For what it’s worth, that particular format war, the format backed by more porn studios (HD-DVD) actually lost to the one with less porn backing (Blu-ray). Personally I think that the PS3 tipped things over the edge.

Wasteful of what, though?

If a particular farm can produce 1000 kg of meat and 500kg of bones/other waste in a year by raising female meat chickens, would it be a waste to devote that farm to raising 500 kg of meat and 400 kg of bones from male egg chickens? In a sense, that’s a waste of the farm to produce half as much meat as it can produce through killing chicks.

It’s a philosophical difference on what weight to assign to the lives of chicks, adult chickens, other resources including human labor, etc. The lazy shortcut is to maximize return on dollar investment with no regard for any of those moral, ethical, and philosophical considerations, and that’s what most of the industry does today, but even if you shift to a new moral framework you’ll need to decide how to weight those things.

Dual purpose breeds for both egg laying and meat production are poorly optimized at either. So the industry has moved onto specialized breeds that are best at doing one of them.

Plus raising roosters together is much more logistically challenging than raising hens. So they’d need much more space and much more oversight/labor. So rather than devote some resources to raising males of breeds that are good for laying eggs, they’d rather devote those same resources to raising much more meat from females of meat breeds.

Well yeah the key is to acquire that passive income before you’re born, through your parents, so that you can pursue your dreams as soon as you’re old enough to form them.

Can we talk about how the graphic didn’t sort the results in any kind of chronological order? Today, then October 2023, then May 2024 is an insane way to present this data. Go either oldest first or newest first sort order.

It’s not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:

• Resolution
• Frame rate
• Quality
• Bit rate (file size)
• Encoding complexity
• Decoding complexity (which affects battery life of mobile devices viewing the content)
• Robustness for dropped or corrupted data

Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).

Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that’s 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that’s 100 terabytes of traffic saved.

But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they’re ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.

Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid’s birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it’s on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.

If a service doesn’t scale, it won’t be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.

Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.

We have tons of evidence that it happened but our models for explaining and predicting it are bad at consistently and reliably explaining everything we’ve already seen, and each new discovery seems to break those models even more.

The theory is the model trying to explain how it works. The fact, though, is that we have evidence showing that it did happen, even if we don’t have a unified theory of how it happened.

Imagine a car crash site, where the cars have definitely crashed, but everyone has different debates about what caused the crash. Imagine further that the specifics of any person’s explanation has a few inconsistencies with what we see. So we’d have the fact that a car crash happened, but lousy theories explaining how it happened.

So anybody who says dark matter doesn’t exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day.

There’s dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can “see”.

No, we have observations that are consistent with the existence of matter that does interact gravitationally with regular matter, but does not appear to interact with light or electromagnetic forces. It’s not like any matter we know about, other than the fact that it seems to have gravity.

General relativity works really well to explain matter in the solar system. Bigger than that, you have to use something else. The general consensus is that dark matter exists, but it’s not strictly proven, as there are alternative theories.

Then, even bigger than that, dark matter alone isn’t enough, you need dark energy to explain some observations, if you assume that cosmological constants are constant. If it turns out that they’re not truly universally constant, we might need to modify some theories (including the proposed existence of dark matter and dark energy).

Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does.

Not just the why, but also the what. We didn’t observe gravitational waves until 2015. People have proposed the existence of dark matter and dark energy because observed gravity doesn’t behave as our models would predict at certain cosmological scales.

The dude in charge wasn’t even a billionaire. He was just some founder whose company wasn’t doing all that well, financially. I think his peak net worth was something like $25 million, and that was mostly in stock in his doomed company. $25 million is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s also not quite enough money to explain the dude’s arrogance.

It’s just that their common scripts were from ABC, CBS, or NBC

That’s not true. The actual local news programming was entirely independent from the affiliated broadcast network. National news programming from the national news networks were carried, including more editorial/long form formats (60 minutes, Dateline, Nightline), but that was still independent from what the local stations were covering in their own newsrooms.

Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear. It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price. “[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.

Later in article:

Reality was more prosaic. Like most startups, OceanGate was in constant need of funds. Rush was trying to save money wherever he could. Interns, who made up around a third of the engineering team, were paid as little as $13 an hour. (When a manager pointed out in 2016 that Washington’s minimum wage was just $9.47 an hour, Rush responded, “I agree we are high. $10 seems fair.”) Rush also downgraded the sub’s titanium components from aerospace grade 5 quality to weaker and cheaper grade 3, says one former employee.

I knew they were being cavalier about safety, but didn’t realize they were penny pinching to this degree.

Oh don’t worry, malicious .exe files were all over the forums back then.

They’re flipping the Pickup Artist concepts on men, so that particular concept long predates app based dating and the FDS community. “High Value” is definitely a specific phrase used in discussing attracting women over 20 years ago.

OP is just republishing the comics of the day published on the official Far Side website.

Try running a line to every neighborhood, with using eniment domain.

Aren’t you just describing how roads were built to every home in every community?

Y’all motherfuckers need the compose key.

I’m volunteering at an animal hospital.

Animal Hospital?!?

The animals are the patients.

Oh. That makes sense.

Are committee meetings immune to runaway political madness? Who’s on the committee? How does the committee make decisions? Can those decisions be revisited?

I’m not convinced that today’s state of science is any different than in eras past, tracing all the way back to kings and wealthy patrons throwing their political and economic might behind their preferred scientific endeavors.

Science was political in non-capitalistic societies, as well. That’s the point of my second paragraph: science requires resources and however a society steers resources to productive uses, a scientist will need to advocate for their research in order for it to get done.