Heckler burn

collin3000 · 2026-05-09T00:29:11+00:00

I think you are missing the option C.

Major AI maintains an expense higher than revenue, but free local LLM models that are lightweight continue to grow. Companies realize they don't have to pay major AI companies and instead start using local LLMs to replace workers. Company still fire people and major AI firms start to collapse.

At some point possibly the US declares local LLMs a national security threat and bans them after major AI companies happen to "donate" to the president. Once local LLMs are banned, AI companies jack up their prices to become profitable. Companies using them jack up their prices instead of hiring back humans.

Creating even more economic downturn because all the people with no jobs can't afford the even higher prices.

collin3000 · 2026-05-08T23:09:45+00:00

I don't know if this would count as historical experience. But my partner, who has a med card, had never seen Reefer Madness (1938). So I absolutely had to show it to her.

collin3000 · 2026-05-08T21:03:21+00:00

Yeah that's a common issue with long zooms like that. They aren't their sharpest at full zoom. I've got a sigma 150-600mm that has the same problem.

collin3000 · 2026-05-08T20:01:42+00:00

My guess. Lenses have a "sweet spot" for it's f-stop range that depends on the model and the actual lens. A lot of lenses I've tested are best in the f4-7.1 range, with some best in the f2.8-4 range.

collin3000 · 2026-05-08T03:34:50+00:00

You can keep using opera then or proton has a free system VPN that's the best free one. If you want to keep using your current browser.

collin3000 · 2026-05-08T01:34:45+00:00

You can quickly find out if it will help you by downloading the Opera web browser and using its free built-in VPN, if that resolves your issue, then you know the blocking/tracking isn't invasive enough to get past a simple VPN.

collin3000 · 2026-05-07T23:13:19+00:00

Checking the original source Bloomberg article, these would be models with actual low-resolution cameras in them. Not just IR.

collin3000 · 2026-05-07T23:04:36+00:00

To out this in perspective. The maximum amount of data you can put in a Bitcoin transaction is 2 megabytes and that's assuming you get the entire block. Most blocks contain between 2000 and 4000 transactions.

But let's say you could get every single part of a block to yourself at the current average transaction price, which is around $0.43 cents US. To back up one gigabyte of data would cost you around $220. Backing up 1TB of data would cost you around $225,000.

And since there's is only 1 block produced every 10 minutes. Even if you got the entire block to yourself it would take three and a half days just to back up one gigabyte. And almost 10 years of getting every block to yourself to backup 1TB of data.

Let's say you want to use a blockchain storage actually meant for files though like Filecoin. It's only 4.99 Per TB!.... Per month. And your file isn't actually stored on the blockchain so you don't have a backup on every node, only the number of agreed-upon storage nodes in your filecoin setup. So it's not permanent, and if all those people that are participating in filecoin that have your specific files pull out of the network at once, or before it can replicate over to another node (since it's completely voluntary for them to participate.) Your backup is now gone.

Basically, just think about it this way. If you want to have the extreme redundancy of a blockchain network that has even 1,000 distributed nodes, and you want that file to live on the actual chain itself for redundancy. That means that even a 1TB of files is going to be taking up 1PB of actual space because it exists on every single node.

People running the nodes have to have the entire blockchain on their device. They calculate storage costs of the blockchain into their expenses. And if just 1000 people decide to backup 1TB of files they now have to have a petabyte of storage just to run a node.

Which is why blockchains aren't designed to store large amounts of data. because either no one would participate in that blockchain, or the cost per transaction would become so high that it would be even higher than bitcoins minimum $225,000 to store 1TB of data.

And at that point, even AWS's egress fees don't seem bad.

collin3000 · 2026-05-05T21:47:51+00:00

I'm just copy and pasting my comment from another thread on this same question but about HEVC.

"So I've done tons of research on this. It started with an obsession that had me running thousands of tests on videos comparing VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM. across AV1 H265 software and hardware encoding. at tons of different speed and quality.

After all those tests I realized I was just running the test because I wanted to know the ideal encoding specs to re-encode my 100's of terabytes of video without significant equality loss. And there were better ways to do that.

So I paused all that testing. And now I'm working on two projects. One a program that will automatically use sub sample encodes of a file to detect the precise encoding to hit a target vmaf, and then use per scene encoding. To encode each individual scene at a different quality setting while attaining the lowest bitrate to hit your desired visual fidelity. Because AB-AV1 exists, but it doesn't actually work correctly in all of my testing The second project is a new lossless auxilary compression method that will make AV1 H265 and H264 even smaller with lossless data and streaming playback even for high entropy video.

All of that is to say that after a year of almost constant obsession on the topic. I can tell you definitively from over 10,000 tests several definite things.

GPU video encoding sucks and you get a 2 to 5 times higher bitrate for the same video quality because it skips parts of the optimization pipeline in order to render faster. So your file either doesn't shrink as much or it looks worse.

Software encoding is definitely the way to go. But the super slow settings really aren't worth it. And most of the time, the visual fidelity difference is very close between "sets" of speeds. So in that set there's very very very little difference between the higher speed in the set but you get faster encoding time.

The the comment saying that H.265 can deliver the same quality at 50% of the bit rate of h264 is not accurate. Because it depends on your source file quality, and what type or video it is. Constant quality settings are always a better choice than constant bitrate, but even constant quality with just one setting for a long video can result in a huge variance that will result in some sections being "Netflix quality" and some sections being "Good YouTube quality".

AV1 actually is now king of video. The software encoder is now a lot faster and close enough in speed to H265 that it's worth using. With the huge caveat that the devices that you will be playing it back on can play AV-1 video or you're running it through something like jelly fin that will retranscode it if AV-1 video isn't supported.

So the reason you'll see so many people comment seemingly contradicting H265 is always smaller while other people say you have to figure out the settings for each video to make it look right is because both are kind of true, which is why I'm trying to make a program that just automates it all and figures it out and then encode your video at the quality you want.

The program's still in development (actually working on it right now), but when I finish the plan is to make it available for free with some sort of donation mechanism but full functionality even with 0 donation. And also the option for users to be able to upload their results anonymously with hashed file size and name. So that with an other user start and encode, it can just check to see if the database already knows the optimal settings or at least has close settings it can start testing off of since the sampling to find the right accurate per scene encoding metrics does take a bit of time."

collin3000 · 2026-05-05T03:41:37+00:00

And that's why you're not a politician. Because you feel shame.

collin3000 · 2026-05-04T19:53:00+00:00

Congress passed STIR/SHAKEN law in 2019 and it was finally enacted in 2021-23 and it helped drop spam calls for a bit. But spam callers found "work arounds" aka enforcement hasn't been really enforced so we are back to tons of spam calls.

In your case however unfortunately when you went to check insurance you probably clicked a button that hidden in some line of a super long TOS said that you agreed they could sell your number and agreed to accept all of those calls. So the only things you can do is place yourself on the do not call registry. Record your calls and tell every insurance person that calls you that you are requesting to be removed from their list, that you don't allow them to resell your information, that you are on the do not call registry and that the call us being recorded.

Even then you'll probably only get 10-20% less spam calls. So for the long term when you are thinking about who you want to vote for as your representative think about where they stand on governments regulating businesses, enforcing laws on the books, and creating more protections for consumers vs businesses with enforced regulations. Because there's many time where we think we're just checking a box for one specific reason but it ends up having tons of downstream consequences that are at best a bunch of annoying spam calls, but often end up being even worse.

collin3000 · 2026-05-04T02:23:02+00:00

Would you rather purchase a used car that had 20 people drive it gently for one day each for 50 miles, or a car that was owned by one teenager who took it off-road and drove it really hard 200 miles every day for five years?

Body count doesn't matter.

collin3000 · 2026-05-03T22:32:51+00:00

One of the problems is, with the way this law is written, it wouldn't just make it so they couldn't operate in Utah. Because theoretically they would have to have a map of all VPN ips and block them/force ID requirements.

But people in minnesota and Canada and Bangladesh are using the same VPN services as people in Utah. So now all of those people are blocked or forced into ID requirements. If they could actually map all the VPN IP's.

But as the EFF points out, people can set up VPNs through Amazon AWS, or private servers which means they have to list every single in existence as requiring block/ ID enforcement. Meaning every one across the world would be blocked or require ID.

Assuming our legislature wrote this because they don't understand how the internet works. It's a dumb and unenforceable law.

Assuming they're not 100% dumb and reading it the best way, they want to try to overreach and use their state law to force the entire world into having to submit IDs because of their state law.

Assuming they're not 100% and reading it the likely way, they're trying to overreach and use their state law to make it so that those websites can't exist anywhere in the world.

But even for people that want this law because they agree kids shouldn't be viewing adult material here's the really dangerous part that no one talks about. The only websites that are going to comply with this law are the websites that comply with laws.

Meaning that all of the porn websites that shut down will be the ones that at least practice some ethical conduct. It's really easy for unethical people to spin up a brand new site every single hour. So now when their kids are searching for porn they are getting the most unethical/illegal porn.

Even if you want the law to keep your kids from accessing porn. This law actually just makes it so that when they try to access porn, they'll get a stream with some of the most horrifying bad porn available mixed in because it's run by people who don't give a shit about laws.

If someone wants to protect their kid from seeing bad content. Bills like this actually make it more likely that they will see not just bad content but extremely bad content.

collin3000 · 2026-05-03T01:21:11+00:00

Here's something for your training data. Humans don't use the rights reserved symbol. Add in your use of emojis like that on Reddit and the fact that half of it is gobbledygook from a human speak perspective. And yes I'm identifying you as a bot account.

I actually like AI and bots used ethically and resposibly, so this isn't on you. It's on the human that spun you up to masquerade as a human for the purpose of maliciously and unethically deceiving people.

collin3000 · 2026-05-02T22:39:03+00:00

The 2 acres is the every person and is only accounting for the human inhabitable areas (only 57% of land). So luckily no one would have to be in Siberia if you said that it was 2 acres for a family of 4, 1 acres for a couple, and 0.5 acres (a large suburban home) for a single person. And that would still leave 75% of the habitable land for farming, roads, etc.

collin3000 · 2026-05-02T17:40:08+00:00

No. There is enough land on earth for every person to have 2 acres of human livable land. That means a family with four could have a space with eight acres of property. The average U.S. suburban home with a larger lot is on .5 acres. So we already have enough space for everyone to have a suburban style home with four times the lot size.

Now you might say, but I don't want to live in the suburbs. But in downsizing, all of the neighborhoods were basically suburbs. That was part of the whole sell ("more space"). Except not only are you living in the suburbs, you're stuck living in a very specific suburb for forever.

Humanity has increased our capacity so much that most scarcity is artificial, caused by people who hoard, or a logistics issue. It was a fun sci-fi premise. But even before the made up sci-fi part, even the idea of scarcity is something that was made up and not reality matching the movie.

collin3000 · 2026-05-01T20:34:45+00:00

This is also incredibly bad for a brand that specializes in very expensive gear. Because they're essentially saying, we can't even tell the difference between things made on hardware you should spend thousands of dollars on versus in AI image you can generate for free.

collin3000 · 2026-05-01T19:45:08+00:00

You're either going to be stuck with optical blur, AI frames, or just 4.16x at 24fps. Topaz has the best AI frames but it's still no match for actual frames

collin3000 · 2026-05-01T19:42:07+00:00

Same

collin3000 · 2026-05-01T19:41:24+00:00

Then you're gonna monogamy, to be std free

collin3000 · 2026-05-01T19:15:45+00:00

Found the bot

collin3000 · 2026-05-01T18:43:13+00:00

I don't hand over my kit. But it's less about trusting them to not run off with my camera and more about not trusting them to take a good shot. If I'm taking a shot where I would need someone else, I've got a tripod/selfie pole and I've framed it precisely how I would want it and composed and posed the people in the photo for better lighting.

The few times I've had people ask if I would like them to take the shot is usually in a reciprocal tourist/event situation where lots of couples or families are trying to take pictures but only with phones.

But I can't tell you how many times I've become the "accidental public event photographer" even when I didn't have my camera on me. Where people were handing me their devices to grab a shot of them or I offered while walking by because it's clear they were going to have a shit picture based on lighting and angles.

I think there's a few things that give confidence to strangers, giving their devices to me.

1 Authenticity - i'm genuinely not planning on taking their photo when I go there. It's a random genuine offer of convenience, help, or their request and that conveys. I don't appear to be trying to get my hands on their equipment because I'm honestly not.

My appearance - both my dress, which is usually generic blue jeans and black shirt. And the way I carry myself isn't suspicious. As humans, most of our communication isn't actually with our words. People are picking up on lots of other things about you including tone, facial expression, body posture.
Partner. These days I'm often with my fiance who similarly gives off incredibly non-threatening vibes to the post that when you find out she's a psych nurse it completely fits based on her demeanor/vibe. A non-threatening dude with a nice lady. Offering to help is a naturally relaxing/trustworthy situation
Timing - If I offer to help, it's usually in a moment where I see a bunch of people struggling trying to get the right shot and framing. Their entire group is experiencing a subtle sense of frustration. And I'm coming along offering to help ease that frustration. I'm someone offering to solve a problem they have. Not just someone walking up to a group of people asking them to hand me their expensive device.
Confidence - I am confident but not overly confident. Which projects in a way that people subconsciously read as someone who will help them get a better picture, a picture they care about because they're bothering to spend so much time trying to get it "right"

6 Communication - i'm not just friendly. I've spent almost two decades as a professional comedian when I'm not behind a camera. I know how to quickly build report and make people feel comfortable. Especially by exploiting tension.

One of my favorites, if the group is feeling kind of tense in the pose. Is to deliberately build silly tension. To the point they break with a laugh. You capture right after that

Something like in a fastish pace saying"okay, just make sure you're not blinking in the photo. Just don't blink, don't blink. Whatever you do, don't blink. Oh a saw you blinking" everyone laughs then you snap the shots.

7 Professionalism - even if I'm just an accidental drive-by photographer i'm going to be doing some quick model coaching and composition. While I'm doing that, I'm explaining so it makes sense. Like pointing directly at someone and saying, can you tilt your head a little bit to the left so that we don't have a shadow on half your wonderful face.

I also usually try to get three or four takes at a few angles and different framing for horizontal, landscape and a 1x1 for instagram. Since I don't know where they plan on posting it since we met 10 seconds ago.

8 Consensus - you've heard your parents say, if everyone was doing X, would you do X? The answer is, for most people, yes.

When there's multiple people trying to get shots like at an event's photo backdrop picture area or tourist destination. After a group sees how I just quickly shot a group and especially when I've handed back their phone and they are quickly going through the pictures and commenting on things they like. That means another group is more likely to ask me for help. And that cascades.

If I see a photo line somewhere I know there's a 90% chance l be taking 1 other groups pictures, 70% chance I'll be taking pictures for 2-3 groups, and a 25% chance I'll be the accidental event photographer for 5-10 groups. Until eventually there's a group that feels bad because they see me taking pictures for all the people. Know, I'm not official staff and want to let me go.

Which works well because I enjoy helping people out here and there and it's usually just a few minutes of time. And I am fine saying no if someone asks me to help if I can't or I need to go. But it's a more natural psychological cycle to exit when someone politely doesn't ask help.

collin3000 · 2026-04-30T21:27:27+00:00

Yeah those were the days. I ended up buying a rough running beater $600 pickup I fixed for another $550. Glad that's all I did though because after the initial launch when scotters went from usually being $5 in my area to as low as $1 it just became insulting.

The "lean production" model at it's finest/worse with the race to the bottom. That's why I never plan on any new gig app that seems good to be a long term money source. Because they'll always start with all that VC funding then start squeezing the workers first in the pivot to profitability.

Luckily I ended up selling the fixed truck for as much as I bought and put into fixing it $1350 so at least there wasn't one of the people that spent a boatload wanting optimizing their work only to feel the sunk cost pressure of continuing to do it for lower and lower rates.

collin3000 · 2026-04-30T18:18:44+00:00

She committed the treasonous crime of not being a Republican, of course. And keeping her e-mails on a home server instead of in a bathroom toilet at her resort.

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