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

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  • And yet (at least from an outsider perspective) libertarians are closer to democrats than republicans

    Republicans seem all about telling you what you can and can’t do (can’t get hrt, can’t get an abortion, can’t smoke weed, must marry and have children etc.) whereas both democrats and libertarians are largely “just live your life” but that could just be because all the american parties seem so financially right wing that they’re basically the same in that respect



  • As someone who works in advertising, that is partially true, but also not the complete story…

    Data brokers want you to believe that the more data you have the more likely your ads are to be successful, but in reality it’s not about the amount of data but the quality of the data. If you have someone who has looked at reviews of gym shoes/different models on different stores, then that data is pretty valuable as you can focus on getting them to buy from your store or try and advertise models at the top of their budget, which will likely lead to a higher ROI than just advertising on fitness forums (note it is super hard to get the balance between tipping people over the line to buy and advertising them something they were already going to buy/had already decided against - Google particularly are absolutely terrible at this, but also do evaluation in house, so they’ll misrepresent to advertisers that your ad which showed up one link above your non-sponsored link made 100% of the difference in getting the purchase). Similarly, if you have data that someone is active on a car audio forum and recently bought a specific model of car, you can advertise kits/speakers specifically to that car, which is better than just advertising “hey, we make audio upgrade kits for [specific car/cars in general] on a forum/related site”.

    This also makes advertising one of the few situations where using ML actually makes sense - there’s huge amounts of data (way more than a person can consider) to come in, and patterns which lead to good results (someone purchasing something) or bad results (someone not purchasing something). It’s not worth a human targeting every single microcategory, but if an ML model can pick up that advertising to (eg) people who have recently purchased cameras who are interested in triathlons and often visit areas with with high rainfall makes them more likely to buy your specific aftermarket lens hood, then it makes buying the ads so much more worth it and also lets you extrapolate onto other microcategories which may also have similar results, and if they don’t then that updates the model.

    Generally data is less useful for awareness campaigns (ie “next time you’re in the supermarket/in the business for x, buy our brand” type of campaign), especially if it’s already on a relevant site, but it’s still somewhat useful if someone is reading on a (trustworthy) news site or watching an ad-supported streaming service, however purchase data & activity data is still useful for showing more relevant ads, as while 90%+ of people on a fitness forum are going to be into fitness, I don’t think 90%+ of general site visitors or tv show viewers are going to be into anything specific enough to make it worth it to advertise it.


  • The reason they have to manipulate the audience is because people look for validation and so feel good when other people react to things in the same way as them. If another equally funny show has a laugh track and you don’t, yours will likely be less enjoyable to watch unless it’s a specific form of humour which benefits from not having a laugh track.

    Basically a laugh track can’t save a terrible show, but it can manipulate people into finding a mediocre show more enjoyable to watch, but a mediocre show will make people laugh organically at least a few times anyway.



  • more science facts, if you were to put earth as close as you could to saturn without them destroying each other, they would orbit each other as a binary planet rather than earth being a satellite of saturn

    essentially there’s no way for earth to stably orbit saturn as it’d have to be so close it’d be ripped apart








  • Yeah even gpt4o couldn’t keep track of encounters, run battles etc. in my case…

    I think if you wanted to do it mechanically consistently you’d probably need to integrate it into a vtt where you give it context and potentially fine-tune it to give quest related summaries & gming rather than just “stuff”


  • I made a mistake from remembering something I read a long time ago and corrected my comment accordingly. I also made it clear that I thought the sentence for the protesters was way too harsh, I just took issue at the words “peaceful protest” when people were injured as a fairly direct result of their actions.

    I definitely support JSO over the oil companies and whoever they pay off in government, but I don’t think claiming a protest is “peaceful” should be a “get out of jail free card”. Call it a justified protest or whatever, but the vast majority of what protesters call “peaceful protest” is actually not peaceful at all, as the actual peaceful protesters aren’t having to defend their agressive or unpeaceful actions.



  • I just looked up the car crashes and it was 3 people to hospital as a direct result of the traffic, I got casualties mixed up with deaths. I’ll edit my comment to say.

    There’s no exact figure on ambulances delayed, but given all the traffic it caused, but for heart attacks (all I could find good data on) the chances of surviving are halved in a 4 minute period (https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.120.017048), so factoring in all serious injuries there’s a decent chance that at least one outcome was severely affected if not changed to death as a result of an ambulance being delayed.





  • Yeah, of course it varies place to place but I think for the majority of at least somewhat developed countries and urban areas in less developed countries 50Mbps is a reasonable figure for “normal home internet” - even at 25Mbps you’re looking at 4½ hours for 50GB which is very doable if you leave it going while you’re at work or just in the background over the course of an evening

    Edit: I was curious and looked it up. Global average download is around 50-60Mbps and upload is 10-12Mbps.