There isn't any meaningful competition.

I've tried Rumble myself both as a viewer and as a content producer (very small channel), and it's just... not even in the same league, barely on the same continent.

But there's always a chance a competitor suddenly appears when some VCs with deep pockets decide it's worth the gamble.

Absolutely not. The YouTube customers are the people buying ads on the platform.

YouTube is fleecing them by raising the number of ads they can bill them for, even though they're force-showing them to visitors who have very clearly expressed that they don't want ads and are more likely to hold the ads against the customers who paid for them than see them as an incentive to buy or as a positive brand-image thing.

The headline can only be understood *after* reading the submission.

I'll say it again - I use ReVanced because it has accessibility settings YouTube refuses to expose (default video speed, etc.)

I use it with my YouTube Premium subscription.

Google better not violate the ADA by blocking accessibility tools - that would be a criminal act.

And that's exactly what YouTube is doing.

YT is dying. Slowly, and it'll be around for years, but it's dying. The algorithm is starting to fail in very obvious ways, like recommending you the same videos constantly, despite you've scrolled past them a hundred times before. The content has become thinly veiled advertisement in addition to the actual advertisement they shove down your throat in increasingly aggressive manner. Most of the large content creators don't make much money anymore on YouTube and would probably jump ship the moment a competitor with a comparative audience size appears.

They're desperately trying to keep the cash cow alive somehow. And when you run out of ideas to innovate and make a good product, you start to ask yourself how you can fleece your customers for more.

> all these companies lock customers into binding arbitration

Don't assume this in the case of fraud or theft without speaking to a lawyer.

Usually the whole agreement is void if crimes are committed.

And you need to find a judge who agrees, not convnce the legal academy.

Yes, the damaged craft needed to be written off.

NASA beancounters and politicians took a risk. Astronauts died.

Again.

It was said at the time that the white paint on the early shuttle tanks served to also keep the foam together and reduce drag on it.

They scrapped it to save money and increase payload by a tiny fraction. But mostly to save money.

Engineers: this is necessary.
NASA Bean Counters: nah.

Every freakin' time.

It's true that there is the assumption that technology and innovation will reduce interstellar travel times drastically, the way they have reduce travel across an ocean from many weeks to a few hours.

I do agree that most people probably are off by at least two orders of magnitude in estimating realistic interstellar travel times. With technology we can predict as probably going to happen, we're still on the order of hundreds of years to even nearby star systems.

Unless some magical technology breaks the light-speed barrier, space will not be "another ocean".

However, star-faring civilisations are still possible. They wouldn't be any kind of space kingdom, but independent star systems that just happen to have a common ancestry. They would certainly communicate, and the technology for that basically exists already, at least in the nearby area ( And if we can only travel to a few of the nearest stars, would we want to? Is there anything there we want?

Humans do a lot of things simply because we can. And what is vast resources today isn't so much tomorrow. Just 200 years ago, all the gold in the world wouldn't have enabled you to fly to another country for a quick visit to relatives. King, pope, peasant, no difference, simply wasn't possible. Today, anyone with an average income can do it.

So in another 200 years, who's to say that a space ship to a nearby solar system is not well within the budget of a wealthy nation?

Cinemas essentially killed themselves in the early 2000s, at least over here in Europe. There used to be local cinemas everywhere, with one or at most 2 main halls and 2-4 small ones. The main hall or halls showed the Hollywood blockbuster of the month and the smaller ones the other movies, the ones that didn't fill the main hall.

Then all of those local cinemas started disappearing and were replaced with the massive cinemas we have today, with 10+ main halls and no small ones (or "small" ones the size that the main hall of local cinemas used to be). I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been there where these massive halls were filled to even somewhat near capacity. Most of the time you can pick wherever because there's 2-4 people per row. Make it 10% full if you want to be generous.

Of course that's not viable. They thought economy of scale. They thought they can have more efficiency than the local places by having fewer cashiers and popcorn sellers per customer. They thought on paper and not in the real world.

And to have even a chance to fill those halls, the only movies that they could show were blockbusters.

You are hung up on semantics. What you said "statistical context models that can form a vague approximation of reality without having the slightest understanding..." qualifies as AI.

The reason we "have AI" is because the definition of "AI" is extremely broad and includes algorithms that do these sorts of things. You seem to be thinking of something VERY narrow and specific, like "AGI" which we don't have. But AGI is different than AI.

The dictionary definition of AI is just something that mimics intelligent behavior, not something that is "actually intelligent." So, computer algorithms don't need to be intelligent or understand things in order to still qualify as "AI."

I know you want the term "AI" to mean something like "conscious, self-awared, thinking machine" but that is simply not what it means. And you pounding your fist and insisting that's what it means will not change this, because in English words get their meanings from popular use. And in popular use, the tech we have now qualifies as "AI."

Is it still forbidden for a local hospital to pay the ISP so a radiologist can get stat MRI's faster than his neighbor gets cat videos?

Some places have like 10 meg of bandwidth for the neighborhood. FCC may imagine everybody has gigabit FTTH.

I asked the developer to have some way for red/green colorblind people (9% of males, probably 8% of sysadmins) to be able to change the colors.

My electric bill is too damn high.

Interesting.

I'm building a solar battery from LTO cells and am now wondering about adding a simple square driver.

Gotta see if they're NMC or not. 20,000 cycle rating natively might go to 40,000?

Quote:
```
The length of relaxation period was
the same as current pulse, resulting in a Duty Ratio of 50% under PC charg-
ing. The average current for all three charging modes were kept the same
(1C, i.e., 2.2 A), thus the current during PC charging (2C, i.e., 4.4 A) was
twice as large as that during CC charging.
```