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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • In three years, this went from a very niche behavior to an absolute mainstream part of the market

    It’s because of the fracturing of the marketplace. For a while there were only a few major Film/TV streaming services. Netflix and Hulu, then HBO and Amazon, and a handful of niche or genre platforms.
    Then around the pandemic time, every network and their mother decided to pull their licensing to start their own streaming platform or several. The platforms all cost as much or more as before, but you need more of them to watch the different IP you are interested in.

    What the studios don’t realize (or won’t publicly admit) is that instead of replacing cable TV, they have effectively recreated the video rental industry.





  • ELI5 answer?

    In the conventional calendar, there wasn’t a year zero and it wasn’t skipped. Zero is the moment in time that we use to begin counting time.

    Think of an elementary school style number line: …-3_-2_-1_0_1_2_3… Each number is one year apart. This makes the numbers measure something like Age. If you are 3 years old, you can count 3 years between 0 and 3.

    But a year is not an Age. It is the span of time between ages, and the years we name are actually the spaces between the numbers on the number line. So the first year (1 AD/CE) is the first space after zero (between 0 and 1), and the first negative year (1 BC/BCE) is the first space before the 0 (between -1 and 0).

    Then there is the astronomical calendar, which does have a year zero. They get this by naming the year (the space on the number line) after the number to the right side of the space on the number line.



    1. It’s established
    2. It is a general purpose platform: it has personal posting, business listings, messaging, groups, communities, photos, news, clip format video, live streaming, p2p sales, business sales, event coordination and advertising, payment processing and cash sharing, games…
      Most other platforms do one or several of those things much better than FB, but FB is good enough for lots of people. It’s a one stop shop, and it does a fair job at cross pollinating the various aspects of its platform. It has enough stuff to keep to keep users engaged even if their interest wanes from one or more particular platform components.


  • Yes. Theoretically they can drive people away and make more money if the people they haven’t driven away spend more for less goods.

    Let’s imagine on a normal lunch hour I sell 100 burgers at lunch for $4. If I raised my price to $4.50, I’d only sell 80 burgers. If I raised the price to $5 then I’d only sell 50 burgers If a burger costs me $3 then I normally make $1 a burger, but at the middle price I make $1.50, and $2 at the high price.

    100 burger x $1 = $100 profit
    80 burgers x $1.5 = $120 profit
    50 burgers x $2 = $100 profit

    The trick is figuring out how changing price will affect demand without pissing all your potential customers off. Restaurants already do dynamic pricing with Happy Hour and Taco Tuesdays etc. They give a “discount” to entice more people to come in when they are less busy.










  • Wow. that’s all kinds of incorrect

    It’s not a discriminatory bias or even one that can really have anything done about it.

    It is absolutely data training bias. Whether it is the data that ML was trained on or the data that programmers were trained on is irrelevant. This is a problem of the computer not recognizing that a human is a human

    It’s purely physics.

    It is not. See below:

    Is it harder to track smaller objects or larger ones?

    No, not if the scale of your hardware is correct. A 3’ tall human may be smaller than a 6’ one, but it is larger than a 10” traffic light lens or a 30” stop sign. The systems do not have quite as much trouble recognizing those smaller objects. This is a problem of the computer not recognizing that the human is a human.

    Is it harder for an optical system to track something darker. In any natural scene.

    Also no. If that were the case, then we would have problems with collision bias against darker vehicles, or not being able to recognize the black asphalt of the road. Optical systems do not rely on the absolute signal strength of an object. they rely on contrast. A darker skin tone would only have low contrast against a background with a similar shade, and that doesn’t even account for clothing which usually covers most of a persons body. Again, this is a problem of the computer not recognizing that the human is a human.

    smaller and darker individuals have less signal. Less signal means lower probability of detection,

    No, they have different signals. that signal needs to be compared to the background to determine whether it exists and where it is, and then compared to the dataset to determine what it is. This is still a problem of the computer not recognizing that the human is a human.

    It’s the same reason a stealth bomber is harder to track than a passenger plane. Less signal.

    Close, but not quite.

    1. In this case the “less signal” only works because it is compared to a low signal background, creating a low contrast image. It is more like camouflage than invisibility. Radar uses a single source of “illumination“ against a mostly empty backdrop so the background is “dark”, like looking up at the night sky with a flashlight.
    2. The less signal is not because the plane is optically dark. It has a special coating that absorbs some of the radar illumination and a special shape that scatters some of the radar illumination, coming from that single source, away from the single point sensor. Humans of any skin tone are not specially designed to absorb and scatter optical light from any particular type of light source away from any particular sensor. Even at night, a vehicle should have a minimum of 2 headlights as sources of optical illumination (as well as streetlights, other vehicles. buildings, signs and other light pollution) and multiple sensors. Furthermore, the system should be designed to demand manual control as it approaches insufficient illumination to operate.

    This is a problem of the computer not recognizing that the human is a human.