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  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • A little ham-fisted, sure, but if you think it’s irrelevant you evidently didn’t take any time to actually think about it (you did also reply instantly, so I’ll take that over you lacking reading comprehension).

    I’ll simplify.

    Digital piracy is illegal copying of unlicenced content.
    Alice creates content.
    Alice licences the content to Bob.
    Bob decides to distribute the content with advertisements from Charlie.
    You download the content.
    Charlie does not pay Bob.
    You did not breach any licences.
    You did not pirate the content.

    And just to further clarify, Alice is the person who made a video, Bob is Youtube, Charlie is an advertiser. Your argument is not an ad is piracy if “the advertisement company [hasn’t] paid the content creator.” The advertiser pays the distribution company, and the relationship between those two companies is irrelevant. The advertiser failing to pay does not retroactively turn you into a pirate.

    The whole argument is pointless in the first place, it’s irrelevant whether or not you consider ad blocking to be technically piracy. A sensible adblock argument would be around the ethics of manipulation versus payment, or security versus whatever it is advertisers want. Arguing semantics doesn’t matter.



  • Dark matter might not even exist, all we know is that gravity-based predictions break down after a certain point. Dark matter is the just the most popular proposed solution where you essentially just add extra undetectable mass until it works. The distant second is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) or some variation of it, which is where you try to tweak the theories to fit observations instead. It has the same problem as dark matter where we keep coming up with better experiments which always fail to find anything.

    There’s a similar problem at the opposite end of the scale spectrum too; quantum mechanics doesn’t play nice with our current understanding of gravity leading to the search for the “theory of everything”. This is why I personally lean towards the idea that it’s our theories that are wrong and not an undetectable mass, but this isn’t my field so my opinion isn’t worth much (especially since a majority actually working in the field lean towards dark matter as far as I can tell).







  • I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money.

    See that’s your entire problem right there, you’re in sales. Your incentive is to drain every penny you can out of customers through useless up-sells and selling hardware to get the service they’re already paying for.

    You literally just argued that if your 600mbps router only supplies an 80mbps connection then your 600mbps connection is 80mbps. And speed isn’t divided equally by the number of devices connected either, that’s just ridiculous. The impact of a connected but idle device is minimal. Also, why would you need 600mbps for only 4 devices? You could stream 4k video on all four devices 24/7 and you’re still not using even a quarter of that bandwidth; you’re looking at a recommendation of only 15mbps to 25mbps per user for a 4k-viable internet connection.

    Here’s a ping to my stock ISP-supplied router on another floor and three rooms away via wifi:

    --- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
    611 packets transmitted, 611 received, 0% packet loss, time 623436ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.647/0.779/2.105/0.110 ms
    

    It’s obviously impossible to improve a 0% packet loss, switching to a wired connection would be a considerable cost for minimal benefit (though admittedly that ping is unusually good, I’d normally expect slightly over 1ms average). I’m also getting over my advertised speeds according to fast.com and speedtest.net despite being on wifi and running through Mullvad so I suppose the problem might just be that I’m not using whichever scummy ISP you work for.

    I have a home office and have work from home (or hybrid) for pretty much my entire career, even before WFH was normalised. I can assure you a wired connection is not a necessity to work from home.


  • So the ISP isn’t to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn’t for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?

    The “wire everything” approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It’s only worth the time and money to wire everything if you’ve identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don’t just do it by default.







  • To me that seems like a demonstration of why it would work. Allowing the people living there to buy the house from the government moved housing from the hands of government into private ownership. Allowing the people living there to buy the home from a corporate landlord will remove housing from corporate landlords, which is exactly what’s needed if we want people to be able to afford housing. People buying the home they live in from their landlord won’t remove council housing.

    It’ll probably drive down house prices but that’s kind of the point. As a private homeowner I’d lose out on some potential money if I ever moved so that’s not ideal, but that’s a fair “loss” if it means other people can afford somewhere to live.