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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • New York City has also banned plastic bags since 2020. I was skeptical about the ban at first, because by measure of material weight, bags are but a small fraction of plastic waste. Thin film is just too efficient in terms of use-per-weight ratio. I also thought anyone who didn’t want to use plastic bags already had the option to bring their own reusable bags with them.

    My newfound appreciation for the ban is that not only does it divert the use of plastic material, but it forces a change in the public perception around plastic use itself. Sure, you could bring your own bags, but it felt awkward because no one else did. You felt like you were inconveniencing the cashiers and other shoppers by breaking the routine, as if you were asking for special treatment. But now it’s perfectly normal! You want to carry that bag of potatoes in your arms without an external bag? Go right ahead. You want to run home carrying a jug of milk dripping condensation on the pavement? Doesn’t make you look like a crazy person! All thanks to the ban. Single action by the government on behalf of the collective has achieved what collective action by many single individuals could not have.








  • Democrats hate progressives. The two would be separate parties in a sensible democracy, but in the legacy first-past-the-post American system, splitting the party while Republicans exist is political suicide. There are more progressives than center Democrats, but they are not as united as the core establishment Democrats are, which made any one of them irrelevant in primaries up to now. RCV has given them a real chance for the first time. For example by giving Lander votes to Mamdani in the instant runoff. The moment RCV got implemented, long-serving Democrats started suddenly getting kicked out in the primaries. This terrifies them, so Democrats will continue to fight against RCV in the future. Just look how both Cuomo and Adams will try to commit political murder-suicide now by running as independent in the general just so that the “official Democratic party nominee” would not win.


  • Wtf happened to Adams? Sure, he was under criminal corruption indictments, then cozied up to Trump and got “pardoned” (charges dismissed). But then he was supposed to be on the Democratic primary ballot, his picture was even in the official voter guide from a month ago, but on election day his name wasn’t even in the list? Now he’s apparently running as independent incumbent instead? What a booger!

    EDIT: Both Cuomo and Adams are intending to run as independent in the general? WhyTF do we even have primaries then! If they are not going to play by their own rules of their special little club, let’s just extend Ranked Choice Voting to cover the general and scrap the primaries altogether!



  • 6 months, during high school over the winter. Shower was broken (water would only come out perfectly hot or cold, nothing in between) and parents/landlord would not fix it. I kinda just gave up on it. Nothing bad came out of it. Nobody at home or at school ever said anything or even noticed, as far as I could tell. No, they were not just being polite. I watched everyone closely, as much as an experiment of personal curiosity as anything else, and there were no signs of disapproval, nobody had a clue. I suffered no social consequences whatsoever. Wearing a new set of clothes every day alone was sufficient to stay clean.

    Can’t decide whether I just have one of those Asian genes that make you not smell, or whether Americans as a culture are psychotically brainwashed by soap companies’ propaganda to the point where even the idea of “spending more than 1 day away from shower” is worse than death for them. Never used deodorant either (other than to try it out - just makes me feel gross, sticky, and smelly). Imagine how much money those deodorant companies are missing out on me over a lifetime!


  • I know Lemmy hates AI, but this actually would be a perfect use for it. The problem is the idea of what an ad is. Yes, you could try to use secondary characteristics like image color or sound normalized volume (WhyTF do youtube ads still sound 3x louder than content? are we living in cable era again?), but they would be error-prone for any content more visually intense than a podcast. They would also not capture sponsorblock content like “I love showing you all these foreign countries but what I love even more is having my internet connection secure” that match the video flow. A crowdsourced lookup table of all known ad clip fingerprints would go a long way, until ad videos themselves start being AI-generated on the fly for that sweet personalization revenue.

    No, what I really want is to distill the idea of what I want to see into an AI and have it filter out what I don’t want to see for me. I know an ad when I see one, so AI can too. Pre-roll/mid-roll ads? Gone. Sponsorblock content? Gone. Like and subscribe? Skipped as if it didn’t exist. Virtual billboards on the sidelines of sporting events? Overlayed with kittens. Idiocracy banners squeezing the video from either side? Cropped and rescaled. Watermarks? Excised and content-aware-filled.

    The last frontier is when the content itself is secretly an ad, imprinting upon you some idea or point of view. You’ll have to watch out for that one on your own.


  • Ah, I can see OP’s line of thought now:

    • you have a point A’ on a plane and a random point A
    • you find a midpoint B and draw a sphere around it. A and A’ are now a diameter of the sphere
    • pick two random points D and C at the intersection of the plane and the sphere
    • by the “triangle inscribed in a circle/sphere where one side is a diameter” rule, such a triangle must be a right triangle
    • therefore both angles ACA’ and ADA’ are right angles
    • thus C and D both satisfy the conditions of the initial question (with all points renamed: A=P, (C or D)=H, A’=A)
    • OP never defined what a projection is, it being “4th grade math”, but one of the requirements is being unique
    • C and D cannot both be the projection, therefore the initial question must be answered “false”: just because AH is perpendicular to PH doesn’t make H a projection.

    I like treating posts as puzzles, figuring out thread by thread WTF they are talking about. But dear OP, let me let you know, your picture and explanation of it are completely incomprehensible to everyone else xD. The picture is not an illustration to the question but a sketch of your search for a counterexample, with all points renamed of course, but also a sphere appearing out of nowhere (for you to invoke the inscribed-triangle-rule, also mentioned nowhere). Your headline question is a non-sequitur, jumping from talking about 4D (never to be mentioned again) into a ChatGPT experiment, into demanding more education in schools. You complain about geometry being hard but also simple. The math problem itself was not even your question, yet it distracted everyone else from whatever it is you were trying to ask. If you ever want to get useful answers from people other than crazed puzzleseekers like me, you’ll need to use better communication!


  • In the ultimate, you’d need to do something like run a headless browser in a virtual machine, have it play out and record the entire video, then use something like AI to splice out the ad segments and distracting elements (a souped-up sponsorblock will work for a while, but eventually ads will be injected into the raw video stream at random intervals), and present the pristine finished content to you. Basically we are going to re-invent TiVo all over again xD.

    In worst case, you can’t start watching until the pre-roll ad timers expire. This is how adblocking works on Twitch streams currently - you can only see a purple screen even if you block the ads.

    And yes, the headless browser will need to use AI for human-like mouse movement and to solve captchas - basically whatever state-of-the-art technologies spammers and scrapers are already currently using.

    Google is anticipating this future and is trying to implement and force hardware-based DRM for web video before then.





  • It’s a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked “no vids for u” message, you’d get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being “buggy” and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no “smoking gun” blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.

    The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.