Just desserts

Strongly reminds me of Old MacDonald Had a Barcode, E-I-E-I CAR. Basically put a standard anti-virus test string into various sorts of barcode and see what breaks.

Yes, that is why I said “Sounds great”.

Sounds great. I think it is super valuable to have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe in all sorts of ways. Having ActivityPub is also nice.

Robot vacuum cleaners aren’t great a cleaning, but they are very effective at keeping the dust down. You will still want to clean occasionally but with a robot vacuum running regularly you can do it much less often and the house feels cleaner in the meantime.

I’m also lucky enough to be able to afford house cleaners now. It is such a nice gift to our family to not have to worry about doing these things. We can spend that time doing stuff together rather than cleaning and we don’t think about how dirty the house is and dread cleaning it nearly as often. If you can afford it I would highly recommend it. It definitely isn’t cheap but many people have more expensive habits that bring less joy IMHO.

there will be scaling with all of its negative consequences on perceived quality

In theory this is true. If you had a nice high-bitrate 1080p video it may look better on a 1080 display than any quality of 1440p video would due to loss while scaling. But in almost all cases selecting higher resolutions will provide better perceived quality due to the higher bitrate, even if they aren’t integer multiples of the displayed size.

It will also be more bandwidth efficient to target the output size directly. But streaming services want to keep the number of different versions small. Often this will already be >4 resolutions and 2-3 codecs. If they wanted to also have low/medium/high for each resolution that would be a significant cost (encoding itself, storage and reduction in cache hits). So they sort of squish the resolution and quality together into one scale, so 1080p isn’t just 1080p it also serves as a general “medium” quality. If you want “high” you need to go to 1440p or 2160p even if your output is only 1080.

the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.

But they post resolutions, which are arguably less interesting. The “general public” has been taught to use resolution as a proxy of quality. For TVs and other screens this is mostly true, but for video it isn’t the best metric (lossless video aside).

Bitrate is probably a better metric but even then it isn’t great. Different codes and encoding settings can result in much better quality at the same bitrate. But I think in most cases it correlates better with quality than resolution does.

The ideal metric would probably be some sort of actual quality metric, but none of these are perfect either. Maybe we should just go back to Low/Med/High for quality descriptions.

The circuit power doesn’t matter for the example. I was just picking easy numbers. You can have the same problem as long as the rating of the extension cord is less than the circuit breaker. (And as you pointed that out this is a very common case due to the frequently low rating of extension cords.)

100% vibes based. I’ve been noticing very atrocious artifacts. It could also be things like different encoding settings that are producing a worse result. Or I could be making up the whole thing up and confirmed it in my mind for 1080p when the launched the higher bitrate and then was primed to see the higher resolutions drop in quality after.

Yeah, there are two components here

1. Adding extra length.
2. Adding more outlets.

2 is the main problem, but you need a little of 1 to have it fail in an unsafe way (ie. not just tripping the circuit breaker).

If you just add a lot of extra outlets and plug lots of stuff in then you will simply trip the circuit breaker. (Assuming that everything is properly set up according to code.) In order to create a problem you need some extra wiring that is rated for less load than the wall wiring. (Now in practice every splitter has some amount of wiring, so these can be the same device, but most power bars are rated to be “fully used” or have a fuse internally). So the problem looks something like this:

1. Have a 20A wall circuit.
2. Plug a 10A extension cord into it.
3. Plug a power bar or other splitter into the extension cord.
4. Put enough devices into the splitter to generate 15A of current.

Now you are overloading the extension cord and risking fire.

Yes, you will have double heat output due to twice the resistance which causes twice the voltage drop and more or less the same current. But this heat output is spread across twice as much wire, so unless the extension cables are coiled together on the ground each will heat up the same amount as a single one would.

To clarify a bit, the benefit of the UK system isn’t the end device having a fuse, but the cable itself having a fuse.

In the US the setup would be something like

1. Wall has 20A wiring.
2. Electrical panel has 20A fuse to avoid the wire in the wall from overheating.
3. Extension cord is designed for 10A
4. You plug in 2 10A devices to the extension cord.
5. The wall wiring is fine, it can take 20A.
6. The circuit breaker doesn’t trip as it is also 20A.
7. The extension cord overheats and starts a fire.

In the UK the 10A extension cord will have its own 10A fuse in the plug. So when you turn on the two 10A devices the fuse in the extension cord will blow and prevent the extension cord from overheating.

But unless coiled up on the ground the longer cable also has more area to dissipate heat, so the longer cable doesn’t change anything here. The heat output will be consistent for any section of the cable no matter how much more cable there is on easier side of it.

The only think that the different resistance would affect is the voltage drop to the end device. But voltage drop varies wildly so you are unlikely to have a meaningful difference caused by a few extension cords (unless maybe you are already a bad case like an apartment building to start).

You could also just plug in the 10 amp cord and plug the device into it. The chaining doesn’t change anything here.

The worst part is that this doesn’t seem to be some sort of better quality. All of the other qualities seem to have tanked in the past year, so at best this just restores the previous 1080p bitrate.