I prefer to think of it like there is some fake Europe wannabe out there and the poster wanted to make sure people knew he was talking about the real Europe.

I’d recommend reading this if you are interested in why making assumptions when designing a system is a bad idea (but often necessary): https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Especially the one on names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ And the one on time: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time

You are totally correct. This is one of the first mainstream publications I’ve seen really explain to people what “AI” is and what it isn’t. Good to see this kind of content.

The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.

Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.

The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.

And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.

I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.

Always has been.

And I’ve been using Microsoft since my first computer in 1984. Recently got DOS 2.0 with hacked FAT16 running on my first computer, would have blown my mind back then.

No the “AI” isn’t a threat in itself. And treating generative algorithms like LLM like it’s general intelligence is dumb beyond words. However:

It massively increases the reach and capacity of foreign (and sadly domestic) agents to influence people. All of those Russian trolls that brought about fascism, Brexit and the rise of the far right used to be humans. Now a single human can do more than a whole army of people could in the past using AI. Spreading misinformation has never been easier.

Then there’s the whole replacing peoples jobs with AI. No the AI can’t actually do those jobs, not very well at least. But if management and the share holders think they can increase profits using AI, they will certainly fire a lot of folk. And even if that ends up ruining the company down the line, that costs even more jobs and usually impacts the people lower in the organization the most.

Also there’s a risk of people literally becoming less capable and knowledgeable because of AI. If you can have a digital assistant you carry around on your pocket at all times answer every question ever, why bother learning anything yourself? Why take the hard road, when the easy road is available? People are at risk of losing information, knowledge and the ability to think for themselves because of this. And it can become so bad, when the AI just makes shit up, people think it’s the truth. And in a darker tone, if the people behind the big AIs want something to not be known or misrepresented, they can make it happen. And people would be so reliant on it, they wouldn’t even know this happens. This is already an issue with social media, AI is much much worse.

Then there is the resource usage for AI. This makes the impact of crypto currency seem like a rounding error. The energy and water usage is huge and becoming bigger every day. This has the potential to undo almost all of the climate wins we’ve had for the past two decades and push the Earth beyond the tipping point. What people seem to forget about climate change is once things start becoming bad, it’s way too late and the situation will deteriorate at an exponential rate.

That’s just a couple of big things I can think of on the top of my head. I’m sure there are many more issues (such as the death of the internet). But I think this is enough to call the current level of “AI” a threat to humanity.

And just about anything you try to do to actually read the description would start the movie, including doing nothing for 10 secs (because you are fucking reading the description). Till you hit the back button which just boots you back to the home screen, so you can start the selection process all over again.

Helpfully they do include IMDB scores when browsing for stuff, sadly all their stuff is total shite so all the scores are low. But hey, at least they include them.

The only way to watch anything on Prime is to make your selection in advance somewhere else and then search for it. If you type in the literal title of the movie, it will mostly be in the top 10 of the search results. This includes resuming watching something you were watching, like their hit series Fallout. You would expect the resume watching thing to be proudly the first item on the home page. OMG you actually watched something of ours, we are so happy. Nope it’s buried away on the 5th or 6th line and you need to scroll to get to it. It also happily resumes the previous episode at the credits, without the helpful next episode button. If you do manage to get to the next episode, you will need to watch the first 5 secs of same ad you’ve seen a million times (because they only seem to have the one ad on their platform) before you can skip to the content.

I don’t know what those guys are smoking, but their app is total garbage.

Usually big corps collect all your personal information and tell you it’s a good thing because they use it to make useful recommendations. That way you at least get something out of it. At Amazon they just take all your personal data and when it comes to recommendations it gives you a big middle finger. I don’t know here’s a romcom from 12 years ago, you like that stuff right? Whatever fuck off.

Oh I see why they shut down the Super Mario Maker 1 servers, money is getting tight at Nintendo.

For those not in the know: The big issue with quantum computers is decoherence. This is (simply put) noise produced in the system, which interferes or overwrites the calculation / signal we want to get out of the computer. A large part of this is thermal energy, all that energy bouncing around destroys any chance of reading out the signal. So the solution would be to cool the machine within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, which is hard but not impossible. Then there’s also EM radiation coming from all around us (wifi and cellphones, but also things like radio), this is relatively easy to shield against. A bit of a pain, but still something that can be done. But then there’s cosmic rays, there’s a real chance a cosmic ray hits with enough energy to disrupt the calculation within milliseconds. Milliseconds isn’t enough to do a useful calculation, so that’s a problem. Shielding against this is also pretty hard, since cosmic rays can have a lot of energy.

Then there’s the issue of measurement itself, measuring automatically means putting in energy to the system. This means it’s very hard (or maybe even impossible) to read out the results, without destroying them. Even if you get the damn thing stable enough to do a useful calculation.

The more qubits in a system, the more powerful it becomes, and you need quite a number of them to do anything useful with the machine. But the more qubits the bigger the decoherence issue.

This is why some people (me included) don’t believe the current form of quantum computers we are researching can actually work in the real world. We need some kind of big breakthrough on this to create an actually useful quantum computer system. With all the cooling and shielding requirements we certainly won’t be using them at home any time soon.

But of course as with anything these days the marketing department and media runs with everything they can, spouting out nonsense about quantum computers becoming mainstream any day now and all the amazing things they can do. This can make it hard to figure out what the actual level of development is right now. Plus anybody working on this is putting in billions of dollars and sure as heck won’t share anything with anybody. So maybe someone has already made a breakthrough, but I doubt it.

No that’s the small M.2 for wifi, there is a large M.2 above that with a heatsink over it. It’s not visible in the photo because the GPU is in the way.

Second the RB5009, I have been using it for some time now and love it. It was an upgrade from my old Mikrotik router, because I wanted more performance out of the tunneling. Performance is one thing the RB5009 has in abundance.

Isn’t that motherboard alone a few hundred? 4 4TB Ironwolfs is also a few hundred.

And then everyone clapped

I can also recommend the book the TS mentioned, it is very good and after reading it you will understand regular expressions. It’s fine to use a cheat sheet if you want, cause if you don’t do it regularly the knowledge can sag, but the understanding is what matters. Also depending on the context, different implementations can have slightly different syntax or modifiers to be aware of.

I lent out the book to my brother once and he somehow lost it, so I never got it back. Don’t lend out book guys.

And remember not everything can be solved using a regular expression: https://xkcd.com/1171/

I don’t think you know what an ad hominem is.

Yeah sorry mate, your planet needs to go, we need to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

Not a chance, power supplies contain capacitors that don’t do well at lower temperatures. Even special kinds don’t survive long at those temperatures. You would need to build an isolated enclosure and include a heater and heat management system. This is usually done with multiple layers, so the inside where the electronics is can be maintained at a constant uniform temperature. Moisture is also an issue, so you’d have to deal with that. All that takes up a lot of power, which will cut into the batteries.

Batteries are a bad choice for something like that. Led lights are super efficient, but when we’re talking about something like a couple of strings around a house it’s a lot of power. Everyone who has to keep their car (or if you don’t have a huge garage their car battery) inside during winter knows that kind of cold kills batteries. So I would recommend powering it from the grid. Something like an outdoor outlet would do fine.

Much easier would be to just have everything inside and only have a single cable with 24 - 48 volt (depending on the setup) for power and some (or one) control wires. These kinds of wires aren’t that expensive and easy to run. With good water proof connectors it’s easy to plug in and wire up. They aren’t very thick, so only a small hole is needed. Usually they connect to wire terminals on the inside, so the hole only has to be big enough for the wire.

I think you can get kits for this kind of thing, which makes it easy to setup and get running. Just a pain in the neck to step on a ladder and securely mount it to the roof.

If you have the power supply and controllers and such inside, the leds outside wouldn’t be a problem.

You are joking, but every grocery shop I go to would gladly reimburse you if you bought some ham you didn’t like. They would even ask you what was wrong with it, if there might be a health concern they will do a full recall. If they get too many complaints, they will pull the product. The price of a single ham is easily worth the feedback on the product and the continued loyalty of the customer.