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cogman

@ cogman @lemmy.world

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360
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • FIFA is now selling parking spots at LA's World Cup games, more than a mile from the stadium, for $250-$300.

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  • A massive failure in US city planning is that stadiums don't have bus and rail access.

    Every major stadium should have a light rail station which exits right into the ticket booth. There's literally no reason why these things can't have huge public transport during major events. Anyone that's tried to leave one of these events knows just what a PITA it is.

  • Know the real culprits

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  • Caught me. Was just an easy number to pull.

    But I'd argue that 2% is still something to look at. A 2% shortfall in power capacity still means you are looking at rolling blackouts to handle the demand/production mismatch. If power has to be rationed, then I'd much rather have an extra ~50k AC units running vs pretty lights for advertisements. Especially since load tends to peak during the day anyways. Shutting off the lights during the day makes sense.

  • Know the real culprits

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  • It's actually a bit silly to call lighting a "base load". That's not how the grid works. Base load is specifically talking about the grid itself and what the lowest load is on the grid. They don't have an actuarial table where your refrigerator gets put into the base load bucket while your bathroom lights are put in the peak load bucket. It's all one load.

    What power companies are looking at is the demand curve. The lowest level of the demand curve is the base load. That's all it is.

    Things do get trickier with commercial power, especially when talking about machinery. But for something as simple as lighting it's completely straight forward. Turning off 150MW of lights frees 150MW of peeker capacity which can be used for more useful things like boiling water in a data center to answer questions wrong (I kid).

  • Know the real culprits

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  • Compressor startup is more intensive than lighting. Once the compressor is running it's a pretty steady power consumption.

    A window unit, for example, on startup (assuming it doesn't have a smooth start) will pull a full 20A. However, during operation it ultimately will pull around 5A.

    That said, there's not some sort of special electrical budget which makes the lights in NYT come from baseload generators vs peakers. If those lights turned off, the total grid load would go down by the amount of power those lights consume. And, as it turns out, those lights are consuming around 150MW. That's ~4 steel mills worth of heat just being shoved into the atmosphere for advertisement. It's at least 1 powerplant's worth of power.

    Shutting those lights off would take the coordination of something like 10 businesses vs telling the millions of residence of NY to adjust their power consumption. They absolutely would make a difference. It's not like there isn't still a base load of power needed with those lights off.

    Edit: My numbers are off, it's closer to 35MW. ~1 steel mill worth

  • AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains

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  • Hey, can we stop calling everything with a computer "AI"? Order management systems have been a thing long before LLMs were invented (I've worked on one). This was perhaps one of the first applications of computing. Humans hand writing an order form in a major grocery store hasn't been a thing since like the 80s.

    Also, I'm like 80% sure this article was barfed out by an LLM. The em-dashes be everywhere.

  • He's so close to getting it...

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  • I don't feel too bad for the 1 in 1000 women that weirdly crave being hit on in public with headphones on. Maybe some day she'll meet the OP which is the 1 in 1000 men who weirdly don't realize that people with headphones on don't want to socialize.

  • Texas Republican faces allegations of affair with staffer who died by suicide - ABC News

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  • Texas Republican faces allegations of affair with staffer who died by suicide - ABC News

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  • It's pretty rare that anyone does that. The only cases I'm aware of is someone doing a protest.

    Ima bet poison then burning the body.

  • ‘Playing Checkers’: Trump’s Bid to Revive Coal Is Nonsensical | The president last week ordered the Department of Defense to purchase coal energy. Experts say it's a lost cause

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  • IKR? That was a surprising fact to me.

    It's the worst of all the fossil fuels. They all suck, but coal sucks the most. Expensive and dangerous to mine. Requires a buttload. Releases all sort of nasty pollutants. Doesn't fully burn to CO2. And is slow to ramp so it's only really good for a baseload.

    If coal wasn't used for iron smelting, it would have never been used to for power generation.

  • Star Trek: Starfleet Academy actor Karim Diané decides to do their AMA on Lemmy!

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  • It's possible, you copy the post id and put a number in front of it, like the following:

    #43294288@startrek.website

    However, it doesn't autoformat to a link (unfortunately). To do that you need to do regular links. IE: [link](#43294288@startrek.website) which produces this link

    Edit: Damn it, messed this up, just a sec let me read some more.

    Looks like it's simply not possible. There's open github cases around this and this particular feature was just dropped. Shame, I'd have liked the #postId@site format.

  • Tesla Sales Down 55% in UK, 58% in Spain, 59% in Germany, 81% in Netherlands, 93% in Norway vs. 2024

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  • It’s very clear that at this point, insofar as there is any logic at all to the decision making of people investing in Tesla (and there’s very little evidence of that), they’re evaluating it as a software company, not a car company.

    Nah, the logic to the decision is that other people are buying a lot of tesla stock and the price keeps going up. It's very nearly a ponzi scheme. It has value completely detached to what the company is doing. It's tulips, crypto, beanie babies. Most institutional investors realizes this, they also are trying to get in and get out without holding the bag.

  • Progressive Texas organizers hail shock win as far-right Republicans left reeling

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  • Progressive dems have been cleaning up over the past year. Hopefully the DNC doesn't plug it's ears and ignore the obvious. There's certainly a good number of corporate democrats trying to make this out to be a nothing.

  • Everything's fine. Nothing to see here.

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  • At the moment, nothing will be done. There's no way the current SEC chair will give a fuck about this sort of stuff.

    But assuming a competent chair ever gets in charge, I expect there to be a shit show of lawsuits. It really doesn't matter that "the LLM did it" lying on those mandatory reports can lead to big fines.

  • In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud

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  • Regardless, I'd bet anything that you are not able to reencode blurays to 15mbps without substantial quality loss.

    It's crazy how confident you are about something you've never done.

    Yes, I've gotten transparent encodes with 15mbps. Lots of people have.

    If you don't believe me, go to the AV1 subreddit and ask "can you get a transparent encode with only 15mbps". Or just go read up on svt-av1 and av1an and do it yourself.

  • In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud

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  • Look, this is just an incorrect oversimplification of the problem. It's popular on the internet but it's just factually incorrect.

    Here's a thread discussing the exact problem I'm describing

    https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/1co9sgx/av1_in_dark_scenes/

    The issue at play for streaming services is they have a general pipeline for encoding. I mean, it could be described as cheaping out because they don't have enough QA spot checking and special purposing encodes to make sure the quality isn't trash. But it's really not strictly a "not enough bits" problem.

  • In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud

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  • I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding

    They don’t really care about the quality

    It's funny that you are trying to make both these points at the same time.

    You don't hire world class experts if you don't care about quality.

    I have a hobby of doing re-encoding blurays to lower bitrates. And one thing that's pretty obvious is the world class experts who wrote the encoders in the first place have them overly tuned to omit data from dark areas of a scene to avoid wasting bits in that location. This is true of H265, VP9, and AV1. You have to specifically tune those encoders to push the encoder to spend more of it's bits on the dark area or you have to up the bitrate to absurd levels.

    Where these encoders spend the bitrate in dark scenes is on any areas of light within the scene. That works great if you are looking at something like a tree with a lot of dark patches, but it really messes with a single light person with darkness everywhere. It just so happens that it's really easy to dump 2mbps on a torch in a hall and leave just 0.1mbps on the rest of the scene.

    That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.

    I can tell you that this is simply false. And it's the same psuedo-scientific logic that someone trying to sell gold plated cables and FLAC encodings pushes.

    Look, beyond just the darkness tuning problem that streaming services have, the other problem they have is a QOS. The way content is encoded for streaming just isn't ideal. When you say "they have to hit 14mpbs" the fact is that they are forcing themselves to do 14mbps throughout the entire video. The reason they do this is because they want to limit buffering as much as possible. It's a lot better experience to lower your resolution because you are constantly buffering. But that action makes it really hard to do good video optimizations on the encoder. Ever second of the video they are burning 14mb whether they need those 14mb or not. The way that'd deliver less data would be if they only averaged 14mbps rather than forcing it throughout. Allowing for 40mbps bursts when needed but then pushing everything else out at 1mbps saves on bandwidth. However, the end user doesn't know that the reason they just started buffering is because a high motion action scene is coming up (and netflix doesn't want to buffer for more than a few minutes).

    The other point I'd make is that streaming companies simply have a pipeline that they shove all video through. And, because it's so generalized, these sorts of tradeoffs which make stuff look like a blocky mess happen. Sometimes that blocky mess is present in the source material (The streaming services aren't ripping the blurays themselves, they get it from the content providers who aren't necessarily sending in raws).

    I say all this because you can absolutely get 4k and 1080p looking good at sub-bluray rates. I have a library filled with these re-encodes that look great because of my experience here. A decent amount of HD media can be encoded at 1 or 2mbps and look great. But you have to make tradeoffs that streaming companies won't make.

    For the record, the way I do my encoding is a scene by scene encode using VMAF to adjust the quality rate with some custom software I built to do just that. I target a 95% VMAF which ends up looking just fantastic across media.

  • In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud

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  • Blocky artifacts typically appear in low light situations. There will be situations where it might just be blocky due to not having enough bits (high motion scenes) but there are plenty of cases where low light tuning is where you'd end up noticing the blockyness.

  • In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud

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  • People don't like hearing this, but streaming services tune their codecs to properly calibrated TVs. Very few people have properly calibrated TVs. In particular, people really like to up the brightness and contrast.

    A lot of scenes that look like mud are that way because you really aren't supposed to be able distinguish between those levels of blackness.

    That said, streaming services should have seen the 1000 comments like the ones here and adjusted already. You don't need bluray level of bits to make things look better in those dark scenes, you need to tune your encoder to allow it to throw more bits into the void.

  • 'No, That Is Not Your Job,' Say Critics After Schumer Claims 'Job' Is to 'Fight for Aid to Israel' | Common Dreams

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  • I'll be cynical, his job is to get elected. The way that has traditionally worked is by making constituents happy.

    He is failing at that job because he'll be primaried in his next election.

    As minority leader, his job is to become majority leader. Again, traditionally, by making the nation happy with the party. He's failing there because right now everyone (other than consultants) hates his fecklessness. Which is a major drag on the Democrat party.

    Senators need to show some backbone and oust him as minority leader, he's failing miserably. They are failing by playing nice with this loon.