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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I don’t think you understand how it works… An upload:download ratio must average (not simple mean, but that’s because ratios are nonlinear - I can’t recall the mean type but it’s the nth root of multiplying them all together) 1 in a system where all uploads and downloads are logged in the same tracker. It doesn’t matter who the uploader or downloader is or how recently they made their account. That’s what I meant by a closed system.

    An open system would be where you download parts or all of a given torrent via another tracker, and the same with upload. The private tracker only logs what you downloaded and uploaded though it, so your ratio from the perspective of that tracker is different to in reality.

    Even if you ignore the first 5 files or 15GB or whatever for new users, if you have those files then great but do you really want to turn it into a betting game of seeding supply and leeching demand?


  • I was referring to ones which explicitly require you to have a >1 ratio to download files, which do absolutely have leniency when you sign up, but the average ratio is 1 by definition assuming a closed system and so it’s infeasible for the majority to get >1. Often they have freeleach days but that requires you to be around on that day and also download stuff you don’t want to seed it, rather than just slightly reducing the required ratio (also IMO having a required ratio of any form is bad as it encourages people to turn off seeding after that point, generally I’ll seed stuff which has <5 seeders or low availability of parts I have, as seeding them to 100x is way more valuable than seeding 1000 files which have hundreds of seeders all with 100% availability to 1x)

    I accept they want to keep leaches out though, so if they required a ratio of 0.5-0.75 that’d be fine, but from my experience most “entry level” private ones don’t, and most non-entry level ones either have closed signups or a requirement to be signed up with an existing private tracker in which things are either ridiculously over or underseeded with no inbetween, so it’s hard to build up a ratio.




  • Are those the trackers which demand you have accounts with other private trackers before you join or the ones which demand everyone have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition, so everyone either gets huge seedboxes, cheats the ratio or has to download niche but big files from other sites and switch out the tracker to artificially up the ratio?

    I’m sure there are actually good private trackers, but I’ve found there are open/effectively open (sign up only with no verification/requirements) trackers with better communities than any restricted one I’ve found



  • Oh yeah I absolutely agree with monopoly abuse being a bad thing with a huge caveat that it’s so much worse for essential services and not quite as bad for extras, like youtube. I personally can’t see any competition to youtube being able to provide a better service - it’s in a similar niche to Netflix where they were great until they got competition at which point the userbase and content fragmented, which meant they had to provide a worse service to make money as the content rights agreements made it into several small monopolies and so they were literally unable to compete, which is frankly worse



  • It’s normal for most afaik but that’s because manufacturers make a trimmed down phone to go on your wrist which means you have to charge it daily, without realising it’s on your wrist so it doesn’t need to be super slim with huge cuts to battery size to go in your pocket.

    My garmin has an always on display, heart rate, steps, blood oxygen, thermometer, barometer and whatever else and yet still manages a 4 week battery life, 3 weeks with normal use (1h gps per day, using the touchscreen and higher brightness) or even around 50-60h of GPS/more frequent heart rate/active maps activity tracking

    It’s on 7% now and is giving me an estimated battery life of >2 days, which just shows how abysmal many smart watch battery lives are


  • Wikipedia’s job isn’t free to be anti- or pro- anything, it’s to show facts free from bias, even if you and most other readers agree with that bias.

    Of course the facts can clearly show something to be almost objectively evil to anyone capable of understanding them, but it’s not for Wikipedia to perform any analysis of those facts - saying “Israel has killed X civilians in attacks which many of their allies claimed were completely avoidable [citation]” in an article featured on the front page is perfectly valid, however a big banner with a Palestinian flag is not as it’s a (fair) interpretation of the facts and not simply a presentation of them.


  • I just find the saving mechanism frustrating to use compared to vim’s as an entry level user, and now as a mid-skilled user I dislike how featureless nano is - when I was first learning how to use the terminal I hated having to edit anything as I was pretty much force-fed nano with no alternative provided, but on finding vim and remembering literally 3 things (:w, :q and i) everything became so much easier, but I definitely do have an extra bitter taste left about not being told about something much easier to use which irked me when I saw someone preaching how amazing nano is

    I also really don’t get the hate for vim when remembering 3 things gives you as much/more functionality as nano and is a starting point for so much more functionality - intuitive doesn’t mean featureless and don’t try and pretend nano’s shortcuts are the same as 99% of other editors (text or otherwise), in fact they’re totally different, making it less intuitive



  • The syntax is certainly easier than Java

    And VisualBasic’s syntax is easier than COBOL, but this isn’t a competition to make the least offensive heap of putrid garbage, so why does it matter?

    Python works just fine for basic scripts, frankly it’s amazing for it, but oop and functional programming is so incredibly obviously badly shoehorned in that huge swathes needs scrapping and version 4 releasing





  • I believe none except colonising space… The others are so far off that we don’t even know for sure if they’re even possible, what’s going to go wrong or whether we’re looking in the complete wrong direction, meanwhile you’re dismissing the only realistic one in the next 250 years because we’re close enough that we actually know how hard it is.

    There’s something to be said about chasing after things that are impossible as the possible seems too hard, but I’m not enough of a philosopher for that.