• 6 Posts
  • 77 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • *fresh, running water that is not right next to their food. Cats would normally eat… dead things— and as water literally right next to these generally is not exactly hygienic, they will (as an evolutionary fact) much prefer even random puddle water.

    So: different place for water than for food.



  • This may be, but the probability is unarguably higher than with Trump. Voting exclusively for candidates you morally agree on only works if enough people have the same morale (in this case i.e. are educated on Israel and so on) and are also not willing to make compromises.

    Even if unfortunate, this is currently not the case; and you voting independent has smaller chances of changing that than voting democratic. So you will probably have to accept this situation for the moment and choose the “best actually feasible” strategy— and feasible means having the highest probability to win in real life, not merely trying.

    Personally, I’d even argue that it’s unethical to not vote for a candidate like Harris, just because the chances of getting stuff like ranked choice voting or educating voters done (which will then lead to you being able to realistically vote for others) is significantly higher when voting Democrats than… letting Trump win?

    Notice that I don’t say you have to agree with anything else she stands for, you’re trying to achieve certain goals/get out of the very unfortunate current situation, and even a low chance of reaching that is infinitely better than none.





  • Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.



  • YouTube is/ its ads are are extremely privacy intrusive and there isn’t really an alternative to the platform. Next to the comparatively obvious network effects all social media platforms rely on is also because YouTube on its own is not that profitable and probably only really makes Google money via the data collected on the platform. This means only platforms that have a gigantic ad network themselves and are able to monetize said data as well as Google can can actually compete with YouTube— and as you see, there are basically none.

    Also, the whole blocking ad blockers thing is trying to fundamentally reverse the power equilibrium between the website (the server) and the person visiting it (the client); because for the last 40 years or so, the server had the purpose of delivering content to the client which could decide what to do with and how to present said content. This sharing of responsibility between the two comes in many forms, starting with simple things such as screen readers or a reading mode for the browser.


  • This is not necessarily the case.

    You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.

    But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream “one video” per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.

    The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software