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There is another niche if you make them several miles long and width. Then can use more conventional construction materials like a concrete shell. (We are of course not ready for that)

In that case they should have those giant propellers that seem to spin at a few rotations per minute

An airship made from concrete? Better off using Led for Zeppelins.

We need enough slop to create that market.

If you already had a hand crafted codebase, a ton of miles on it, no real issue for a long time and customers who value some metric of quality then it might be worth crafting things by hand — if only for the bragging.


Imagine, eventually, a large ever growing library full of unread books. One could roam around forever and discover new things.

Might be possible to generate a 3d world using some taxonomy estimate the amount of titles and generate the books as the area is explored.

Like the manuscripts in Sakya Monastery in Tibet and like the millions(?) of cuneiform clay tablets. Vast amounts of data that may contain information.


Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market.

I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.

If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.


You had huge click farms back in the days.

Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%

The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?

Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?


These bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.

Serious question: Do you watch a lot of YouTube? Why not just cough up the $16 for YouTube Premium? Creators actually do get paid more for Premium users' views than they do from adsense. You get to see none of these ads that piss you off.

Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk.

But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.


I don’t use YouTube at all but I can still answer - Because $16 will become $20, $30, $50 … and then they will begin to show ads again anyway.

I don't get this commonplace logic. Why make the decision on the possible distant future? You can always just cancel when that happens.

The moment the cost went from free to more-than-free is “when that happened.” I’m not willing to participate.

> I’m not willing to participate

Nah, you're participating by watching. You'd have 100% of my respect and 100% moral high ground with your stance just by avoiding youtube.com.


Your assumption I’m watching is invalid.

Sorry, I didn’t realize you weren’t the other guy.

No worries. :)

You expect Google to serve thousands of petabytes per month (costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in raw bandwidth) for absolutely nothing in return?

I have zero expectations of any business. If they have an expectation to be paid then they need to offer something of value. Their costs to operate are not my concern.

If they're not offering something of value why are you using the thing that you say doesn't have value?

I don’t. Please see original comment.

Well this discussion about getting YouTube premium is clearly aimed at people who use YouTube but without premium, not people who don't use YouTube at all.

Follow the thread all the way up for the full context.

Do you think it's that low? I would have assumed 7 figures in bandwidth.

You won't pay for something because of inflation? How do you survive, since everything's affected by inflation? Ever buy gasoline for a car or a transit pass? rent? food? What else can't you pay for because they price will go up in the future?

Inflation helped me kick my junk food and fast food habits. I still buy groceries of course but when prices rise, luxuries are almost always the first items to go.

Corporate greed ≠ inflation

I want to see and feel the product. Nowadays mostly to see how bad it is.

It's $29 per month for the family plan now.

YouTube’s enshittification is shamelessly out of control.

If you really want it, you can vpn through certain countries they don’t show ads at all.


It is giving me 1+ hour ads now based on my view history (I think) and it is actually hilarious. I've watched two till the end. To keep someone engaged for that long you better bring something interesting to the table.

>Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?

Isn't that what you see on free to view TV. The same ads over and over.


Those work. You'll remember that brand if you ever need that product.

I could call them, tell them I see their ad, ask questions then call again and again and again and again. I just read one may call a company as often as one wants.

Well… I’ll remember that I never want to give Liberty Mutual a single dollar.

I was never going to give any of the woo-woo secret health nonsense hucksters any money, though.


Before the ad, you had no brand awareness at all of Liberty Mutual. Now, you know their name enough to call them out specifically in a Hacker News comment. Your propensity to buy has improved a lot just based on that fact, regardless of whether you consciously want to avoid them now.

I did know Liberty Mutual. I had business with them.

Now I know them and I’m fucking annoyed that they exist. My “propensity to buy” has not improved.

You can save yourself the trouble of repeating more century old marketing truisms that aren’t. We’ve heard it all before, and it isn’t insight.


Is this a typo? 20 min ad?! I don’t use YouTube.

Sometimes they put one at the start then again 1.5 min into a video and again around 4 minutes. If I don't skip them I may not even remember what the video was about.

I’ve seen the intro to an audiobook be used as an ad.

> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%

This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.

PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?

Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.


I couldn't imagine someone running campaign like that intentionally but it's apparently cheap to do so. 20 minutes of my time is apparently worth 3 cent. Those 5 hours watching the same ad again and again probably cost the spammer 2 euro.

It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined.

> ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.

You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)


We made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it.

End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.

We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.

I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.


In late elementary school, I had an extremely large vocabulary due to the volume of reading that I did on my own free time. However, I was failing vocabulary tests, which were usually a fill-in-the blank worksheet where you were expected to regurgitate that weeks list of approved vocabulary words. The problem was that for each approved word, I knew several more appropriate synonyms.

I found that using a very sharp pencil, I could microprint the weekly word list on a piece of matte scotch tape / cellotape. Then I could put that bit of tape on the side of a white Bic pen it it would be nearly undetectable. I could normally write with the list of words facing my palm, and just rotate the pen so the list was visible when I needed it.

It's has been close to 50 years so I assume that the statute of limitations has long since expired for cheating on a 6'th grade vocabulary test. I don't feel bad about it at all, so there.


I had to much great stuff of my own to think about. Made great effort keeping their earthly matters out of my head. I could see how others changed into one of them which for many was an improvement.

Ill do an example from a few days ago: Most are familiar with noticing someone is looking at you. I've forged many jokes involving that effect. It is real beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In previous experiments I learn that people can feel someone looking at a security monitor. If multiple people look at the screen with intend the subject looks around him paranoid and can't properly play pool anymore.

The new discovery: I was on my laptop at 2am and suddenly I feel eyes. I turn my head and look at the security camera. When someone opens the app the camera makes a clicking sound. I didn't hear any clicking but I felt someone was looking. The GF was asleep so it wasn't her.

In the morning she opened the app, swiped the timeline to some random spot and looked what I was doing. To her surprise I immediately looked over my shoulder straight at her. She asked me what sinister thing I was up to looking at the camera like that.

It apparently works across time!


Deletionists have been circling html since the beginning and have only managed to get rid of document.writeln() they tried really hard to get rid of framesets but ultimately failed.

I suspect in the long run a similar lack of "success" getting rid of Apache.

There are probably other things that are here to stay.


In the old days we had this thing called a redaction. It was like a dungeon master vs playing the same hardcoded level again and again. Had one suggested automating it back then even the greatest optimist wouldn't see how you replace [say] Stephen King with a calculator but here we are - true believers.

I'm definitely not experienced enough to know but I read people are having it write somewhat elaborate documentation beforehand. Have it figure out which parts of the code may be touched, what other things will be affected and which uncertainties it has. Basically a full report before giving permission for any code to be written/modified. Again, I haven't seen it, don't know how common this is nor how effective. Though it sounded interesting.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/pentag... >The result is an astounding $10tn in taxpayer money that has gone unaccounted for since 1996.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-go... >While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.

The report by Dr. Skidmore is easy to find.

https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-su...


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