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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • I’m not as optimistic as you.

    Hosting video is really expensive. Making video is really expensive. YouTube was losing money for about 15 years despite having a monopoly on online video for most of that time and the best advertising tech in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to make a free competitor to YouTube.

    On the paid side, there’s plenty of streaming services that are making money. But you have to be already established in order to get a contract. And since you will typically have to use social media in order to get past that initial barrier, it might as well include YouTube.

    However, my guess is that YouTube makes the majority of it’s money from larger channels. If the larger channels all join paid streaming services(e.g. Nebula) then gradually that may be able to bring YouTube down.




  • Yes, even for them, the information they can get through a phone is lifesaving. They can learn how to build water supply and sanitation systems and shelter. They can learn how to farm and forage for food. They can find the best way to cross international borders and become a refugee. And so on, they can improve every aspect of their lives. Information is power, and with a smartphone they have access to the entire world, rather than just word of mouth knowledge in their local community.

    Obviously, places without any form of electricity are screwed, but satellite internet is rapidly becoming cheaper and more accessible so soon they won’t even need cell coverage.



  • Towards the end of the video he addresses the point that the optimum speed of cars is around 60(or I thought it was 70).

    This argument doesn’t apply here because that figure is for a car traveling at a constant speed on a straight, flat road with no wind. E.g. a freeway/motorway. In a city, a significant amount of the energy is used to speed up and slow down at intersections.

    Remember the kinetic energy formula, Ek=1/2 mv^2 . That tells you that accelerating a car to twice the speed takes 4 times the energy, or in other words it takes 4 times as much fuel to get to 60 as it does to get to 30.

    This extra energy to get up to speed is going to far outweigh any benefit from less rolling resistance at 60 compared to 30.







  • By the way, 1 tablespoon of peanut butter does not weigh 14.79 grams. 1 US tablespoon is a unit of volume that’s equal to 14.79 milliliters(mils). Grams are a unit of mass. In order to convert between them we need the density. Because the metric system is great, the density of water is 1g/mil, so 1 US tablespoon of water weighs exactly 14.79 mils. However the density of peanut butter is a bit higher, so the US tablespoon of peanut butter will weigh a bit more.

    Additional pedantry, yes I did have to write US tablespoon every time. A US tablespoon is 14.79mils, a metric tablespoon is 15mils, a traditional Australian tablespoon was 20mils although now they mostly use metric tablespoons.








  • Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.

    We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.

    In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it’s about right.


  • Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.

    I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.