• 4 Posts
  • 291 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • cbarrick@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•A lot of state poll results show ties. So are they tied because of voters — or pollsters?English
    111·
    4 days ago

    BUT good poll results aren’t just “we polled 1,000 people and here’s who they’re voting for.”

    Good pollsters take demographic data when they poll. They model the biases of different demos, and they correct for those biases in their models.

    Yes, reducing underrepresentation at poll time would be ideal. But pollsters are smart and are doing their best to put out good models. Pollsters know Gen Z is underrepresented and are accounting for that already.

    In other words, don’t let Gen Z underrepresentation in the polls lull you into a false sense of security. The polls are accurate. The race is neck and neck.

  • cbarrick@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•HBO should use a different bumper for streaming.English
    7·
    1 month ago

    Video codecs mostly work by tracking movement, predicting which pixels will change, and striving to only encode the pixels that actually change or change dramatically. In other words, compression looks for patterns.

    All of that goes out the window when you try to compress static. There are no patterns. It simply can’t be compressed. This isn’t a matter of the algorithms not being good enough. It’s a fundamental limit of information theory.

    Anything fancier amounts to embedding the intro into the compressor as a well-known pattern. And at that point, you’re better off just caching a 4K version of the intro as a standalone video file directly in the app.

  • cbarrick@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Don't let the media and the masses fool you, It is possible to visualize 4DEnglish
    24·
    1 month ago

    And it is not possible to “visualize 4D”

    Sure it is.

    • 3 spatial dimensions + time
    • 3 spatial dimensions + 1 color dimension (grayscale)
    • 2 spatial dimensions + 2 color dimensions
    • etc

    And that’s not even counting projection. All the time we interact with 3D data that’s projected to 2D (almost every photo you’ve ever looked at). There are similar ways to project 4D to 2D.

    (Not defending the video or anything, just pointing out that visualizing higher dimensions is something we know about for ages.)

  • cbarrick@lemmy.worldtoToday I Learned@lemmy.world•TIL of the continent "Zealandia", a large, mostly submerged continent in the Pacific Ocean which New Zealand is a part of.English
    37·
    2 months ago

    I think the reason Zealandia is called a “submerged continent” is because it is made of continental crust rather than oceanic crust.

    But IMO the best geologic definition of continents is by tectonic plates, which mostly matches up with the cultural definitions of the continents.

    For the major continents, we have these plates:

    • North American
    • South American
    • Eurasian
    • African
    • Australian
    • Antarctic

    There are several smaller plates too, like the Caribbean, Indian, and Arabian plates. IMO, we should consider these independent continents.

    There is also a dedicated Pacific plate. The ring of fire is the border of this plate.

    New Zealand / Zealandia is on the ring of fire. Half on the Australian plate, half on the Pacific plate. You can actually see the border of the two plates when you look at the topographical map of Zealandia.