• 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • In theory, the rich can just continue paying off each other spending money on rich people stuff. 80% of the economy consisting of activities like robot-staffed billionaire-owned construction companies making and selling super-yachts to oil billionaires, who made their fortune selling fuel to space tourism companies ferrying billionaire designer bag heiresses to the Moon. The rest of us can starve to death and the economy won’t even blink.



  • I agree that OP is in the best position to report the crime to the police - they are closest to the police station, they have video evidence, they literally know who the thief is - but it should not be their responsibility! OP has done nothing wrong and there are no measures they could have taken to prevent this crime (other than not shopping online at all). If OP gets a police report, OP is taking up the task of being the victim, and then BestBuy has no legal obligation to refund them at all, other than out of the kindness of their heart. Rather, BestBuy is the victim in this crime, same as if the item was stolen off the shelf at their warehouse and scanner records forged. It is their responsibility to file a police report, if they want the numbers in their system to add up. Only then could they ask OP to kindly provide the video evidence to help them out, and they’d be lucky if OP would give it to them, having no obligation to do so.


  • Yes! It’s an olympics game of mental gymnastics where everyone - BestBuy, DoorDash, OP, the police - try to offload responsibility onto someone else. However, a crime WAS committed. Someone is the victim. The victim is the one who was deprived of property/money and will not have access to it until/unless the thief is caught and property recovered. BestBuy thinks OP is the victim, since the item was stolen off (not)their porch. OP thinks BestBuy should be the victim, since OP had no involvement in organizing the delivery. DoorDash could also take up responsibility of being the victim, since it was their (not)employee that stole from them.

    If OP goes to the police now, they would be losing the mental gymnastics by accepting the status of the victim. BestBuy would never refund them in this case. It is in OP’s best interest to pursue the chargeback first. If OP succeeds in the refund or the chargeback, then BestBuy will have no package and no money, so BestBuy would be the victim. Then it will be BestBuy’s responsibility to report the crime.


  • The “libertarian paradise” idea is that as far as Best Buy is concerned, the item was delivered. If the DoorDash delivery driver happened to turn right around and steal the package, that’s a separate crime and a matter for the police to deal with, same as if anyone else had stolen it. And it’s OP’s fault for not picking the box up sooner, during the 3 seconds it was sitting on the porch. The porch that wasn’t even theirs. So anyway, the libertarian solution is for OP to contact police to track down the thief and either recover the stolen item or sue the thief for monetary compensation. Best Buy is innocent and no refund is coming. DoorDash is innocent too because they contracted with an independent contractor to deliver the item, and what the contractor does after the item has been delivered is not their responsibility.








  • 6 months, during high school over the winter. Shower was broken (water would only come out perfectly hot or cold, nothing in between) and parents/landlord would not fix it. I kinda just gave up on it. Nothing bad came out of it. Nobody at home or at school ever said anything or even noticed, as far as I could tell. No, they were not just being polite. I watched everyone closely, as much as an experiment of personal curiosity as anything else, and there were no signs of disapproval, nobody had a clue. I suffered no social consequences whatsoever. Wearing a new set of clothes every day alone was sufficient to stay clean.

    Can’t decide whether I just have one of those Asian genes that make you not smell, or whether Americans as a culture are psychotically brainwashed by soap companies’ propaganda to the point where even the idea of “spending more than 1 day away from shower” is worse than death for them. Never used deodorant either (other than to try it out - just makes me feel gross, sticky, and smelly). Imagine how much money those deodorant companies are missing out on me over a lifetime!



  • I know Lemmy hates AI, but this actually would be a perfect use for it. The problem is the idea of what an ad is. Yes, you could try to use secondary characteristics like image color or sound normalized volume (WhyTF do youtube ads still sound 3x louder than content? are we living in cable era again?), but they would be error-prone for any content more visually intense than a podcast. They would also not capture sponsorblock content like “I love showing you all these foreign countries but what I love even more is having my internet connection secure” that match the video flow. A crowdsourced lookup table of all known ad clip fingerprints would go a long way, until ad videos themselves start being AI-generated on the fly for that sweet personalization revenue.

    No, what I really want is to distill the idea of what I want to see into an AI and have it filter out what I don’t want to see for me. I know an ad when I see one, so AI can too. Pre-roll/mid-roll ads? Gone. Sponsorblock content? Gone. Like and subscribe? Skipped as if it didn’t exist. Virtual billboards on the sidelines of sporting events? Overlayed with kittens. Idiocracy banners squeezing the video from either side? Cropped and rescaled. Watermarks? Excised and content-aware-filled.

    The last frontier is when the content itself is secretly an ad, imprinting upon you some idea or point of view. You’ll have to watch out for that one on your own.


  • Ah, I can see OP’s line of thought now:

    • you have a point A’ on a plane and a random point A
    • you find a midpoint B and draw a sphere around it. A and A’ are now a diameter of the sphere
    • pick two random points D and C at the intersection of the plane and the sphere
    • by the “triangle inscribed in a circle/sphere where one side is a diameter” rule, such a triangle must be a right triangle
    • therefore both angles ACA’ and ADA’ are right angles
    • thus C and D both satisfy the conditions of the initial question (with all points renamed: A=P, (C or D)=H, A’=A)
    • OP never defined what a projection is, it being “4th grade math”, but one of the requirements is being unique
    • C and D cannot both be the projection, therefore the initial question must be answered “false”: just because AH is perpendicular to PH doesn’t make H a projection.

    I like treating posts as puzzles, figuring out thread by thread WTF they are talking about. But dear OP, let me let you know, your picture and explanation of it are completely incomprehensible to everyone else xD. The picture is not an illustration to the question but a sketch of your search for a counterexample, with all points renamed of course, but also a sphere appearing out of nowhere (for you to invoke the inscribed-triangle-rule, also mentioned nowhere). Your headline question is a non-sequitur, jumping from talking about 4D (never to be mentioned again) into a ChatGPT experiment, into demanding more education in schools. You complain about geometry being hard but also simple. The math problem itself was not even your question, yet it distracted everyone else from whatever it is you were trying to ask. If you ever want to get useful answers from people other than crazed puzzleseekers like me, you’ll need to use better communication!


  • In the ultimate, you’d need to do something like run a headless browser in a virtual machine, have it play out and record the entire video, then use something like AI to splice out the ad segments and distracting elements (a souped-up sponsorblock will work for a while, but eventually ads will be injected into the raw video stream at random intervals), and present the pristine finished content to you. Basically we are going to re-invent TiVo all over again xD.

    In worst case, you can’t start watching until the pre-roll ad timers expire. This is how adblocking works on Twitch streams currently - you can only see a purple screen even if you block the ads.

    And yes, the headless browser will need to use AI for human-like mouse movement and to solve captchas - basically whatever state-of-the-art technologies spammers and scrapers are already currently using.

    Google is anticipating this future and is trying to implement and force hardware-based DRM for web video before then.





  • It’s a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked “no vids for u” message, you’d get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being “buggy” and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no “smoking gun” blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.

    The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.