I feel like there is a real possibility of a federation schism where a bunch of server admins get together and defederate with the rest of the servers. In that case you either need two accounts on both side of the schism or just be blind to whatever is happening over there.

I’m not sure what you were trying, but this works for me:

Never use hardware encoding. That is intended for real time transcoding. There are not many settings that work since it is just sending the file to the video card and letting it do its thing.

Slower is better. If you set the software encoder to very slow it will produce an output that is very high quality per megabyte. I generally don’t care if it takes twice as long to encode it as to watch it. I queue it up and let it run over night.

Choose the right codec. I like 10 bit HEVC, because I know it will work on the clients I play it from. When you rip a DVD using MakeMKV, the video will be MPEG-2, it was designed in the 1990’s and converting the file to a modern codec will save a lot of space. I don’t reencode 4K UHD rips much since I don’t want to mess with losing the hdr or other color features that I like in watching those files.

Audio tracks: I will rip out audio for languages I don’t speak, or desctiptive audio track, but go out of my way to label things like director commentaries. I don’t reencode the audio tracks at all, you won’t save much disk space by messing with them compared to the video tracks.

A few months back I got adblocker notifications while using UBlock Origin. I did the update and refresh and it would work again.

I would also recommend “To be or not to be” by Ryan North. It is a choose your own adventure version of the play. Well worth your time.

Nobody is saying that tariffs are income taxes, but I pay a bunch of taxes each year that are not income taxes. I have sales taxes at stores, property taxes a couple times a year, and hidden ones like gas taxes. Now we are going to pay more import taxes so that the ultra rich don’t have to pay as much capital gains. To call them anything else is lying to yourself.

A tariff is a sales tax, pure and simple. Sales taxes hit lower income people harder than the rich because they have to put a higher percentage of their income into it.

Most asbestos is safe, until you need to dispose of it. You could make a glove that is encased in another material so you get the insulation with no health hazard, but once it gets worn or thrown in a landfill it will be a problem.

Didn’t the people purchasing them have to sign a document saying they would not resell them to a 3rd party? Or did that not happen?

My point is you have to pick SOME server to host your account. You are right that most communities are accessible from most servers, but that is where it becomes confusing for someone who just wants to look at memes for a specific fan base.

That’s what that Star Trek server did.

The problem with that is that you need to make a user on one of those servers. Do you make it on the politics one, or the games one? What happens 3 months later when you realize the server you picked on a whim is full of assholes and gets defederated?

Do you think an average user at that point would move their subscriptions to a new account or will they get annoyed at the concept?

It doesn’t matter. You check the first of each group and pick the smallest, then compare the one you didn’t pick with the next one of the other group. In your example, you would pick all of the ones from the right side and once it is empty, just add all the ones on the left.

When you merge two sorted lists, you only have to compare the first element of each, since you can trust that all of the other elements are bigger. All the steps before that are there to make sure that is true.

On MacOS you get a choice when you format the drive.

To be honest, that seems like it should be the one thing they are reliably good at. It requires just looking up info on their database, with no manipulation.

That’s not how they are designed at all. LLMs are just text predictors. If the user inputs something like “A B C D E F” then the next most likely word would be “G”.

Companies like OpenAI will try to add context to make things seem smarter, like prime it with the current date so it won’t just respond with some date it was trained on, or look for info on specific people or whatnot, but at its core, they are just really big auto fill text predictors.

I live in the states and haven’t seen a smoking section of a restaurant or bar since around the turn of the century. There are ones which have smoking tables outside too close to the door, which sucks.

It’s funny watching old movies like Airplane where he was buying a plane ticket and she asked “smoking or non-smoking” and you remember that people used to smoke while trapped in an airplane.

The network effect is real. You can have the best, most awesomely-designed social media platform ever and it will be useless if you are the only person on it.

You can try to convince all your contacts to switch away from whatever app is causing the most evil today, but you also have to convince all of your contacts’ contacts and all of theirs as well.

I live in Washington State and see them all the time. They are definitely purchased as a status symbol more than for its usefulness.

It reminds me of when the Hummer first came out, and all you saw was rich people like Arnold driving them around.

The SUV is really just a mini van. Mini vans got a bad rep, which I think is a shame because I LOVED my Honda Odyssey. It drives like a car, and has a 3rd row that you can actually sit adults in. Also, with all the seats down, and middle seats removed, you could carry a LOT. We fit two full sofas from Ikea back there. It was a tight fit, but it worked great.

For whatever reason people don’t like the idea of mini vans, so they made the suv because TRUCK. We replaced the Odyssey with a Subaru Ascent, and that is great too, it has all wheel driving, and a lot more bells and whistles than the old Odyssey. The 3rd row is not nice to sit in as an adult though, and I miss the sliding doors, those were great in tight spaces.

They just need to put more sliding doors on these vehicles they expect people to get in and out of the back seats.

So we can do this all again in 2124 then.