emtel (u/emtel) - Readit News

emtel commented on YouTube's $60B revenue revealed amid paid subscriber push bbc.com/news/articles/crk... · Posted by u/1659447091

drnick1 · 2 days ago

> He said YouTube Premium - its service letting users pay to remove ads between videos, or songs on its music service - had helped boost paid subscriptions across Google consumer services to more than 325 million in 2025 overall.

325 million people that don't know about Firefox and uBlock Origin?

emtel · 2 days ago

I pay for YouTube premium and it’s one of my happiest expenditures. YouTube is a miraculous, unbelievable treasure trove. Learn any language, any musical instrument, any academic subject. TV clips from the 80s that someone taped in VHS for some reason. Isaac Arthur, Veritaseum, numberphile. I’ve gotten more value from YouTube than any other single site on the internet, and it’s not close!

So yeah, take my $13.99/month

emtel commented on A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bigwheels

peaseagee · 16 days ago

That's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately?

emtel · 16 days ago

Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.

emtel commented on Why Real Life is better than IRC (2000) everything2.com/node/e2no... · Posted by u/themaxdavitt

emtel · a month ago

I can't believe everything2 still exists!

emtel commented on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15 eupolicy.social/@jmaris/1... · Posted by u/colinprince

weli · a month ago

When did hacker news become so right wing that saying the French revolution was a good societal movement is seen as "glorifying mass executions"? lmao

emtel · a month ago

I'm not sure you have to be terribly right wing to say that a "societal movement" which includes something called "The Reign of Terror", in which tens of thousands of people were executed, was a bad thing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Reign_of_Ter...)

emtel commented on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15 eupolicy.social/@jmaris/1... · Posted by u/colinprince

thelastgallon · a month ago

The French seem to be very thoughtful people who solved multiple pesky problems permanently:

1) Guillotine for the super rich

2) Nuclear to power >70%

3) C15 for people, cows, craftsmen, mini house

4) TGV

5) french fries for the fastest carbohydrate delivery, handily beating rice

I wish they bring back the first 3 and do some shorts, market them to the world. Fries are doing fine.

emtel · a month ago

> Guillotine for the super rich

Can we not glorify mass executions on HN please? Bluesky is available if that's your thing.

emtel commented on Rust's Block Pattern notgull.net/block-pattern... · Posted by u/zdw

emtel · 2 months ago

There are some situations with tricky lifetime issues that are almost impossible to write without this pattern. Trying to break code out into functions would force you to name all the types (not even possible for closures) or use generics (which can lead to difficulties specifying all required trait bounds), and `drop()` on its own is of no use since it doesn't effect the lexical lifetimes.

emtel commented on An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643... · Posted by u/rapnie

modeless · 2 months ago

I'm not sure I believe that operational satellites would be unaffected by sustained bombardment with tungsten particles at orbital velocity (x2 for head on collisions), even if they are 10 microns.

emtel · 2 months ago

a reasonable concern

emtel commented on An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643... · Posted by u/rapnie

oofbey · 2 months ago

That’s a solid idea. Never heard that before. And it really seems like it would solve an otherwise extremely difficult problem.

It would not discriminate though. Everything in that orbit would be taken down - debris and any functional satellites.

emtel · 2 months ago

You should read the linked post. You can tune the particle size to affect only objects below a certain size.

emtel commented on An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643... · Posted by u/rapnie

modeless · 2 months ago

If the Starlink satellites all collided, the worst case is that we would have to ditch the space station (which is already planned in a few years) and wait a few years to launch more into LEO. The debris deorbits automatically due to atmospheric drag. And in the meantime we would still be able to launch through the cloud to higher orbits or escape velocity as it wouldn't be dense enough to hit something that only passes though for a couple of minutes.

IMO now that LEO communication satellites are feasible we should ban launching satellites into higher orbits. Collision debris up there is much, much worse because it's essentially permanent. It will not deorbit by itself for thousands of years or more, and there is no plausible way to clean it up even with technology much more advanced than ours.

emtel · 2 months ago

There actually is one idea for cleaning up debris in high orbit: You launch tons of very fine powder into the orbits you wish to clear. These orbiting particles create drag on anything up there, so that their orbits degrade much faster. But the because the particles themselves are so tiny, they have a very low ballistic coefficient, and will deorbit quickly.

More: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/space-debris-p...

emtel commented on The Case That A.I. Is Thinking newyorker.com/newsletter/... · Posted by u/jsomers

sema4hacker · 2 months ago

"Splitting the universe of intellectual tasks" would be a gigantic job. Various AI implementations already fail at so many tasks it seems reasonable for skeptics to claim the AI is not yet thinking, and the burden is on the implementers to fix that.

emtel · 2 months ago

> "Splitting the universe of intellectual tasks" would be a gigantic job

What I mean is a theory that allows you to categorize any given task according to whether it requires "thinking" or not, not literally cataloging all conceivable tasks.