• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Eli5: Call company that installs solar panels. Give them a bunch of money (thousands to tens of thousands depending). Wait 20 years to get that money back on the lower energy bill. Replace the whole system because it is obsolete. Rince repeat.

    For real totally disconnecting from the power grid is a bad idea. That means you need a lot more equipment and battery storage. This increases the investment significantly, without much upside. It also prevents you from selling the power you generate but don’t need back to the power company (but depending on where you live this might not be a thing due to overproduction).

    Also depending on you latitude and local climate it may be nearly impossible to go fully off grid without a huge system. Where I live we have about 6 weeks of very little to no sun (low sun combined with a lot of clouds and snow). That means all the power you need during that time needs to be collected previously and stored. This during a time it’s cold af so the power usage is high (using heat pumps for warming the house, which is very efficient). This means a lot of batteries and a lot of solar panels, just to get through these 6 weeks. It could easily triple the costs or more, even if you have the room for it to begin with.

    I would analyse the power usage and see where you can save money on. 300 per month seems very high. Where I live energy is much more expensive than in the US and my bill is closer to 100 per month.

    Just call a company, have some panels installed for say 2500-5000 bucks depending on how much room you have on the roof and if you need upgrades to your power system. This will save you at least 50 per month on the bill. But be aware the ROI will be on the order of 10-15 years at least and more if you are unlucky. Saving energy is free and means money in your pocket right away.


  • For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another. Considering the compelling record evidence about the physical, mental, and emotional impact of unwanted pregnancies on the women who are forced by law to carry them to term (as well as on their other living children), the Court finds that, until the pregnancy is viable, a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and her health remains private and protected, i.e., remains her business and her business alone. When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then – and only then – should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it









  • Most of the bots on Lemmy have been well meaning, but ultimately annoying.

    The issue is there isn’t really a lot of traffic on Lemmy. And from the people that are here a lot of them are lurkers, just consuming, maybe upvoting once in a while, but that’s it. This leads bots that reply to a lot of comments/posts to become a large part of the traffic and thus the experience for the users. There isn’t enough for the bots to get lost in the noise. This also leads to the user experiencing the feeling of only interacting with bots, instead of other people. Most people commenting are looking for people interaction and get annoyed when they think they have such an interaction only for it to be a bot.

    Lemmy is also very focused of an audience at the moment, which leads to bots not really being necessary. People here are usually very tech savvy and know how to do most of the things. A bot that explains how to do things people already know how to do comes across as unneeded.




  • No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn’t matter where in the video you use those seconds.

    So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.

    In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.

    And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it’s just a matter of making it harder. If it’s beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it’s good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.



  • Yeah I’m thinking of a system like this:

    A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn’t a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a “credit” with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.

    One way to get around this is to have something in the background “watch” the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it’s available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There’s ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.

    The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they’ll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn’t anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn’t care if a percentage of users doesn’t watch the ads, as long as most of them do.

    My point was, there’s ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.


  • I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.

    This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.

    Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads.

    Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.





  • Oncoming drivers? I’m getting blasted by “cars” behind me. Fucking trucks or even lifted trucks with their headlights at my eye level. And it seems like lights are getting brighter as well, or people drive with their high beams on. My rearview mirror is auto dimming, which helps a lot. But since I drive the speed limit these trucks are swerving back and forth behind me, blinding me via the side mirrors.

    Man we really really need restrictions on size and weight of cars. It’s getting ridiculous out there.