The accountability part is what makes me more angry. I get to lose so many (maybe hundreds?) of hours a year because of how bad DB works. Meanwhile the executives at DB get their nice boni each year and absurdly high wages for what they do... which is consistently worsening the train experience year after year. Probably none of them even use the train.
I am always a bit annoyed when the root of the problem is not explained. This is the case most of the time (DB of course). I would really like to have a bit more information. Even if there is nothing you can do, it helps to understand how big or small the problem is. Then you can make a decision based on it. Like getting out in the next station or something.
Just got my Framework 13 last week. I really love this computer, and how it is pushing for upgradability and repairability in this segment. Thanks a lot for creating this computer!
Just got my Framework Dektop a few weeks ago and it works flawlessly so far with Debian 13 install including (shock!) suspend working without issue. :)
It’s really great to see companies focus on improving Linux hardware support.
I just bought a second Fairphone 4 just to play a bit with pmOS. I'm really surprised by the state it is. It's not fully usable as a daily driver yet, but with some work it can get there. Waydroid works also pretty good. Of course, the major problem are banking apps and similar. I hope that some progress can be done in this direction. And, who needs working audio, if you can have python and git in your phone!? :P
I made a partition for Nix on mine so I have all the tools I need while not relying on Jolla to package things (the installable package list is quite barren). My audio works from the speakers, but the patches to make the headphone jack (something you Fairphone users no longer know of :P) work won’t come til the next release. For banks, I just use cash or log into the website on my laptop if required—while I will refuse goods/services that require an apps to the fullest extent possible (couldn’t get around TicketMaster which was a real blood-boiler beyond just the “phone required” aspect).
Yes, I think that just trying to use services that don't require special mobile apps can get you a long way. It is sometimes difficult, but now I'm beginning to move more in this direction :)
It’s the same as unGoogling your life where you can slowly start moving off one service at a time & make sure new ones you use are open or at least otherwise ethical.
Did you test apps that need sensors and notifications? If I want to run an OpenStreetmaps apk (there's no good way to run OMS on Linux natively), do I get GPS and compass heading? Do I get turn-by-turn navigation? Even if the app is in the background?
I'm always amazed by people doing reverse engineering of some country formats. There's a binary format that I've been wanting to reverse engineer, but I don't know exactly how to start. It's for the result file of a proprietary finite element program. Could anyone point me to some resources and also what are the basics that I need to learn to achieve this?
(a) you reverse engineer the application writing or reading the file. Even without fully understanding the application it can give you valuable information about the format (e.g. "The application calls fwrite in a for loop ten times, maybe those are related to the ten elements that I see on the screen").
(b) you reverse engineer only the file. For example, you change one value in the application and compare the resulting output file. Or the opposite way: you change one value in the file and see what happens in the application when you load it.
The most important resource you'll need is a hex editor that can let you drop at a cursor and see what the value is at the cursor for all the basic datatypes (u8/u16/u32/u64, float, double, at minimum). Something like 010 Editor or ImHex.
If it's a really simple format, since you appear to have the ability to generate arbitrary file contents using the program, you can get some mileage by generating a suite of small contents with few changes between them. I reverse engineered the DSP sphere blueprint format by generating a blueprint with one node, then the same node located elsewhere, then two nodes, then two nodes and one frame between them, etc. But this process is really only possible for the simplest formats; I'd gander that most reverse-engineered file formats are heavily based on decompilation of the deserialization code.
A lot of binary file formats end up being some form of "container" format--essentially, a file contains some form of directory mapping an item ID to a location in the file, and the contents of that is in some other binary format. It's worth first checking if this is the case, and matching against known formats like ZIP or HDF5.
ImHex will tell you if it's compressed. Do you understand data structures? Floats, all those data types?
I'd suggest looking at a format like msgpack to see what a binary data format could look like: https://msgpack.org/
Then be aware that proprietary formats are going to be a lot more complicated. Or maybe it's just zipped up json data, only way to tell is to start poking around at it.
The way I do it is looking for markers. Most files have some kind of magic number in the beginning. So these can valuable to recognize.
The next part is always looking into the values of 32 bit or 64 bit integers, if their value is higher than 0 but less then the files size they often are offsets into the file, meaning they address specific parts.
Another recommendation is to understand what you are looking for. For games, you are most likely looking for meshes and textures. For meshes in 3D every vertex of a mesh is most likely represented by 3 floats / doubles. If you see clusters of 3 floats with sensical values (e.g. without an +/-E component) its likely that your looking at real floats.
When looking for textures it can help to adjust the view on the data to the same resolution of the data your looking for. For example, if you are looking for a 8bit alpha map with a resolution of 64 x 64 then try to get 64 bytes in a row in your hex editor, you might be lucky to see the pattern show up.
For save games I can only reiterated what has been mentioned before. Look for unique specific values in the file as integers. For example how much gold you have.
I used these technics to reverse engineer:
* Diablo 2 save games
* World of Worcraft adt chunks
* .NET Assembly files (I would recommend reading the ECMA specification though)
* jade format of Beyond good and evil
Ah yes, invest in a good hex editor of course. For me Hex Workshop has been part of this journey.
The bare basics are working with a hex editor and understanding data types - ints, floats, null-terminated strings, length-prefixed strings etc.
I'd recommend taking a well documented binary file format (Doom WAD file?), go over the documentation, and see that you manage to see the individual values in the hex editor.
Now, after you have a feel for how things might look in hex, look at your own file. Start by saving an empty project from your program and identifying the header, maybe it's compressed?
If it's not, change a tiny thing in the program and save again, compare the files to see what changed. Or alternatively change the file a tiny bit and load it.
Write a parser and add things as you learn more. If the file isn't intentionally obfuscated, it should probably be just a matter of persevering until you can parse the entire file.
Thanks. That is kind of what I imagined. But I am not good at understanding the information from the hex editor. Reading the article I was a bit lost with the terms like little-endian and thought that that might be someone important concept to know for the task . I guess that that is what I should learn first.
As someone who has reverse engineers hundreds of random file formats of all kinds over the years, the comment that suggests understanding the code is generally spot on.
You can basically divide the world into read/write/write-only formats and read-only formats.
For read/write/write-only formats, usually the in-memory data structures were written first, and then the serialization/deserialization code. So it almost always more useful to see how the code works, than try to just figure out what random bytes in the file mean. A not insignificant percent of the time, the serialization/deserialization code is fairly straightforward - read some bytes, maybe decompress them, maybe checksum them and compare to a checksum field, shove in right place in memory structure/create a class using it, move on.
Different parts of the program may read different parts of a file, but again, usually a given part of the deserialization/serialization code is fairly
understandable.
Read-only formats are scattershot. Lots of reasons. I'll just cover a few. First, because the code doesn't usually have both the writing and reading, you have less of a point of reference for what reading code is doing. Second, they are not uncommonly memory mapped serializations of in-memory structures. But not necessarily even for the current platform. So it may even make perfect sense and be easy to undersatnd on some platform, but on your platform, the code is doing weird conversions and such. This is essentially a variant of "the format was designed before the code". Lots and lots more issues.
I still would start by trying to understand deserialization code rather the format directly in this case, but it often is significantly harder to get a handle on.
There are commonalities in some types of programs (IE you will find commonalities between games using the same engine, etc), but if you are talking "in general", the above is the best "in general" i can give you.
One other tip - it is common to expect things to be logical and make sense - you can even see an example in this very article. Don't expect this.
For example, data fields that don't make sense or are broken, but the program doesn't use it so it doesn't matter, checksums that don't actually check anything, signed/verified files where the signing key is changeable easily, encryption where the key is hardcoded or stored in the file, you name it.
Most folks verify that their program works, they don't usually go look and verify that everything written/read makes any sense.
It has been a minute since I routinely did this kind of work, but I have to mention this because it's fun:
You can do something in between reverse-engineering the code and reverse-engineering the format if you can instrument the reader: attach breakpoints on every basic block in the reader, load a file, take a baseline trace of what gets hit, then vary bytes in the file and diff the new trace against the baseline.
It helps tremendously if you have a programming background as usually the developers behind the original format didn't have any need to make things harder than they need to be. Because of this, you can often guess how the format works, aka. "If I was the original developer, how would I do this?"
I am an engineer, but not a computer scientist or developer. I have been using Linux for 20 years and program a lot at work and at home. I think it should be possible, but find it difficult to interpret the hex code. I do have a general idea of how the format should be organized, as it contains mostly geometric data and associated results.
If you make a lot of slides with latex, then it is definitely worth it to try typst. I have a lot of presentations in latex for lectures and such things, with many animated tikz figures. But the compilation times are huge. At some point it is very time consuming to iterate. With typst, it compiles so fast that you don't have to fear to start a compilation. I finish my presentations much faster now.
Cetz has been working very good for me. I was really unsure that it could replace tikz for my applications. But apparently, as long as you have good geometrical primitives (lines, rectangle, circles, etc) you can do a lot. Also it is much nicer to program and make real functions with typst. It is true, the typst options to replace beamer are still not quite there in comparison, but they are definitely in a very useful state. See for example typst-presentate [1].
One thing I'm missing when making slides with typst is the ability to show short videos or animated gifs. Although to be fair this isn't easy in beamer either.
Typst can actually include gifs, but they don't move for me. I have some hopes that perhaps one could make slides straight in html which could alleviate the issue.
I was very surprised that it worked perfectly in my 10-year old notebook. Normally, nothing this fancy is playable in a web browser for me. The CPU was about 20% (I only have two cores, 4 threads).
This looks super nice! That is kind of the interface I wish FreeCAD could have. I am more the type of person who likes to use a python interface to create parametric models, but this is really cool!
Anyone knows what is the status of Truck [1] in this regard. Are they going to implement an open-source CAD program with their CAD-kernel? That also looks like a promising project.
Thanks for clarifying cadmium's status and offering your take on the state of truck and fornjot. So, what happened with cadmium? Is Truck just too primitive to build on top of so far? It looks like both of these kernels are actively being developed, what do you think of their rate of progress?
No idea where truck is going, it'll take me quite some time to tinker with CAD I think, it left me quite a bitter taste...
Fornjot seems to be doing good, I'm donating to them and I get regular updates (you should too!). Still, there's a long, long road ahead
If I were to do this all over again I'd either go the OCCT route (like chili3d or zoo) or solvespace. they're both "lacking" kernels if you compare them to the commercial ones, but I think there's enough "market gap" for makers that would prefer a sustainable CAD format instead of perfect fillets (and IMO freecad is not the solution).
Keep in mind though that my efforts where laser focused on non-math stuff. From what I gathered from my time in cadmium, b-rep kernels are hard in an unsustainable level. Browser level unsustainable. I just hope that out of seer necessity we'll find another way to solve the CAD problem, instead of a b-rep kernel
I think that the tools are not will organized, and I always have problems finding the tool I need in the menu. The concept of having different workbenches does not work good for me, as often I am looking for a tool and then realize I am in the wrong workbench. But it is not always clear why something is in a workbench and not in the other, and there are duplicated functions in some workbenches. Also, the fact that it does not support Wayland makes everything look blurry in hdpi screens. I like that it has a good python
API though, but the documentation is a bit lacking. However, the different workbenches also sometimes complicate the use of the Python API. I like e.g. how build123d works.
FreeCAD interface needs to take a lot of pointers from paid CAD programs, this Chili3D interface is quite close, larger icons in ribbons at the top of the screen with clear definitions
There's an active knee-jerk hostility in the FreeCAD community to any user problem that even hints that it might involve a comparison to proprietary CAD. I've had "FreeCAD isn't Fusion and you shouldn't expect it to behave the same way" thrown at me when I've been discussing something bone-headed FreeCAD was doing.
I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.
> I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations
I think it is far worse than that:
1. If I don't understand a language, probably that video is not for me. Most videos targeted for international audience are in English, or at least the author translated it by theirself.
2. Titles are small sentences, and they don't have enough context to be translated. Once I saw a video called something like "Vamos assistir uma conexão com o passado", which in Portuguese means "Let's watch a connection to the past". I needed to de-translate it in my brain to understand that the original title was "Let's play A Link to the Past"
3. Online resources are a great way to exercise a second language. So, please, don't underestimate my capabilities. At least let me try to read in the original language by myself, if I need the translation I how to use Google Translate or a dictionary.
I reckon that this feature makes the access to online content more democratic, it's ok. But at least let me disable that since it makes the experience worse
There's a video that Youtube keeps sending me with a translated title "O segredo das lavadouras" (what translates to "the secret of washing machines") that is about picking screw washers...
But the real problem is when it decides to translate the titles of some perfectly watchable videos in English into something that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, what has no relation to my accepted languages, and is only used half-way across the world from where I am.
My computer is set to English even though I'm German, and sometimes Youtube will treat me to this really uncanny machine voice with really weird phrases because it auto-translated some German video or advert.
Lidl is worth it, ja!
> Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?
Office politics. Google is famously "performance-driven", so the manager in charge of that feature needs usage metrics to be high for the sake of their own career.
That's a funny idea—if the KPI was boosting adoption of a feature and the PM just made that feature the default and suddenly adoption was through the roof.
Same here. My native tongue is German, I live in Switzerland, but my settings on all devices are English.
I do this on purpose, because I find everything is more searchable. I don't even know any German terms for most technical things I might search or look for. So even if the automatic translations were good, which they aren't, this would be a non-feature.
My browser already tells them what my preferred language is. Just use it.
Living in Zurich (German part of Switzerland for those who don't know), Windows 10 in English, the built-in Microsoft Store used to offer content in... French.
Now it's a mix of German and English, e.g. 1 heading is "Spiele-Bestseller", and the next is "Best selling apps". And prices displayed as "28,00 CHF" (correct would be to use the decimal point).
Not only the titles, but also the audio track. There's a few youtubers I regularly watch who are trying to branch out into some additional languages by providing fan-made translated audio tracks, and english is sometimes one of those. Every single time I watch one of those videos, I have to manually set the language back to the original because often the translations lose some of the word play or hidden meaning in the original language. Often it also means I need to rewind the video because it started playing before all the controls have loaded (because youtube hates FF with youtube-related extensions) and I could swap the language track back.
One of the sister replies linked to an extension to help with that, which I'm going to give a try, but it's annoying that there's not a simple toggle in the youtube settings to tell it to always use the original language. On the rare occasion that I want to use the translated audio track, I can do _that_ on my own; I speak enough languages that this is a very rare occasion with the type of content I watch.
This isn't even something I can understand as them being hostile to ad blocking or wanting to push ads. This is a 'convenience' feature that is just poorly implemented. But I'm sure there's some PM that got a pat on the back for it.
I'm sure YouTube's algorithm rewards people for using this feature and making their "content accessible", but if you serve me up an ugly machine translated Norwegian title rather than the English one I could read just fine, that's from my experience a signal that your YouTube channel is low quality algorithm-chasing garbage, so I click "never recommend this channel".
What a catastrophe. You punish the wrong person, and even worse, a channel owner will not even receive that signal! The vast majority of channel owners with English content is not aware what's going on. A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.
If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.
So what you're saying: Please complain through proper channels and hope they accept your input?
Or should he just keep using the signals he gets and immediately clean up his feed?
I actually see this as a feature. YouTube recommends a lot of garbage. I suggested that they improved my feed but they implemented this signal instead. I use the exactly this method to weed out a lot of content I do not care for.
You cannot tell the 500 pound gorilla anything. I prefer my videos without subtitles. I have that set as a preference. Yet when chromecasting it is common for the subtitles to spontaneously turn on. And has done so for a long time.
English is not my first language and my first language is not widely used. Hence I am not used to dubbed movies/programming and I am used to seeing subtitles.
If a native english speaker could understand the horror show that the machine generated subtitles are. If you are used to subtitles they are extremely hard to ignore. You will then read and get the understanding (often hilariously wrong) before the audio catches up and you might end up rather confused.
I can understand an American might have a hard time watching a subbed German movie. Thats natural because it is not common. But when you grew up with subtitles it is actually effortless. Except when they are poor. Then it becomes worse because of the cognitive load of 2 languages and the effort to figure out what is correct.
Dear english only speakers: Translation is hard. A poor translation is worse that no translation as it obfuscates the message. AI is not there yet at all. Maybe impressive but often not helpful or plain and simply distorts the real message.
What I wanted to transport is the following idea: attacking a channel owner (who is most likely innocent and did nothing wrong) with a metaphoric sledge-hammer when a more gentle and precise tool will do is not a great way to conduct oneself in society. vintermann and clan have a feed now without content that bothers them, but at the cost of lowering the channel owner's reputation in the eyes of the operators of Youtube, with the effect of slashing recommendations for the videos of the channel owner at large and his earnings. That's not nice, we should be considerate of the consequence of our actions. Does this make sense, do you understand this perspective?
This behaviour rankles me, I think is on the same level as the misuse of the feature "report this as spam (to some upstream entity/3rd party)" for e-mail messages that are not actually spam.
Attacking? By saying "don't recommend this", I'm just saying I want to give someone else the chance to be seen, rather than the ones who will make their stuff objectively worse in order to juice their stats for the algorithm.
I'm sure my "don't recommend this" clicks don't in any way make up for Google's promotion of channels that "make their content accessible", because it doesn't even stop them from recommending me more machine-translated videos.
They base the feed on user input. The feed is then (supposedly) adjusted to what I like.
What I call a signal you call an attack.
I signal that I do not like Minecraft videos. But I do not attack them.
Your anger is misdirected. You should be mad at YouTube because they do not seem to understand that there can be multiple signals at once.
The chances that I click on a Minecraft video is low. Autotranslated even lower.
So we differ strongly in opinion on how the platform should work. I read your "attack" argument as I should write to the Minecraft creators and tell them their content would be better if they played Minesweeper instead.
I do not punish anyone. I just pursue a clean and (for me) high quality feed.
If you are up in arms that I punish your channel that is another signal that I am probably not your target audience.
When dealing with audiences at scale you need to listen to these signals as handling personal opinions in mails from the discerning viewer is not feasible.
The vast majority of videos are not translated into borked machine-Norwegian, so if this isn't something you opt in to, it's something everyone opts out of (I doubt it).
> A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.
No it isn't, because I see what kinds of channels do this, over and over again. They're very clearly publishers who don't care that they make something objectively worse as long as the algorithm rewards them for it.
> If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.
Ha, as if they ever read that. Probably more Google employees will read this comment than will ever read any of my (many) "please stop translating things without asking, I know where to find machine translation if I need it, doing it without asking that means I have to translate back from broken Norwegian into English in order to understand what the hell you were trying to say" feedback reports.
The channel I'm interested in would be of great interest to English speakers. There are only a few people brave/stupid enough to travel to dangerous places (Ukraine near the front) to do a documentary. I cannot blame the author for turning on the translate, it likely overall expands his reach and is a good thing for those who are not interested in his native language. However I'm trying to learn his native language and getting dropped to English out of my control is not helpful to me.
Youtube really doesn't make it obvious that a title got auto-translated. I now realize that I've seen this happen before, with a video that had a different title on my TV than on my computer, but up until this very second I thought it was my TV's fault.
Even being aware of this - how do I know that it's an auto-translation, rather than someone making AI slop in my native language, without watching the video?
Now Reddit results are translated as well in Google, Kagi, so you think you have found a relevant response in your language, but it's just a machine translation from an English post.
Leads to foreign-language posts on English-speaking small subreddits as well. I see plenty of Portugese, Spanish, Italian and German in communities that barely have enough traffic to debate in a single language.
Thanks for the link, good to know. Gives me a fuzzy feeling to pay for a search engine whose devs you can actually interact with and are actually working on improving their product.
It's interesting that the quality is so low. You can do very good translations for many languages today even with fairly cheap LMs, but for some reason (cost?) automated translation online seems to be still mostly at Google Translate level.
It's even worse for videos with "official" dubs. I have been jump scared by German and French dubs on certain videos recently, I distinctly remember MrBeast, Mark Rober and Nick DiGiovanni. I have set my language to English and my Region to US (worldwide) I don't know what gave YT the idea to preselect these dubs for me, I have seldomly even watched a video that is not English.
Using Brave on iOS I haven't encountered it yet. Perhaps it strips some information? But with the official YT app I have, and it was both fascinating and annoying.
I don't even get the point of that. If I need a translation of the title, I won't be able to watch the video anyways. At least ot makes some sense with the horribly auto-translated videos now, but they had the title translation for a long time while the video was still the original language.
I get you and normally wouldn't either. I was a little impressed when I could switch to like 10 diff languages on the fly. As a foreign language learner seems like it could be pretty helpful.
It's probably most useful for utility or news content. Not 'high effort videos' about an interesting topic. I'm imagining you find a video in another language that fixes a problem you have and can switch to your language to watch.
I sometime watch videos in English with the automatic subtitles. Sometimes I can't understand a few words and the subtitles help me. Most of the time I watch them without subtitles, and rewind the video a few seconds to rewatch a short part with the subtitles enabled.
Worse is the auto-dubbing in some channels. Which cannot be disabled. That has resulted in me stopping to watch a channel completely due to the inability to select the original language (youtube mobile website).
What I don't get is how the feature works. I see it for veeery few videos and those are usually highly profitable clickbait and/or big budget productions, so my assumption has been this is actually something the uploader has to enable or even fill out. My language is very "small", so it makes sense that only the broadly-popuar and highly-profitable would be worth translating the titles for.
Unfortunately, all the translations are machine-translated garbage and there is no setting to turn this off as a viewer, so it's just incredibly annoying.
Gosh this annoys me so much. I am native Portuguese speaker but have all my settings in English. It always tries to auto-dub Portuguese content into English, how do I turn that off?
It is not just that these translations are not needed, they are often - in my case German - of a low quality, contain errors and lose information which the original language contained. And the roboter voices loses all the interesting modulations of the original voice. Even a Fireship video sounds terrible when translated.
So much this. I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Else I can't explain why youtube only lets you set one language. Heck, even google allows you to configure all spoken languages in your account, the very same google account you use for youtube. Yet youtube ignores it and has its own settings.
I think the issue is not speaking more than one language, but not preferring your native language over the original content's language. This is a very American-English-centric view of the world, where content is made for your language and your demographic. Consumption from outside the US is the exception.
In the rest of the world, and especially in Europe, this is the norm, not the exception. On one hand there is the prevalence of US English media (hello hollywood), US english literature (esp. in tech); and on the other hand cross-consumption between EU countries is much more common.
Oh, and the content ends up being in English too, because that's how to reach many people. We don't want those to be translated, because we don't want a double translation. This is something that the US / Silicon Valley mind cannot comprehend.
I think it's more a matter of "why would they have their system language set to X if they speak Y? If they want Y, they should just set their system language to Y!"
It's the idea that the user has a preference for something, and it applies always and everywhere, even when it's not applicable.
It should be absolutely clear, when i speak English and German, do not auto-translate any video title in those languages to the other. You wouldn't believe how bad the translations are, and how unwanted by me (the user). Worse when you speak a third or fourth language, and tend to watch videos. It gets messy.
It was more of an example in how they pick up on _some_ signal about a users language preference and then arrogantly assume they're correct in their decision, and that it's the user's fault if they assumed wrong.
This is actually something that foreigners working at Big Tech US companies should be able to understand very well, because English as a system language is often how software developers set things up for themselves regardless of their native language.
But they don't make those decisions. It's a UX thing, which means that in practice whoever is in charge of "driving up the numbers" is going to be making the decision; the engineers just get to cuss while implementing it.
While i appreciate the effort that Mark Rober puts in his Youtube videos making them multilanguage, i absolutely hate that native voice. It's one of the few Youtube shorts i have to play twice because of it.
Jesus H Christ, I once a month google to see if there's a proper way of stopping this (You can block this with TamperMonkey)
2 things that absolutely kill my experience,
1. Messing up with titles, specially if the contents of the video are still in a different language, Which Kurzgesagt will I get today? Only YouTube knows, this is annoying if I know the youtuber could use a different language in the title to make a joke
2. Messing up with the default audio tracks, I don't mind if the YouTuber has a dubbed track, that's awesome for getting more exposure, but I already know and expect a specific voice and it's extremely jarring
By the by, one quirk of poor language handling that I think it probably harming YouTube is advert language.
Every one of my subscriptions is an English language channel, and my language choice on all Google properties (where possible) including YouTube is English. It's not hard to judge that English is my favoured language.
And yet... every video advert I receive when travelling is served in the local country's language. It doesn't especially bother me, since I actively avoid listening to adverts (and indeed, now pay for Premium lite to avoid them almost altogether) but it's a weird not-so-edge case that I'd have thought a company as large as Google might have addressed already. They've absolutely got the tech to deliver adverts in any language. (And it could be powerful: imagine receiving adverts for local businesses in your native language while on holiday.)
Do you have en-US or en-GB as an alternate, lower-priority language?
If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles.
The other thing that Google might properly use is account-specific language settings. But if they're using GeoIP as has been suggested, I agree they're doing it wrong.
Hear! Hear! It enrages me. They also automatically turn the subtitles ON, making you constantly have to disable them. There is no way for multilingual users to add a list of the languages they understand, which is an insane limitation that's been driving me crazy for years at this point. Wtf are they even working on at youtube's HQ? Making video thumbnails larger still?
And most of the times, the translation misses a core part of the title, making it harder or even impossible to understand. A recent example is "I booted windows from Google Drive (part 2)", which got translated to "inicié ventanas de Google Drive", which misses the whole point. Luckily for me, the miniature said what the video was about, and I could understand and watch it.
About the translation, sure, "boot" ≈ "iniciar", "window" = "ventana", but for (microsoft) windows, and other names in foreign languages, the same name must be kept.
I mean, I can deal with the titles, but recently it has been auto selecting machine translated sound tracks, without any way to disable it. And they're bad, like maybe one level above 2010 phone TTS system
If that is the case, then I don't see any novelty here. This has been done for a long time. In Germany, this is called "Panzerholz" (something like "bulletproof wood")
Modern Panzerholz (Kunstharzpressholz, 'synthetic resin densified wood') is manufactured with resin - this new material doesn't seem to rely on resin, but only on the cellulose contained in the wood.
Same reason we don't build bridges out of titanium: panzerholz is more expensive than normal wood, and normal wood is good enough for most applications where it's used.
Titanium's strength is in its weight: steel's Young modulus is almost twice as high, so you'd have to build rather large bridges to compensate. Titanium is useful where weight is a concern, like things you launch into space. Steel is perfect whenever weight isn't a concern and sometimes still works really well because you get so much strength out of so little which is why there are so many fans of the thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames.
Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.
Those steel bike frames don't have much in common with the steel used for structural steel. They both are iron alloys with added carbon content, the similarity stops there.
Similarly trying to compare "titanium" to "steel" is dumb. No one uses pure titanium for structural purposes & there are hundreds of common steel alloys.
Please stop repeating this FUD. The notion that a rigid steel frame provides measurable shock absorbtion over the supple, air-filled, rubber tires is mind numbingly stupid.
Steel bikes feel “better” and “springier” than aluminum bikes. Objectively, they last longer than aluminum bikes.
What exact differences in physical properties or construction leads to this, I couldn’t tell you, but you can pick up an old steel bike frame for cheap and experience it yourself. Well-made steel frames are much lighter than poorly-made ones, so I would recommend finding one of the good ones.
No, I tried probably ten or fifteen of each type over a 35 year period.
There are a bunch of factors, including tube thickness, alloy (I’m sure that when it comes to steel this matters, I think it doesn’t matter with aluminum), and frame geometry.
One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, if you are using rim brakes, aluminum wheels are so much better than steel wheels it’s not even a conversation worth having. This is because aluminum wheels, unless they are painted, will have a nice aluminum oxide coating. This is effectively a ceramic and the coefficient of friction with rubber brake pads doesn’t change when the rims are wet, say on a rainy day. Steel rims lose all friction when wet.
Because I have been around for a while and made a lot of “experiments” (mistakes), I know some things. I’m happy to share what I know with you.
As you can see from Figure 3a at the top of the third page of the paper, this densified wood is about ten times the stiffness of natural wood, in the sense of Young's modulus. Stiffness is basically the product of Young's modulus and geometry, not geometry alone.
Oh man if that's true I hope it replaces dimensional lumber for floor joists. I'm not sure which psychopath invented span charts for home building, but it's extremely rare I'm in a non-slab house where the cabinets and such don't rattle from just a normal person walking across the floor!
I ended up putting beams in to half the span across my own house because it got so annoying(I want to say they are high grade SYP 2x10s @ 13 or 14')
