sparrc (u/sparrc) - Readit News

sparrc commented on The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA theguardian.com/sport/202... · Posted by u/treetalker

wolfi1 · 7 days ago

my question is more technical: how did the blot out the booing? and: how live was it in the US? from the Academy Awards we know that they have a 5s delay (following the Michael Moore incident), but what is it with olympics broadcast?

sparrc · 7 days ago

While they do show it live, it's in the middle of the workday, so almost everyone in the USA will have watched it delayed by many hours at "prime time", aka around 8pm local time in each zone.

That being said, I'm in the US and I heard boos on the delayed broadcast.

sparrc commented on Everyone Is Stealing TV theverge.com/streaming/87... · Posted by u/naves

functionmouse · 9 days ago

Can't the cable company just include steganography with the subscriber ID encoded into the video stream, so that when NFL appears on one of these streaming boxes, they can just kill that subscriber's service and thus the pirate streams also?

sparrc · 9 days ago

This would be much easier said than done, most video segments are served up by CDNs, so it would have to be done via processing on CDN edge nodes. Cloudflare might support something like this but most CDNs don't as far as I'm aware. Doing it server-side would kill CDN cache hit rates and massively increase cost.

sparrc commented on Everyone in Seattle hates AI jonready.com/blog/posts/e... · Posted by u/mips_avatar

sparrc · 2 months ago

I'm in Seattle at AWS and haven't encountered this attitude towards AI at all. All of my coworkers pretty much love using Cline and Kiro.

sparrc commented on Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality' bbc.com/news/articles/cwy... · Posted by u/jillesvangurp

jitix · 3 months ago

Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.

Things that let workers focus on innovation. IT workers in cheaper countries have it much easier while we have to juggle rising cost of living and cyclical layoffs here. And ever since companies started hiring workers directly and paying 30-50% (compared to 10-15% during the GCC era) the quality is almost at par with US.

sparrc · 3 months ago

The US is not perfect by any measure, but your argument that the US doesn't have innovative nor "high-value" jobs is absurd beyond belief.

sparrc commented on Improving performance of rav1d video decoder ohadravid.github.io/posts... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

flashblaze · 9 months ago

I'm not really well versed with codecs, but is it up to the devices or the providers (where you're uploading them) to handle playback or both? A couple of days ago, I tried to upload an Instagram Reel in AV1 codec, and I was struggling to preview it on my Samsung S20 FE Snapdragon version (before uploading and during preview as well). I then resorted to H.264 and it worked w/o any issues.

sparrc · 9 months ago

Playback is 100% handled by the device. The primary (and essentially only) benefit of H.264 is that almost every device in the entire world has an H.264 hardware decoder builtin to the chip, even extremely cheap devices.

AV1 hardware decoders are still rare so your device was probably resorting to software decoding, which is not ideal.

sparrc commented on Meta in talks to reincorporate in Texas or another state, WSJ reports reuters.com/technology/me... · Posted by u/belter

sampton · a year ago

This type of idol worshipping has to stop. LeCun invented CNN but he also said world simulation using diffusion was a deadened, which has been proven very wrong. The money is better spent hiring new grads with open minds and something to prove.

sparrc · a year ago

He's a director not a "in the trenches" researcher anymore. He's being paid for being a highly technical leader who enables and recruits researchers he employs to do great work, similar to Oppenheimer in a way.

sparrc commented on Saturated fat: the making and unmaking of a scientific consensus (2022) journals.lww.com/co-endoc... · Posted by u/mgh2

sparrc · a year ago

Nina Teicholz is a bit of a controversial figure in the nutrition world so I'd advise people to take this with a grain of salt...

sparrc commented on Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules cnbc.com/2024/09/10/apple... · Posted by u/kklisura

cpill · a year ago

it's not, but it's not the general case and also you realise this is the very opposite of the US: you get taxed when overseas (unless your a large corporation) and then get no benefits when returning because that would be communism.

sparrc · a year ago

That's a bit of an exaggeration, social security (state pension) and medicare (state healthcare for retirees) are not perfect but they're not terrible either.

sparrc commented on Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules cnbc.com/2024/09/10/apple... · Posted by u/kklisura

jandrewrogers · a year ago

> Expats aren’t double taxed but you need to file tax returns to offset taxable income that’s already been taxed.

This is not correct, it is only practically true in trivial cases. Excess taxation is a very real pain point for Americans living overseas, never mind the other indefensible things the US government does to its expats like FATCA.

Many types of income cannot be offset nor or they covered by tax treaties. Every time there is an impedance mismatch between US tax code and foreign tax code, including basic things like classification of income, deductions, and exemptions, you can end up with liabilities in both countries. It is not uncommon to pay more taxes in aggregate as an expat than you would pay in either country separately.

The way the US government, and some State governments, treat American expats is quite fucked.

sparrc · a year ago

On the other hand, I know someone from the UK who moved away and lived in places like Qatar and Oman for 20-30 years, keeping their UK citizenship and paying zero taxes to the UK (and extremely low taxes in the gulf countries).

Then they retired, returned to the UK, sent their kids to subsidized state universities (in the UK), receive free healthcare on the NHS, and receive state benefits for retirees.

They receive all of these state benefits and they paid almost no taxes to the UK government for most of their adult life. Is that fair?

sparrc commented on Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules cnbc.com/2024/09/10/apple... · Posted by u/kklisura

koyote · a year ago

> Please, tell me what types of income earned by a U.S. expat isn't covered by a tax treaty?

I am not a tax person, but selling a house can cause you to owe tax in the US even if you did not owe any tax in the country you are living in (and sold the house in).

Famously one of the reasons Boris Johnson tried to give up his US citizenship (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-30932891).

sparrc · a year ago

You are correct, but this only applies because:

> Unlike the UK, the US levies capital gains tax on proceeds from the sale of a main residence.

I understand why it can feel unfair but by definition this is not "double taxing". The gains on the house were not taxed by the UK which is why he had to pay US taxes.