What do you mean? We just migrated that software to a Windows XP VM running on Windows 7! That was just 15 years ago, it’ll be good for another 15 for sure.

Well you say that, but near the office park where I used to work there was a gas station that served as the outlet for a local sandwich place. All the sandwiches would get made fresh in the morning and be delivered just in time for lunch. They were awesome, there were lines around the block at lunchtime. They were known throughout the area. The sandwich shop also did deliveries for orders of 50 pieces and up, but the company I worked for only did that a few times a year. Haven’t worked there for over 15 years, but I still remember the taste of those sandwiches.

Yeah I’ve had that one happen. Big team, more than a year of work, thousands of hours, over 1500 of my own hours. Internal presentation to the team at the customer end, they loved it and couldn’t wait for actual launch day. We were all so proud and everyone was happy.

Alas that day never came, the customer went bankrupt due to one of the investors pulling out. Nothing to do with us, just some bean counter did the math and decided they were better off letting the company fold.

I spoke to one of the people at the customer we had worked with throughout the project. She was devastated it was all for nothing and she lost her job as a result. By the time a new investor came around to pick up the pieces, she had found a new job. Spoke to the former ceo of the customer, he had a new job for a couple of days a week at the company that bought up the remainders. He fought to get the project going again, but the new company is very non IT focused, oldskool. So they vetoed it. I later found out one of the project leads was consulted and he had pretty much killed any chance. I always disliked that dude, but he got a pretty good deal out of it or so I’m told.

That’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

AI will take jobs when the shareholders think it will make them more money. This has very little if not nothing to do with how good said AI is at the job.

Sounds like a skill issue, fuck them kids

Holy shit that must be some freak combination of factors. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the clarification, pipes look like copper but might be cast iron.

Still doesn’t fit with the explanation, aluminum has more resistance than copper, but not that much more. The resistance of cast iron is an order of magnitude higher than aluminum. So it would still be the lowest resistance in the circuit and thus the coolest part.

And cast iron is pretty good at conducting heat. Not as good as copper or aluminum, but still pretty good. We’ve been using the material to make pans and pots for cooking because of it’s thermal properties. So the heat wouldn’t just stop at the fitting, but continue on at least some ways.

Moreover it’s physically impossible to get aluminum hot enough to glow like this and still keep its shape. It melts at 600 degrees C, well below the point where something gets red hot, let alone yellow like this. If the aluminum were to be this hot, it would be in a puddle and at risk of burning.

This makes no sense at all.

Why would only these two specific pipes get hot, so hot to glow, but not the other lines connected to it? And not the fittings around it? It’s all copper, so even if the power itself doesn’t heat them up, why would being connected to an extremely hot pipe heat it up. Since it’s you know copper and being good at transferring heat is what it’s known for.

And why would the lower resistance part be the part that get hottest? Low resistance means less loss, so those parts would in fact be the coldest of all.

Plus thin walled copper pipes can’t get so hot they glow without melting or at the very least lose all structural integrity and break.

And a downed power line with a short to ground would almost immediately turn off. It’s when there isn’t a direct line to ground those things are dangerous. As soon as it shorts, it gets turned off at the source to prevent further damage, fire and not cause issues upstream.

Either it’s Photoshop or someone has wrapped led lighting around some pipes.

No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn’t matter where in the video you use those seconds.

So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.

In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.

And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it’s just a matter of making it harder. If it’s beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it’s good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.

Nope that’s not necessary at all, the client experience can be the same as it’s always been. See my other response for what I was thinking of.

Also, this doesn’t work very well in the current YT implementation. If you skip around a video with ads, sometime you’ll get ads even though you’ve just watched a pre-roll for example.

Yeah I’m thinking of a system like this:

A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn’t a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a “credit” with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.

One way to get around this is to have something in the background “watch” the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it’s available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There’s ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.

The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they’ll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn’t anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn’t care if a percentage of users doesn’t watch the ads, as long as most of them do.

My point was, there’s ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.

I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.

This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.

Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads.

Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.

Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn’t have to be handled clientside.

It has Blast Processing!

Oncoming drivers? I’m getting blasted by “cars” behind me. Fucking trucks or even lifted trucks with their headlights at my eye level. And it seems like lights are getting brighter as well, or people drive with their high beams on. My rearview mirror is auto dimming, which helps a lot. But since I drive the speed limit these trucks are swerving back and forth behind me, blinding me via the side mirrors.

Man we really really need restrictions on size and weight of cars. It’s getting ridiculous out there.

For people wondering: This is to track batches from the factory, so when there’s a quality issue, they know when and where it was created.

Yeah this game is really annoying to play, which is a shame because it is cute as hell. It continually prompts you to do the thing. It’s like playing Mario and having someone tell you to walk right and jump all through the game. What makes it much worse is that the game fully comes to a stop to do so. Everything just pauses and the game explains what to do. Even when there is a puzzle, the game basically gives you the answer.

The approach Astro Bot uses is much better. It let’s you struggle for a bit and then gives an animation with the move you need and which button it is. Which is really handy because even if you know what move you want it’s easy to forget the right button combination for it. It’s very non intrusive and if you know the move the animation won’t even pop up. An experienced player won’t notice the mechanic at all. If you come back from not playing for a bit, the reminder about the buttons is useful. For kids who genuinely get stuck, the help prevents them from giving up.

Games that were infuriating with these kinds of mechanics were the new God of War games. At every fucking puzzle when you take 10 secs just to get oriented and look at what you need to do, some NPC (usually Boi of War) just tells you the answer. There is no way to turn this off and it made me turn off the game multiple times. If you want to put puzzles in the game, put puzzles in your game and let me figure it out. If you are going to give the answer, why are there puzzles to begin with? It doesn’t help Atreus is one of the worse characters ever written especially in the last game.

Windows 11 has changed this, many many people now warn other people about not using Windows 11 because it is such shit. Doesn’t matter what you run, just don’t run Windows 11.

My computer is like “Kernel panic” and I’m like “Same man, same…”

Like the insect/spider kind or in my code?