SirEDCaLot

joined 2 years ago
[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I think both you and her are wrong. Dems lost big in this last election. So it's time to take a fucking step back and ask why. What needs changing? The party is in trouble. And they are in trouble because they are listening to big business and political consultants and not voters and people like AOC and Bernie. Kamala was supposed to be easy 'safe' candidate to defeat Trump. How'd that work? Hillary was supposed to be the 'safe' candidate to beat him the first time. Safer than Bernie and his 'crazy radical platform' of actually making the country work for the fucking people who live in it. How'd that work out?

Maybe having candidates that manipulate the primary process and count on superdelegates doesn't work. Maybe putting someone forward who polled at 2% among Democrats before election season doesn't work. Maybe 'I'm not Trump' isn't fucking good enough to win the White House.

Unfortunately I don't see many Democrats talking about this lesson, let alone taking it to heart. So I am looking forward to four more years of complaining and hopelessly attempting damage control while putting forward no new ideas whatsoever.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 2 points 6 months ago

It's all about advertising. On a web page, which is cheap to create and cheap to host, the only ad you can really get is a pop-up or similar, and those don't pay very much. On the video, which is expensive to create and expensive to host, you can have 30 or 45 seconds of video ads, which pay a lot more.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

19 minutes into a 21 minute video and there hasn't been a drill press on screen yet

And that's intentional. The algorithm rewards them for having people watch more / watch longer, and a 21 min video might have 2 or 3 ad rolls. If someone watches all the way thru, creator gets more money and higher placement in search results.

I like YouTube as a concept but the algorithms are totally enshittifying it.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Can you run Firefox on a Chromebook?

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 17 points 6 months ago (14 children)

When I'm 'watching a video' I watch it all the way thru. However often I'm looking for something specific, like how to do something, and a lot more tutorials are now in video form than written (which I don't love but whatever). In that situation I'm usually looking for a specific piece of information which often requires scrubbing around in multiple videos. Same thing if I'm doing research on a product, while I might watch a review will the way through I'm more often looking for some specific things like video of the interface or does it have some specific setting or can I set it up without needing a phone app or cloud account. That requires scrubbing around in multiple videos to see bits of the setup UI. Unusable if each video has an ad

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 79 points 6 months ago (27 children)

While their statement is entirely correct, they're still wrong. YouTube is basically unusable without an ad blocker. Multiple 10 to 15 second long unskippable ads before the video even starts, and unless you watch videos all the way through you end up watching as much ad as you do content. It is damn near impossible to hop around between videos trying to find the one you want because of the pre-roll ads on every vid. On the other hand, with an ad block enabled YouTube is actually quite nice. The engagement algorithm is fucking trash of course but if you know what you're looking for and you go directly to it it's pretty good.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 2 points 6 months ago

That's assuming raw PCM data, no compression (lossy or lossless) whatsoever.

LDAC can do lossless redbook audio (16 bit 44.1 KHz) at 990kbps. All other modes are lossy.
It's probably doing something much like FLAC- lossy encoder + residual corrections to ensure you get the original waveform back out, but with less bandwidth than raw PCM.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 7 points 6 months ago

Honestly the more I think about this the more I think that you are not only right, but putting all of our proverbial eggs in one basket with smartphones was a horrible horrible mistake. We have done too many trade-offs for convenience.

Try to buy a digital camera today, pocket digital cameras basically aren't made anymore. And even a mid-range pocket digital camera from the mid 2010s significantly outperforms a modern smartphone camera. It's simple physics, bigger lens captures more light gives you a better picture.

Try to listen to music. Almost all the digital music we are served up is lossy compressed for streaming. And then we feed it into Bluetooth headphones with even more lossy compression. The sound that actually goes in the ears sounds like crap and bears little resemblance to what the artist laid down on their master, but we're all used to it so we think that's what music is supposed to sound like. A late 1990s Discman has significantly better sound quality even with a cheap DAC.

Try to do something online. A whole lot of new sites and services don't even bother making a website, it's just a promo to download their stupid privacy invading app. And if you want to do whatever you are doing on a real computer with a big screen, you're SOL.

And then there is the unintended effect on our kids. I have always been an advocate of mobile technology. But I am looking at the actual effect of growing up with smartphones and tablets, and the result is an awful lot of kids with attention spans measured in seconds rather than minutes. Kids who can edit video and insert images into a document with their eyes closed, but can barely write three coherent sentences.

I have always been an advocate and user and enthusiast of smartphones and mobile technology. I buy this stuff, I use it, I recommend it to others.
But I think maybe I was wrong. I think maybe we all were wrong.
I look at the overall effect smartphones have on society, and I honestly can't say the world is a better place as a result. We take crappy pictures, listen to crappy music, have crappy attention spans, but it's all very convenient so we don't care.

I think maybe we were better off the other way. And maybe some of that inconvenience is a good thing, in the same way that having to do physical work is good exercise.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 1 points 6 months ago

But that's what I'm saying. I don't want us to be reddit. I want us to be better.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 8 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I would agree to this but with one caveat Let's try to be better than Reddit. These days, Reddit and to some degree let me also has become a circle jerk of closed minds (on all sides of any issue). When confronted with a position they disagree with, people are far too quick to write the person off as a racist, statist, Nazi, anarchist, commie, etc. Rather than considering the merit of the person statement. Let's be better than that. Let's all be better than that.

Having a closed mind is easy. It's lazy. It gets you to that hit of dopamine faster, you tell someone off and hit post and you feel like you've done good. But most of the time you haven't. You've done nothing to persuade them of your viewpoint, or enhance the discussion for others.

That's not to say nobody's wrong. There's plenty of people who are wrong about every issue. But tell them why they're wrong. Have a little good faith, assume that just maybe the person on the other end of the thread has good intentions, also wants the world to succeed and society to be great, they just think their view will help make that happen better. So rather than calling them an idiot, tell them why you're right and your ideas are better. Engage with them.

That's how Reddit used to be. Not recently, I'm talking way back in the early days before the digg migration. It was a place for intelligent people to have reasoned discussions. Let's make lemmy more like that.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 23 points 6 months ago

They don't, but that's not the point. Trump has suggested that various members of Biden's family and inner circle I have done wrong and should be prosecuted. This is preemptively heading that off, ensuring that there cannot be a witch hunt.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 5 points 6 months ago

That is actually not such an unreasonable assumption. Yes there are groups like Pink P who help arm and train LGBT folks. But someone who is LGBT is much more likely to be on the liberal side of things, urban rather than rural, and thus less exposure to civilian gun ownership.

There is also a lot of stigma among liberals. I have heard from a number of LGBT folks that it was far easier to come out to their Republican friends as gay than their Democratic friends as owning a gun- Republicans disapprove of gay people a lot less than Democrats disapprove of gun owners.

view more: ‹ prev next ›