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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The advertisement I saw for this film struck me as some white supremacist nonsense

    Racism in a semi-historical film that covers post Civil War America? Shocking

    Seriously tho’, WTF are you expecting for a film set in that time period? If it pulled the racism it wouldn’t be accurate. It’s going to be chock-a-block with sexism too and for the same exact reason.

    If you don’t want to see it that’s fine but intimating that the film has unnecessary racism in it is ludicrous.


  • Banks lend money based on your assets. And when you have very large asset holdings, those loans can have very favorable terms.

    Yes and there’s two problems with this scheme; one is large and the other could be an apocalypse.

    The first problem, the large one, is that the wealthy aren’t paying taxes on the money they receive from those loans. This starves the Government of the funding that it needs which causes endlessly escalating deficit spending as the rest of the population cannot provide enough tax revenue to cover everything the Government needs to do.

    The apocalyptic problem is that their scheme only works when those assets appreciate in value. If they decline in value, or even just hold steady, it collapses. Right now the wealthy take out another loan, either on a different asset or on the same assets appreciated value, in order to repay the original loan. However if assets decline in value, or even hold steady, they’re unable to keep “flipping” loans like this and they’ll need to come up with the cash to actually repay them. Which means that they’ll have to actually sell some of their assets, as this spreads to more and more of the wealthy the marketplace will enter a value reduction spiral (too many sellers and not enough buyers) and as that happens the Lenders, the banks, will be left holding assets that have increasingly less value. This will quickly lead to an unstoppable chain of Bank failures.

    We’re arguably already in the spiral with Commercial Real Estate values continuing to decline and CRE Mortgage default rates are climbing. We’ll likely reach the tipping between late 2024 and mid 2025, then the bank failures will really start to ramp up.

    Somewhere in there the stock market will start to deflate as the wealthy seek liquidity to stave off foreclosures. Once it deflates enough it too will collapse.

    If you’re not familiar with the pending CRE crisis this Business Insider article explains it pretty well.

    It’s quite possible that we’re standing on the edge of another “Great Depression” event.









  • It’s not that the titanium metal is fake, it’s probably real. By “fake” what they mean is that the part made with the titanium isn’t what the documentation for it claims. It may have been made by a different company than what the documentation says or it may not have been tested in the way that the documentation says.

    Every last piece, down to the tiniest screw, in a commercial airplane has a paper trail and for these parts someone is saying that the paper trail has been falsified. That’s the “fake” part.


  • it was the 80s/90s, windows didn’t exist

    Wow, that’s a pretty narrow gap. The 80386 started mass production in 1986 and Windows 3.0 (the first actually usable one) came out in 1990.

    I refused to use Windows until Win95 and even then I was experimenting with OS/2. In 1997 I installed Slack 3.4 and have been around every since. I’m currently running Linux Mint but I sorta miss SuSe and may go back to it.







  • A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference.

    I don’t think that would work. It would be trivial for YT to put different ads in different time slots which would leave a differencing engine with no way to tell what was content and what was ad. However that thought gave me another one; the core problem is the ability to differentiate between content and ad. That problem is probably solvable by leveraging the NPU that everyone is so desperate to cram into computers today.

    Nearly all of the YT content I watch, and it’s a lot, has predictable elements. As examples the host(s) are commonly in frame and when they’re not their voices are, their equipment is usually in frame somewhere and often features distinctive markings. Even in the cases where those things aren’t true an Ad often stands out because its so different in light, motion, and audio volume.

    With those things in mind it should be possible to train software, similar to an LLM, to recognize the difference between content and ad. So an extension could D/L the video, in part or in whole, and then start chewing through it. If you were willing to wait for a whole D/L of the video then it could show you an ad free version, if you wanted to stream and ran out of ad-removed buffer then it could simply stop the stream (or show you something else) until it has more ad-free content to show you.

    A great way to improve this would be by sharing the results of the local NPU ad detection. Once an ad is detected and its hash shared then everyone else using the extension can now reliably predict what that ad looks like and remove it from the content stream which would minimize the load on the local NPU. It should also be possible for the YT Premium users to contribute so that the hash of an ad-free stream, perhaps in small time based chunks, could be used to speed up ad identification for everyone else.

    It wouldn’t be trivial but it’s not really new territory either. It’s just assembling existing tech in a new way.