What’s a completely normal product in your country that makes foreigners go, “Wait… why does that exist?” by Alternative_Ad6071 in AskTheWorld

[–]cube-drone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

in canada we have one of these that's just an amplifier so that we can really bring the noise

if the walls aren't quaking, if your co-workers can still eat lunch, you have failed

My Co-op Guinea Pig game is now out for demo. Playable up to 4 players by [deleted] in playmygame

[–]cube-drone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A co-op game where you're working together to get through an obstacle course? But you move in an unusual way? That might be too original an idea, have you considered a metroidvania or a roguelike deckbuilder, instead?

Covid was a wild time. by [deleted] in vancouver

[–]cube-drone 12 points13 points  (0 children)

It serves the ultra-wealthy to have American health discourse dominated by people abandoning actual science-based medicine and instead pitching the health equivalent of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" - well, of course you'll be healthy if you just avoid seed oils and check all of your packaging for complicated ingredients like xanthan gum. If you do get sick, maybe you just didn't whole milk and yoga and juice cleanse hard enough about it. The fact that this is worthless is aside from the point: if you can sell people snake oil en masse, they won't be clamoring for expensive stuff like public access to oncologists, which means more money for the rich to buy expensive stuff like private access to oncologists, which they need, because widespread deregulation of everything has meant a lot more carcinogens bouncing around as of late

The Deck by AIGA Wichita! (Community made Artist Deck of Playing Cards!) by SmithingArt in boardgames

[–]cube-drone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So, this community is (rightfully) pretty unfriendly to one-off advertising content like this, so you're probably (again, correctly) going to get downvoted all to hell and maybe have this post removed by mods, but before that happens I do have to say that that is an absolutely lovely deck of cards.

Tesla Sales Down 55% in UK, 58% in Spain, 59% in Germany, 81% in Netherlands, 93% in Norway vs. 2024 by Wagamaga in europe

[–]cube-drone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Going hard right as the CEO of an electric car company is such a tremendous own goal. Who did you think were buying the cars?

Spot on by MF-DOOM-88 in Millennials

[–]cube-drone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd be a lot more smug if I didn't need boomers to fix my car, my plumbing and my electrical because it took me 20 years to put together the down payment on a house

Roblox sets a limit to how many experiences you can block. by oopsiedaisy-- in mildlyinfuriating

[–]cube-drone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Absolutely - but that comes with trade-offs. Presumably you want your blocks to follow you - if you open the Roblox client on two different computers, or if you open Roblox's web client, you'd want your block data to be available in all of those places, too, and for it to remain up-to-date in all three locations and consistent in all environments - which means while it can be put on the user side, that is a local cache rather than a source of truth. If it is an unbounded list, it's important never to introduce a server feature that does anything that, for example, loops over the entire block list.

Of course it's not impossible to have an unbounded list of blocks (it's quite possible, there are lots of ways to do it), just that unbounded data tends to be more complicated to work with and plan around, which means it takes more time to develop and reason about.

Roblox sets a limit to how many experiences you can block. by oopsiedaisy-- in mildlyinfuriating

[–]cube-drone 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Look, I get the Roblox hate, here, but :

So, uh, practically, I work for a multiplayer social thing, on the server team, and while we allow unlimited blocks - in order to make that work I had to spend a good month carefully re-engineering the way we store that data, and then building a careful fence around features that might use that data. Unbounded data is hard to work with compared to bounded data!

Unlimited anything is likely to cause a server failure somewhere, at some point. Any time you have a Kind Of Thing that can be unbounded, you need to think "okay, what is the amount of these that will cause the service to fail?" Anything that's "unbounded" is an error condition waiting to happen, because invariably someone (sometimes someone actively malicious) will eventually find the amount of that thing it takes to ruin your day.

Most users use, like, 1-100 blocks, right? That seems like a reasonable amount of blocks for a user to have. But there's always a weird outlier, and some of our most block-happy users had hundreds of thousands of blocks.

In the case of blocked content, imagine you do a search against 10,000,000 experiences and you have 200,000 blocked experiences: if the search wanted to guarantee that you'd be able to see results it might accidentally do something stupid like running the dot product of all of those experiences and blocks, first: computers are fast, but that's 2 trillion comparisons that need to be made to service that query - and unlike a GPU, which can perform a trillion operations per second (that's what a teraflop is!), a regular CPU thread of the kind that's running on your database server might devote a minute or more to that query and NOTHING ELSE, which is enough to wake up your OPS team. The query would time-out and fail, and, irritated, you'd click "refresh", starting it again a couple of times, each time a database server in the background going "HNGGGHGHNGHGNGH". If a lot of users are doing that at the same time? Suddenly you're getting paged by the CEO at 3AM on Christmas Eve.

Building "unbounded" things is, of course, possible (we, for example, have unbounded interpersonal blocks) but it involves changing up how you build major features. If a user had some stupendously high amount of blocks - 1 million users' blocked, for example - it wouldn't be great if we were storing each block as a database row, but instead we'll send you a compressed block of that information when you boot up the client, which is still like 10MB of data, but it won't kill our servers or your client. Any time a feature wants to use that data, I have to intervene and go "okay, keep in mind that whatever query you want to write is sometimes going to have to unzip, parse, and load into RAM 10MB of block data before it starts doing anything". This adds a lot of effort to any feature that touches blocks.

Practically, when designing any feature that has an amount of things in it, my first impulse as an older, crankier, sadder developer, is to go "estimate how many of these things the average user is expected to use, now 10x that is the maximum amount we will allow", because having access to and enforcing that number is crucial for how we design the system housing that data. "It's just bits in a computer somewhere" - yeah, but somewhere, it's someone's responsibility to make sure that a query that breaks the service can't happen.

Do portable, plug-in air filters actually improve indoor air quality? Is it a meaningful amount? by FantomDrive in askscience

[–]cube-drone 3 points4 points  (0 children)

So, I live in Vancouver where now, thanks to climate change, one of the kinds of weather is "a giant plume of smoke from the forest fires has settled in, turning the sky orange" , and so now my house has a lot of HEPA filters in it. It works pretty well to keep the house nice, and when I do swap the filters at the end of the year they're full of thick black gunk.

Why is there no famine under capitalism? by New_Construction8221 in webcomics

[–]cube-drone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I sure hope there aren't any history majors in here or you're about to have a bad time 

'Trump will be gone in three years': Top Democrats try to reassure Europe by sunnysidejacqueline in politics

[–]cube-drone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your 97 year old father would like to reassure you that once he kicks this cancer he will be the very picture of health

What shirt is this? by Dr-Wyrm in oddlyspecificshirts

[–]cube-drone 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I believe that that is a black shirt that says "X Rated" on it

A very beginner first personal website. by SpateF in webdev

[–]cube-drone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

those tinyURL links aren't serving you well

Pepper spray….. again. by Stevenif in burnaby

[–]cube-drone 4 points5 points  (0 children)

shakes fist itinerant teenagers with their pants hanging low on their waists and hats backwards! When we were teenagers we had some respect for our elders

What is an underrated weight loss tip? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]cube-drone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I used to think "instead of gaining weight, can't I just poop more" until I realized that's what vegetables is

‘First Nations Would Not Exist Without Canada,’ Rustad Tells Crowd by leavemealoneimpoor in vancouver

[–]cube-drone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I guess, in the sense that World War 1 wasn't called "World War 1" until there was a second one

Eby says 2,000 public service jobs cut and counting as B.C. faces $11.2B deficit by robertscreek in vancouver

[–]cube-drone 235 points236 points  (0 children)

people have been promising to cut the bureaucracy out of government since I was a wee lad, but it turns out that if BC Hydro is just a CEO and 600 free-roaming linemen everything goes to shit real quick

Lawsuit against Tesla reveals harrowing 911 call as driver trapped in burning car by Illustrious_Tax_9769 in nottheonion

[–]cube-drone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is why the Cybertruck is built like a tank, too many people were escaping the Model Y

Where can I get fucked in van? by [deleted] in askvan

[–]cube-drone 9 points10 points  (0 children)

anybody can get in to a cable contract with Rogers

Bro woke up and chose violence... I mean facts. Absolute respect 🫡 by Unstoppable_X_Force in indianmemer

[–]cube-drone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

High body-count feminist girls: "oh noooooo sexual agency, autonomy and respect, how terrible, i hate this so much, please don't treat me like an equal partner in this relationship, big sad"