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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • To be fair, in that specific case it is almost certainly not YouTube directly censoring the phrase. They aren’t known to do any kind of editing like that on uploaded videos.

    What is happening is the person that uploaded that video censored themselves…because YouTube’s policy around monetization. They’ll demonetize videos with certain no-no words. Part of that is YouTube and part of that is advertisers demanding their ads not be placed on content that they find objectionable.

    Indirectly, YouTube and advertisers are censoring our content. A lot of it is also TikTok, which will ban you for no-no words. This seeps over into YouTube where something that might be fine on YouTube but is banned on TikTok gets censored anyway in case it gets clipped for TikTok.

    Genuinely the power TikTok and it’s advertisers have over how we communicate is pretty scary. Imagine how often you hear “unalive” instead of “suicide” these days. “Pdf” (or others) instead of “pedophile.” The list goes on.


  • Instead of pretending One Man With A Gun is going to do something

    I used to agree with this train of thought, why be armed when the government has tanks?

    But the realities of the past several years have shown us that an armed rebellion can be significantly more powerful. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, look at Myanmar today where the rebel groups are literally 3D printing carbines. A guerilla group with small arms can put serious pressure on a modern military. Will lots of them die? Probably. Will they “win”? Probably not, but they could easily wear down the enemy with attrition. When you need to move a couple dozen men with rifles it’s an entirely different game than coordinating 12 tanks and 500 men, you can employ completely different tactics. Especially on your home turf that you know inside and out.

    Is an armed rebellion happening anytime soon? I sure hope not. But the threat that an armed populace can at the least put some serious hurt on a military/government is a deterrent to tyranny. Just the possibility of it is a huge deterrent, compared to authoritarian countries where citizens aren’t armed and get run over by tanks.

    I’m not saying gun violence isn’t a huge problem, but saying armed citizenry is zero deterrent is just factually untrue.


  • my vision for a peaceful future isn’t a perpetual Mexican standoff. Nor do I like the idea of political power and representation being directly proportional to one’s intent and capability to do violence.

    The unfortunate reality is that all political power is derived from one’s capability to do violence, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. I pay my taxes because if I don’t the federal government will forcefully take the money from me, or my other possessions. Yeah, arresting someone is “nonviolent” until that person just says “I’d prefer not to.” Forcing someone to pay a fine is nonviolent until they say “I’d prefer not to.”

    It’s the only motivator the government or any body of real power has at the end of the day. It’s a bunch of social norms and agreements all backed by the understanding that you will be made to comply by force otherwise.







  • This is a pretty big overstatement.

    DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span.

    This has not been true for years. SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs except in write-intensive applications (and even then… It really depends on what exact models you are comparing). SSDs have a life-span mostly talked about in terms of TBW (terabytes written) rather than years for a reason, if they’re powered on and not written too they’ll last as long as or longer than a hard drive. (Note: Powered on regularly, SSDs can lose data if stored unpowered for a long time (months)). If you just have an archival drive you’re not constantly erasing and rewriting data to, an SSD is a great choice. Reads also barely affect the lifespan of at all, so you can still access the data you want to protect (hell, write-lock the drive even and it’ll last decades if powered on).

    What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive

    This is just plain silly. Yes, the mechanical wear of the drives spinning up and down means they’ll die faster. But we’re still talking MTBF measured in years. And replacing a hard drive that’s barely used every single year? That’s not just bad advice it’s creating e-waste for no reason. Also note drives fail on a bathtub curve… If you have two good drives that lasted a year, you are increasing your chances of a failure by swapping them for two brand new drives… The best thing you can do for your hard drives is to not power cycle them constantly, any typical usage is fine. Also mechanical parts can actually wear out from disuse as well. Even archival services don’t go to these extremes you’re recommending.

    If you really care about saving your data follow 3-2-1. 3 copies of your data (live, archival (external HDD or similar), off-site), two-different forms of media (HDD, SSD, cloud (yes cloud is an HDD or SSD but they have their own redundancy)), one off-site (in the event of a fire etc.)

    Honestly 99.9% of consumers would be fine with a 2-2-1 scheme, 2 copies (live and off-site/cloud), 2 forms of media, 1 off-site. If you don’t trust Google or don’t want to pay for cloud storage, set up a server with redundant disks at a friend’s house. Just keeping a second copy on a server with redundancy is plenty of fail over for most use cases. 3-2-1 is for data centers and businesses (and any cloud service you rent from will follow 3-2-1…) Let’s not overcomplicate how difficult it is to keep data intact, if I tell someone to buy a new 12tb HDD each year they’re just gonna give up on keeping it safe.



  • I’ve heard that, but once I tried to refund a game at 3 hours and got nothing but an automated response (denial) everytime I requested a refund.

    In this specific case it was actually a game I played 2 hours of during a free weekend approximately 4 years before buying it, played one hour after buying it to see if it had gotten better, decided it hadn’t and refunded it. But Steam counts free weekend playtime towards the refund window…

    If there’s any actual way to ensure a human reviews it, that’d be neat. 100% it was automatically denied by some code just checking my playtime and seeing it was past two hours.






  • You’d think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space

    Someone above posted an article saying they aren’t actually. But you’d be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They’re highly compressible since they’re just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that’s the idea)