a257 (u/a257) - Readit News

a257 commented on Show HN: Fast and Exact Algorithm for Image Merging github.com/C-Naoki/image-... · Posted by u/C-Naoki

a257 · a year ago

In the biomedical sciences, we typically use a tool called BigStitcher [0], which is bundled with ImageJ [1]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-019-0501-0 [1] https://imagej.net/plugins/bigstitcher/

a257 commented on OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon semafor.com/article/01/16... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

andrewstuart · 2 years ago

I was brought up in a household that was anti military.

Only as an adult was I able to form my own opinion.

Without a strong military in the past we would certainly not be here today and without a strong military now, who knows what other nation might decide to attack our sovereignty.

It's childish to be anti military - it shows you do not understand the interconnectedness of our society - good and bad.

a257 · 2 years ago

Is it possible for the military to be too "strong"? Each warship, fighter jet, tank, and soldier costs time, money, and effort to produce and maintain.

That a military is necessary for ensuring the security and continuing stability of the US is of little importance when the real issue is based on a tradeoff, an equilibrium. What are we gaining and what are we losing?

The current situation of the military industrial complex is complicated, but it is nevertheless clear that is is extremely inefficient (and thats by design). I'm not sure if incorporating AI tech into the military is going to change this, when the fundamental incentives remain the same.

a257 commented on Prediction markets can tell the future. Why is the US so afraid of them? ft.com/content/9108f393-6... · Posted by u/pbyte13

a257 · 2 years ago

While the game-ability of prediction markets is a major concern, I believe that the potential of prediction markets to further exacerbate inequalities may be a greater threat. It is important to keep in mind that while markets optimize for total value, it doesn't guarantee that it will optimize for things we as individuals want.

Free markets tend to lead to a positive feedback loop. Someone who has a lot of money will be able to predict the market better than someone who has less. Their advantage generates more wealth which helps them to predict the market better. Wealth generates more wealth.

In theory, this is offset by the notion that the market is not a zero sum game. The person may be generating new, previously unavailable, wealth. But while stock performance is tied to the success of a company (which can generate new wealth), prediction markets are tied to transient questions (where intrinsic value diminishes the closer you get to expiry). In this sense, how "predictions" might generate "new value" is unclear.

a257 commented on YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin andadinosaur.com/youtube-... · Posted by u/mrzool

CuriouslyC · 2 years ago

Pirates and crackers have won every single time in the history of BigCo vs BlackHat. The more draconian and clever google gets, the more talented hackers are drawn to the cause of defeating them, and the more motivated people become to spite them. The only winning move is not to play.

a257 · 2 years ago

Depends on what you consider winning. Consider that out of the 20% of internet users that have adblock today, only a fraction will be willing to turn to illicit means should Google get serious, especially if it requires anything more complicated than installing an extension.

Also keep in mind that pirate groups are able to crack L1 Widevine only because some companies let the keys slip in a breach. The keys are burned as soon as they are discovered, making it impractical to disseminate them for public use.

It's only because individual movies/tv shows have a high enough value (versus the cost of cracking it, the risk of your keys being burned) that pirate groups are able to thrive. This wouldn't work well with Youtube as it's value is primarily derived from having a large quantity of content.

I don't think many people would be willing to pay per Youtube video as they do for a movie.

a257 commented on YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin andadinosaur.com/youtube-... · Posted by u/mrzool

CuriouslyC · 2 years ago

YouTube will "lose" the war, but they'll make adblocking difficult enough for a while that it might get some premium subscribers in the short term in exchange for the loss of goodwill.

a257 · 2 years ago

What makes you think that Youtube will "lose"? From a technical perspective, they have been rather conservative in their efforts so far. It can get so much worse, they could bake ads directly into the video stream or automatically randomize their API.

Don't forget that Google also owns Chrome, which by its dominance over the market can be used to effectuate DRM (such as widevine, or web integrity). They also own the Chrome Web Store, and they can ban any extensions that bypass Youtube ads (they already ban extensions with the ability to download Youtube videos, strangely they allow downloaders for any other site).

Google has a lot of money, and a lot of fingers in critically important pies, to make their wishes a reality should they deem to do so.

a257 commented on SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Project at the Boca Chica Launch Site faa.gov/space/stakeholder... · Posted by u/peter_d_sherman

rtkwe · 2 years ago

There's also that the whole plan of Starship colonizing Mars is wildly impractical and all the numbers Musk throws out don't work; the second you try to start fitting the supposed 100 passengers in to Starship for example there's just not room even if you halve the NASA recommended space per person. Once you account for keeping them alive once they get there it makes the slave trade ships look luxurious. SpaceX is doing really neat stuff just dragged down by Elon's overhyping sales pitches.

a257 · 2 years ago

I love the idea of humanity expanding out into the cosmos, it feels like space exploration is "the Future." But I can't see how SpaceX's Mars colonization plan makes economic sense in the current day. No matter what technical advances they come up with in getting people to Mars, it doesn't change the fact that it is an inhospitable planet. What unique resources are on Mars that makes it more profitable than say, colonizing the Sahara desert?

a257 commented on Show HN: DotBigBang – Multiplayer game engine with 120fps and 2 second load time dotbigbang.com/game/1af87... · Posted by u/bobbydigitales

bobbydigitales · 2 years ago

For a lot of types of games (e.g. social, creative, silly fun) it doesn't matter. For those where it does you have to run servers that you control and write server-authoritative code.

You have to assume clients are hacked whenever you're writing competitive games anyway, so there's not much difference there.

a257 · 2 years ago

Fair enough, I guess it doesn't really matter if someone hacks a drawing/building game. But people love competitive games.

I guess you can prevent most overt hacks through server-side validation. But still, that doesn't stop more sophisticated users from creating and using subtler hacks (such as aimbots).

a257 commented on Show HN: DotBigBang – Multiplayer game engine with 120fps and 2 second load time dotbigbang.com/game/1af87... · Posted by u/bobbydigitales

a257 · 2 years ago

This is so cool! Though, how do you ensure that people are playing fair? When I dabbled in web-based games a year ago, I noticed that it's pretty difficult to have a good anti-cheat system for games that runs on browsers.

a257 commented on Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube” · Posted by u/barbariangrunge

Etheryte · 2 years ago

While that works for now, if Google ever took interest in it I think it would be pretty straightforward to break any libraries like that. If you change either the endpoints or the model or etc with any reasonable frequency the library authors couldn't possibly keep up. Google can orchestrate their rollouts so their things always keep working while the library users are always in for a surprise. This is one of those things that could also be automated and put on a cron if one was really into it. In general though, I think for the time being this is luckily not a big enough of a dot on their radar for them to care.

a257 · 2 years ago

> this is luckily not a big enough of a dot on their radar for them to care.

Funnily enough, Google doesn't allow yt-downloader extensions on the Chrome web store. They will cite you rule #4, and send you a rejection letter for "Facilitating unauthorized access to or download of copyrighted content or media, specifically, YouTube." The irony of course is that they allow downloader extensions for other websites. That they specifically prohibit youtube downloaders while allowing downloaders for almost any other website smells suspiciously like anti-competitive behavior to me.

On the other hand, Firefox's addon store is free from these restrictions, so you can find tons of yt download extensions there.

a257 commented on Web apps are better than no apps molodtsov.me/2023/08/web-... · Posted by u/_xivi

jsunderland323 · 2 years ago

Well then you’re back to the bridge problem. postMessage is crazy slow. There are some problems where parallelization will outperform the ipc cost with postMessage but those problems are few and far between. I haven’t dove into the new web GPU api but it does look kinda promising (shared memory is hard, so I’m apprehensive). I’m sure some of these things will get solved in the long run but for the time being, the bottleneck to browser performance is not necessarily JavaScript itself but the webapis that are crafted around a single threaded model. This is really my only point. Aside from providing systems engineers familiarity with syntax/devex and possibly some portability with some llvm/wasm compatible libs, there is little point in wasm runtimes at this current time imo.

citation:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...

“Data is sent between workers and the main thread via a system of messages — both sides send their messages using the postMessage() method, and respond to messages via the onmessage event handler (the message is contained within the message event's data attribute). The data is copied rather than shared.”

a257 · 2 years ago

Transferable objects have been part of the spec for a while now, making it possible to send data back and forth contexts with no copying.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/transferable-objects-light...