people care.

    This in my opinion is only true to some degree. The real world doesn’t reflect the idealistic demand->supply concept, and instead there are many other factors that play a role. There’s the reverse supply->demand effect aswell, where companies especially through marketing steer consumer demand into the direction that suits them.

    The issue is not enough people care.

    Here the big issue is that not all qualities are equally easy to experience.

    When you go into a store you can immediately see and feel the effect a larger, brighter screen or a thinner device has, the difference in real world battery life for your own specific use case is impossible to quantify. Even more so when asked to extrapolate it into the future and factor in degrading capacities. You can’t even directly translate a concrete number like the mAh size of the battery into it, since hardware/software efficiency and useage patterns can distort it substantially.




  • What i still don’t quite understand with these kind of buyouts is who lends them the money and who gets saddled with the debt? Surely banks know the drill and wouldn’t want to borrow and hold debt for a company destined to fail in such a way.

    Do banks get repaid before that happens and the only people being owed are small contractors and employees? Does the bank repackage the debt and sell it to someone else? Or are the interest payments high enough to just factor in losing part of the money borrowed with high certainty?





  • I also have regular problems with some subtitles. My solution is to enable using an external player in the jellyfin AndroidTV app (i think its under playback->advanced options) and then use VLC player which i’ve also installed to play the movie. That has never failed to me.

    Downside is that unlike the regular exo player i don’t think it supports dolby vision, so i have to change this setting back and forth occasionally. It used to be that there was an option that you could tick, so it asked you everytime which player to use before playing a movie (with the downside that it couldn’t resume playing at a saved timestamp), but after a somewhat recent update this went away.




  • I don’t think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won’t move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).

    The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.

    The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.

    The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you “conveniently let go bankrupt”. They’d try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I’d say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.


  • Photo manipulation has been around as long as the medium itself. And throughout the decades, people have worried about the veracity of images. When PhotoShop became popular, some decried it as the end of truthful photography. And now here’s AI, making things up entirely.

    I actually think it isn’t the AI photo or video manipulation part that makes it a bigger issue nowadays (at least not primarily), but the way in which they are consumed. AI making things easier is just another puzzle piece in this trend.


    Information volume and speed has increased dramatically, resulting in an overflow that significantly shortens the timespan that is dedicated to each piece of content. If i slowly read my sunday newspaper during breakfast, then i’ll give it much more attention, compared to scrolling through my social media feed. That lack of engagement makes it much easier for missinformation to have the desired effect.

    There’s also the increased complexity of the world. Things can on the surface seem reasonable and true, but have knock on consequences that aren’t immediately apparent or only hold true within a narrow picture, but fall appart once viewed from a wider perspective. This just gets worse combined with the point above.

    Then there’s the downfall of high profile leading newsoutlets in relevance and the increased fragmentation of the information landscape. Instead of carefully curated and verified content, immediacy and clickbait take priority. And this imo also has a negative effect on those more classical outlets, which have to compete with it.

    You also have increased populism especially in politics and many more trends, all compounding on the same issue of missinformation.

    And even if caught and corrected, usually the damage is done and the correction reaches far fewer people.


  • I guess marketing getting rolled into that number, as opposed to movie budgets where it is usually separate could make up for it. Or it includes lots of long-term investments similar to the huge stage surrounded by screens (“the volume”) that they used for the mandalorian. Although I am not aware that acolyte did something like that.

    Countless examples of movies and shows with way smaller budgets that end up looking a lot better than most of the recent Disney slop.

    Yeah, but that just goes to prove that money doesn’t solve every problem. It didn’t fix the writing either. The spending part is easy enough.