• 2 Posts
  • 269 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2021

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  • with no changes to the salary they received during the production stage

    But this just isn’t how it works. These people aren’t paid minimum wage. This will definitely be played in salary negotiation as part of the compensation and will almost certainly result in less base salary.

    So now the studio is shifting some risk onto the workers.


  • I don’t know if I really buy “not doing much of the work”. Middle management maybe but to own and run a company is serious work. Especially starting a company is huge risk. So if you take the risk you get a lot of the reward.

    IMHO ways to help even this out are:

    1. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Keep that progressive tax curve going (and not regressing). I think these people do deserve to be rewarded, but up to a point. Honestly I think the tax rate should approach 100% as you approach the very highest percentile of income.
    2. Universal basic income. Make it so that people don’t need to work. They get to choose to work when the compensation is worth it to them. This makes explotation much harder and makes it much easier for people to negotiate fair compensation (whether that is salary, profit sharing, a mix or something else).

    I would also like to see some way to change the natural goal of a company from “make as much money as possible” to “bring as much value to people as possible”, but I think these two things would be a good start.


  • I would be a bit careful with this.

    1. It is incredibly hard to define each worker’s contribution to any particular profit.
    2. It means that the worker’s compensation depends on the overall success of the product which may have little to do with their work (for example bad management tanking a project or it getting cancelled before release).
    3. Accounting can move profits around in a lot of cases. Look at how every movie makes no money.

    In many ways having it be a transaction (work x hours get paid x dollars) is nice. I means that the employee knows exactly what they are getting upfront.




  • I think this is a little confused. Unless your WiFi is open someone seeing your network can’t find out what the WAN IP is.

    And getting your ip can connect the people directly to your box

    “Connect” is a strong word here. Yeah, they can send traffic at it. But that shouldn’t do anything.

    A trace route command to this IP could return intermediate equipment of your isp, helping to pinpoint your town or even your street.

    This is the most reasonable concern. Depending on your ISP and location the IP itself or packet tracing you can get a pretty good idea of the user’s location.



  • I’m pretty surprised that all of the audio formats work. I’m not so surprised that the TV has h265, although maybe a bit surprised that it is exposed to the browser. The container support is also pretty surprising. Unless your MKVs are so simple that they are effectively WEBM.

    Or maybe it pops the link out of the browser into a dedicated media player which has decent codec support.

    iDevices do expose h265 in the browser, but the container support is still a bit surprising. But then again WEBM is basically MKV, so maybe that is why it tends to work.


  • In China there is no such thing as a throwaway number (at least outside of black markets). All numbers require ID to acquire.

    For the US it would be a bit different. VOIP numbers do exist but they are often also blocked by services (this isn’t black and white but there are services that will quite accurately map numbers into ranges like home/cell/business/VoIP).

    But of course the assumption would be that if they start requiring phone numbers for WiFi access the logical next step would be to make all numbers traceable to humans.


  • There are a handful of common reasons.

    1. The client doesn’t support the formats. Browser clients are notoriously picky not supporting some common video (for example few browsers support h265 and it isn’t generally considered web-safe) and audio formats. But embedded devices may also cause trouble if they don’t have enough CPU to do non-accelerated playback and don’t have hardware support for the codec used.
    2. Playing at a lower bitrate. In that case you can transcode at the fly.
    3. Remuxing. This is things like the moov atom where the actual codecs are supported but not the container or exact packaging of the file.

    But yeah, especially if you are using a player with wide format support you may not need it.




  • IMHO this isn’t really worth it.

    1. x264 is very fast at lower profiles. Especially if you aren’t streaming across the internet often the size hit from the fast profiles is fine. Even if you are streaming over the internet it is probably fine. Getting a slightly faster CPU will also get you super far and is more useful to have lying around than a GPU as it will benefit most things that you do on the server. And worst-worst case a bit of CPU usage isn’t going to hurt much of the things that he is running (except maybe a game server if people are playing at the same time and you are really maxing out all of your cores).
    2. Integrated GPUs are fine for a handful of concurrent streams. Especially the Intel ones which have amazing media engines.
    3. Even if you are going for a dedicated GPU I would go with an Intel ARC. They are way better at media encoding and cost less.
    4. You can always add a GPU later. Wait until you have a need and are seeing problems without.





  • I’m struggling to see how this actually made money. Because presumably the customer is paying for the delivery (as well as the food that was never ordered). So the fraudsters would just be paying themselves in a complicated way. My best guess is one of the following:

    1. DoorDash is subsidizing orders so much that this is profitable overall (the amount they pay the driver is more than the customer pays) seems unlikely.
    2. DoorDash is paying the driver multiple times but only charging the customer once. But if this was the case how was this obvious accounting issue never noticed? Shouldn’t the books come out even in the end?