• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle


  • It’s a shame that this law still doesn’t apply to YouTube

    If Germany is anything like Canada and other countries, applying public broadcast laws to YouTube would be a monkey’s paw deal. Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I’m not considering.

    Now if they made a law specifically for youtube and other online video platforms that dealt with advertising in that context, that would be a different story.







  • The sites are purposefully obtuse to not draw attention.

    A debrid service generally has 2 purposes: caching files and unlocking premium file hosting sites for cheap.

    The latter is self-explanatory and not relevant for this thread (basically imagine unlocking premium for sites like mega and rapidgator but only paying 1 site for all of it).

    The former is what’s important. When you give a site like real debrid a torrent/magnet link, it will download the files in that torrent and cache them so that anyone who later wants to access that same torrent, instead of having to rely on seeders, can just download it directly from the debrid website.

    What are the torrent sources?

    It doesn’t have any, users are the ones who manually (or automatically with their API) provide the site with torrents, which the site then caches for anyone who later wants them.

    Also, what about seeding ratios?

    There aren’t any. Most debrid sites only leech and don’t seed, that’s why even among piracy communities they can be controversial.

    And then another comment points out that streamio is meant to work directly with torrents, which leaves me confused as far as how all the pieces fit together.

    Stremio doesn’t do anything on its own, the add-ons built for stremio are what do the work.

    There is an add-on called torrentio which can pull torrents from several popular trackers and show them in stremio, where you can pick one and start streaming (or, more specifically, the stremio app downloads the torrent sequentially, which allows you to watch it while it’s still downloading). That’s what we’re using here.

    This add-on can additionally be configured with your real debrid account’s API key so that when you select a torrent in stremio, instead of stremio downloading the torrent normally from the available seeders, it instead pulls the cached file from real-debrid, dramatically increasing download speed and more or less eliminating buffering altogether (since real debrid can provide the file at much faster speeds). Using real debrid also solves the issue of torrents with no/few seeds, since the file is always cached regardless and can be provided at fast speeds always.

    Hope this helped.


  • Yeah it’s not the perfect model for sure. Usually you did get updates to fix vulnerabilities and bugs, but any major version release would require a new purchase/license.

    But any software that requires connecting to a server anywhere just doesn’t work in this model.

    In the end there’s not much of a choice. Either you pay more for apps to compensate for the time spent on them, subscribe to reduce your costs and assure continuous revenue, or ads.

    Anything that’s perpetually free, unless it has massive communities willing to maintain it, typically ends up like the tools we see here: abandoned/sold.


  • In ye old days the reigning model was a pseudo subscription where you paid for a version of a program and that’s all you got, if you wanted the next version of that program you had to buy it again. This made developing updates profitable and people who didn’t care to pay for the update could still use the outdated program. It wasn’t perfect by any means but I feel like it was one of the better compromises compared to everything else.

    Sadly with the advent of mobile apps such a model is heavily discouraged.



  • Yes, there is a rhyme and reason, but because that requires actually delving into linguistics studying (plus etymology for all those edge cases that got carried over from Latin and other languages), most people don’t get too deep into it apart from shallow rules (eg: if word starts/ends in X then it’s male/female).

    Not even natives of gendered languages usually bother learning the nitty gritty rules, they just pick it up as they go, that’s how all of us learn our languages.

    On a practical level, it’s also much easier to teach a 6 year old in elementary that something is male/female just because, and to remember that, than to go into each and every individual case (morphology, syntax, semantics, etc.), which themselves typically have edge cases due to history and whatnot. Especially because that child will naturally pick it up as they absorb the language around them so it really doesn’t matter much.

    And then there’s just those cases where we actually don’t know because the etymology got lost. Yeah, that’s fun.

    In school I was never taught why something is male/female yet I can always distinguish them naturally in my. day to day because that’s how I’ve always lived. That’s just one of the amazing things of human language.

    If you ask a native of a gendered language why they think X word should be male instead of female they’ll probably just tell you it sounds wrong otherwise, and that’s literally the end of it for most of us. We don’t think about it, we just intuitively know it sounds right or wrong. I’m sure that’s frustrating to hear for a foreigner trying to learn, but you can’t teach what you don’t know. In the end, other than very broad rules, the best way typically is to just start memorizing it one by one.

    Also, “ends in A” is definitely rhyme or reason in Portuguese, that’s actually a rule. Although to be more specific it’s a tonic A, but even that has an exception if it’s a nasal Ã, but I didn’t want to get into phonology too, I just wanted to give a simple example.


  • At least for romance languages, there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets, so neologisms and borrowed words tend to follow the same logic.

    For word morphology, as an example, in Portuguese nouns ending in a are almost always female, so new words that end with a are very likely to be female.

    There are semantic rules too, for example brands and companies are typically (I want to say always but there’s probably edge cases) female, so even though Netflix and Amazon didn’t exist before they’re still female.





  • It’s mostly cousins and mostly in villages. It was somewhat common (as in, it wouldn’t be seen as completely out of left field) to marry your cousin some decades ago. I know a few seniors who either married their cousin or know someone who did. However it’s definitely an older generation thing, I’ve never heard of someone younger than 40 doing it, and I doubt it’s that common these days.