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d6cxxf | Why does a link in a Word document takes too long time to open when clicked in? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because Microsoft Word is not a web browser. So when you click the link it has to take time to open the web browser before it actually searches the url and opens the page. Just a guess."
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d6fn2e | How can two videos of the same length and the same resoklution have different sizes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Different encoding or compression protocols. Video isn't stored as raw data - those files would be massive for even short videos. Instead, the videos are encoded into different formats, which eliminate much of the raw data to reduce file size with differing effects of overall quality. Different protocols focus on different aspects of the video (and thus different raw data to remove), so they will have end results that have different levels of quality and file sizes.",
"The answer is compression. Video is a series of images. Totally uncompressed, a video is the full bitmap of each pixel of each image. There are two basic ways to compress, changes and chunks. Changes are when you just store what changed. This is a big way to reduce video. If a scene shows a person talking in a room, most of the room may stay the same each frame. Just the person, or just the person's face may change. So you don't have to store what is in each frame pixel by pixel, just the pixels that are changing. Chunks are when you define a repetitive section as a chunk and give it a short ID. Then instead of storing the whole chunk each time you just store it once and put in the ID. For instance if a document said \"the United States of America\" many times you could store & USA each time and save a lot of characters. This works best for text but also works for images. If an image has a large area of the same color it can be stores by defining the area and the color instead of each pixel."
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d6idpt | How can DJs jump around on stage without their records skipping? | I'm watching an old video of Fatboy Slim doing a show on Brighton Beach, and he's up on stage moving around pretty good, even jumping at times. Not to mention the bass of the music itself. And the music keeps going without ever skipping. Meanwhile, when I'm listening to LPs, it seems like the slightest movement will make the needle skip. I get that I don't have a super-stable platform for my player, but I wouldn't think a temporary stage is all that stable, either. How do DJs in clubs (who use record players) or at live shows keep the records from skipping? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Former club DJ so I can speak to this. While not nearly as many DJs still use vinyl as they used to, some still do, and prior to the invention of CDJs and serato, they all did. Proper nightlclubs and venues would go to great lengths to isolate acoustic vibrations from the DJ booth. Some would suspend the entire assembly from the ceiling with suspension systems. Others would have the booth structurally separate from the rest of the building, sitting on a thick rubber base over a concrete foundation within the building. Essentially, it was a column within the building that was structurally separate. The turntables that DJs use (almost universally the Technics SL1200 series) were made with club use in mind. They have sturdy tonearms with good tracking, and thick rubber bases with rubber feet to absorb shocks. DJs also tend to use needles made to have extremely good tracking. For more ad-hoc locations like warehouses or lofts, DJs often bring their own makeshift materials for isolation, like mattresses, rubber or foam pads, and cinder blocks. I've even seen DJs put cut tennis balls on the feet of their turntables."
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d6irzy | Why does playing a video on my PC not have any lag or stutter, but playing a game does? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's the same reason it's much more difficult to paint a picture than to look at one. With a video (which is just lots of pictures played one after each other very quickly), the work of making the pictures and stitching them together has already been done, you just have to play it back. When you play a game, your computer creates each picture on the fly, then stitches them together as you play. So videos are much easier to run with good performance, but the drawback is you have no control over what you see. You can't decide that the plot of a film is going to change half way through because it's already been made, you're just watching the result. In a game, you decide where the character goes, what they do, etc because it's being made on the fly according to what buttons you press.",
"Playing a video is much \"easier\" for you PC then rendering a game. For the video, you only have on big file and the GPU just have to give this file with all his colors and motion back. When you play a game, your GPU and CPU have to work a ton of files. Also your GPU has to render every frame. It has to calculate how shadows has to fall, has to display a lot of different things at ones."
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d6j7tg | How does google maps know when you're riding a motorcycle and when you're driving a car? | Google is 90% accurate in this | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It uses the accelerometers and motion sensors built into the device on which it's being used. For instance, when going through a smooth turn at speed, a motorcycle will always lean. It has to lean to turn, and Google knows this, so it can look for trends like this."
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d6lc9m | How did germ theory and half decent medicine take so long seemingly compared to other sciences to develope and become accepted. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This can be summed up with the classic: seeing is believing. Germs are so small that it takes highly specialized equipment to see them and we’ve only had access to such equipment since about 1600’s. During this time people were much more religious and it was much easier to think that G-d called another angel to heaven than to think some millions of microscopic organisms just killed your family member.",
"Medicine was ruled by traditionalists dating back to Ancient Greeks, some of the medical textbooks on anatomy were not altered despite there being ample evidence that they were wrong. Early medicine wasn't about what was right or wrong just learning exactly the same stuff that had always been taught before.",
"For a long time, people generally recognized that disease can be contagious, that people who spend time in close proximity to sick people tend to get ill themselves, and that people who avoid the sick tend not to get ill. But for centuries we had basically no idea why this happened. How could we? Germs are so tiny they're invisible. No one could be expected to realize they exist. We came up with some primitive solutions. Lepers were banished to leper colonies so they couldn't spread their leprosy. Some cities would quarantine ships that arrived from far away, the ship would have to stay in the dock for a few weeks and no one would be allowed to get off the ship during that time. And during the Black Plague, doctors believed in something called a \"miasma\" which was basically like bad air. They believed sick people breathed out bad air, and breathing in that air would get you sick (not all that far off from how it works in reality, right?), so they invented these fancy suits that were basically primitive gas masks filled with perfumes and flowers, to sort of filter out the miasma. The suits actually worked, although not for the reason the doctors thought (the suits came complete with full-length gloves, preventing direct skin-to-skin contact. But it was only once A) cells were discovered by Robert Hooke in 1665, and B) Ignaz Semmelweiz discovered in 1846 that washing your hands significantly reduced deaths in hospitals, that germ theory of disease could really take hold in the scientific establishment. And it did take a few decades for doctors and scientists to fully get on board, many rejected this theory, but the same could be said of many scientific advancements, like heliocentrism and Darwinian evolution. Furthermore, effective medicine was a product of the empirical mindset of the Scientific Revolution. The notion that truth can only be derived by forming a hypothesis and then putting it to the test to try and disprove it. This might seem obvious to us now, but it went against a lot of common thinking in the pre-Enlightenment era. The notion of physical truth being derivable from pure reason or philosophy still predominated, and nowhere was this more disastrous than in medicine, where doctors were more or less making shit up that *sounded* like it ought to be helpful to patients, but never really testing it to see if it actually worked."
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d6lgy7 | How do we make paper out of trees? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Paper mills liquify the pulp of the tree and turn it into thin slices. Paper reverts to its pulpy state when it gets wet.",
"Trees and plants are very fibrous. We take trees, grind them onto a pulp, spread it very thinly through fine mesh, and then compress it and dry it (sometimes with heat and sometimes without. This affects the texture of the finished paper). I mean, in theory. We also add binders and chemicals and stuff to make modern paper. But of you tear paper (especially thicker, art papers), you can [see]( URL_0 ) how the fibers make up the paper. With modern paper, all the fibers are aligned due to how they are pressed through mesh screens. This gives paper a sort of grain, similar to how wood and fabric has a grain. It can be very important to determine the grain of the paper for certain crafts or uses, like book binding. If you can't see the grain in your paper (in some rustic papers, you can visibly see the fibers), the easiest way to test it is to soak the paper in water. The warping and wrinkling forms with the paper grain. You can also test by tearing it. The paper will tear in a straight direction with the grain, but will tear crookedly and unevenly across the grain. Paper is fun."
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d6mqcn | Why we cannot trace unsolicited phone calls from scammers, phishers, criminals and criminals so that we know their exact location and the origin of the call? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The telecom companies can but don't. The telco allows people to select their own callerID on VOIP-based phone systems. They don't have to allow this but they do. The spam system exploit this and set it to a random number, no number, or a number they choose that isn't random. It is solvable but it would require the telecos to do something that is in the better good.",
"I used to work for a digital security company working to shut down phishing, malware and other scams. Occassionally our customers would ask us to shut down phone scams. Ultimately laws against these types of crimes are extremely outdated. Just to get the phone company to deactivate the phone number you have to call the number and record your conversation. They have to openly state on the recording that they're the company they are impersonating. Then you submit the recording to the phone company, upon which they might investigate, and if they determine it to be fraudulent they deactivate the number. But they are by no means legally obligated to do this, so many dont. As far as finding them for arrest/prosecution, sure it's possible to find them but 99 times out of 100 the person is in another country. And in these countries the authorities tend to care about it even less than we do. Most of the time when people report these fraudulent calls they're reporting the number on their caller ID which is usually a spoofed number, spoofed meaning it's not the number they're calling from. In this instance even if they wanted to do something they couldn't because they dont have the right info. This is possible because when your phone receives the connection request your phone says, \"hey, what's your number?\" And the other phone says, \"here you go, this is it, I promise\", but there is no verification process in the technology so the person calling can configure their phone to say whatever they want. So your caller ID could say the call is coming from California when it's actually coming from India. It doesn't help that fraud is a booming industry, growing at an exponential rate. Very little that we do will actually help. All you can really do is ignore their attempts and try to not fall for their tricks. At least until the old farts in DC keel over and people who actually understand technology can pass some better laws.",
"Because the telephone companies aren't financially liable for calls with spoofed caller ID. The technical side of the authentication problem has been solved for decades, but there's no financial incentive for the phone companies to implement it. You might still be able to trace the call with the cooperation of the phone companies and ISPs involved, but you'll probably have to get warrants in multiple jurisdictions.",
"The telephone system is open to enable interoperability across carriers and tracing can be both legally and technically challenging. Caller ID wasn't desiged to authenticate the origin caller, thus you can easily replace the 'from' number with anything. This is useful for situations where many lines sit behind a main PBX, e.g. like a hospital or large office, where you can display the main number regardless of extension. However, this feature also opens caller ID to widespread abuse by scammers. The FCC and other regulatory bodies are forcing telcos to act, by implementing some form of caller authentication, mostly via a digital signature and a protocol known as STIR/SHAKEN. The problem will get bntter as more telcos roll it out.",
"Because they almost always do call spoofing. Essentially, they trick your phone into believing the call is coming from any random assortment of numbers. That's why when you call the number back, it's often a random person, non-connected line, a random company, your local best buy etc.",
"Curious. Today I received a notification that starting in November my cell service provider (Freedom Mobile) will start blocking illegitimate numbers in accordance with CRTC direction. It’s a start I suppose. If you’re hiding behind a spoofed number, I don’t want to talk to you. Ever.",
"They usually just use generic VOIP numbers which typically don't share anything about the caller's location. They almost never use local telecom services.",
"What the other posters are missing is that Telcoms have an open system that allows any and all access. They can't vent ALL companies, and denying access could ruin a small company. Because of this anyone can call into a system from and you can fake credentials, since the owner could come from any source.",
"Part of the problem is that there are legitimate reasons to spoof caller ID. For instance in a business you have had a main line and numbers for individual desks. However, you might have 100 handsets but only 10 active phone trunk lines. It's forest come, first served, and for outgoing each phone tells the phone company what number to show for caller ID. For sales it might be the direct number but for support it could be the generic support line. There's also outsourcing where people in say the Philippines make calls for a company based in the US and their calls go out with that company number.",
"Finally one I know! I may or may not have a different perspective on this as someone who likes to do prank phone calls from time to time and participate in a community of prank callers. Even for the average person it's incredibly easy to hide your number. The term for this is call spoofing. What this does is change your number into another number of your choosing. Back in the day there was a service called spoof card that would act as a calling card. You'd dial a number and could input a new number and they would spoof that number for you. Now, all you need is a computer and you can set up what's called a asterisk. It's essentially accomplishes the same thing as a spoof card did, except you can set it all up yourself in your home. Everyone can do this. A lot of times companies do this to make calls from employees on different numbers in the office appear as if they're calling from the customer service line or the main number you'd want customers to call back. Now, from what I understand the reason it's so hard to catch people with these systems is because phone technology overall is pretty old. You can essentially tell the phone system \"this is my number, trust me\" and with no checks, it'll accept it and that's what youll see on your caller ID when you receive this scam call. Even if we could trace these calls, most scammers call to the US or Canada from other countries such as India among other places. I'm not sure about the legality of it over there, but we don't really have much say on prosecuting these places. A podcast named ReplyAll did an amazing episode on an Indian call center and while it may not be entirely relevant to the question, it may be of interest to you. I've never posted on this sub, and I'm sure my understanding isn't as indepth as some other people's, I still thought I'd share. I hope that helps!"
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d6p0mf | How did credit cards work before the internet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on the era. The modern credit card is mostly traced to the Diners Club card. Basically, some dude was eating out and forgot his wallet and that *was super embarrassing* (his wife had money on her person so he was fine but still embarrassed) and he hatched a plan to basically get restaurants to \"charge\" meals to accounts. Then, at the end of the month, they'd go pay their bills. Later on, credit cards got big. That brought about those big machines you may have seen before. I worked in retail just early enough that we HAD one though I never used it. How those worked is you would put the card in the machine, and run a thing over the card which rubs an imprint into a piece of paper. You then put the amount of the bill on the paper, and the customer signs it. At the end of the day (or week, or whatever) the merchant would then physically mail all the imprints off to the issuing bank (or drop them off) and the bank would then pay it. Later, most merchants moved over to a system that uses a phone to do all of this. Even now, a *lot* of the merchants still use an old style system that dials everything up. Keep in mind though, wiring money around via telephone/telegraph is old. Like, late 1800s old.",
"Your credit card terminal would have a modem in it which called the credit card company via and attached telephone line and processed the transaction that way. This is still done occasionally by older machines, although it’s a much slower process. You generally had a dedicated line for your credit card terminal, or used your fax line for both cards and faxes (faxes were super common) Over the internet, it sends the same data as it used to, it’s just way way faster and doesn’t need and extra phone line. Before the phone line a merchant would take a physical imprint of the card and amount to charge with signature and mail it to the credit card company. Yes snail mail. This actually worked ok as odd as it seems today, it worked just fine. Although it was much much easier to commit fraud as you can imagine.",
"That is a great question! Before the internet, credit cards were run using an analog modem over phone lines or a satellite phone modem. Depending on your age you might recall seeing silver flat cables under the terminal used to run credit and debit purchases. The flat silver cable is/was a phone line. Some places used satalites for approval, mostly high volume gas stations. When the credit card machine was actived, it dialed out on a plain old telephone line. Satalites or land line the process from their was the same... The placed a call. The phone call was answered just like any dial up modem, beeping, hand shake sqwacking sound etc, but very quick. The modem transmission contained the card information and purchase amount which was then approved or declined by the credit card processing company. The credit card processing company was an intermediary between the point of sale and the card issuer. For a cut of the sales they took the risk of approving the purchase. Stores use to get a little booklet with all the stolen and canceled card numbers printered in it. You were supposed to check for the card in this booklet! Rediculous because the print was microscopic. Once approved by the intermediary processing company. The transaction would indicate that the sale was accepted on the credit card machine. It would return an approval code. You wrote this on the credit card slip. The customer signed the store copy and the store kept their copy until they were paid by the bank. I hope you followed the process. P. S. The intermediary companies still exist and are the reason for the signs that you see indicating a minimum dollar amount before stores take credit cards. The fee charged to the sellers are around $ 0.30 -$0.50 per transaction and a % of the sale around 3%-4%. Within the last two years, I had to go figure out why a Western Union money transfer location was no longer working. The location has switched from (POTS) Plain Old Telephone Service to a digital system. The Western Union machine still used an analog modem to communicate. So, I had to have a different system delivered to the site that was internet capable."
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d6racu | In the event of a power outage at a hospital, how do people on life support, in surgery, or otherwise actively dependant on a particular machine survive? Is this just a risk associated with being on the machines? Do hospital generators activate without a lapse between them and the main power? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hospitals do have generators but usually they are on cold stand by and not running immediately when the power goes out. Some hospitals who invested a lot in keeping their stuff up to date have batteries for the most essential machines to bridge the time until the generator comes online. Sadly it appears that with worrying frequency there is not enough preparation for power outage and generators simply fail.",
"I can't tell you about hospitals however a similar problem exists in Datascenters. They usually use diesel generators in the case of a Power outage, though they take 40 seconds or so to start generating enough power. In the mean time giant batteries provide enough power. I'm assuming a similar system is in place at hospitals."
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d6umue | How do phone companies release phones that are so similiar when they have 2-3 years in development behind the scenes? | the new iPhone 11 and google pixel 4 both have the camera clump in the top left. As-well as with the S8 (?) and the pixel, the finger print scanner was moved to the back. So many companies ditched the headphone jack within the same year. along with so many other changes that happened in the same year. How does this happen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Phone development is spurred by consumer wants. Because most consumers look for the same things, they design phones around those. Ditching the headphone jack could also be seen as a money-making opportunity. Companies have only ditched the headphone jack when they are successful in selling their own wireless earbuds."
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d6w9u4 | In a first person shooter, how is the video game able to track the trajectory of a fired bullet and its interaction with online players in real time? | Apologies if this isn’t an easy question to answer without programming knowledge, but as a casual gamer I’ve always been very curious about this. Thank you for any replies! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For simple bullets, there is no trajectory tracked. What they do is called hitscanning. Basically they treat your gun as a laser pointer and wherever it is pointing is what is hit. Internally, it draws an imaginary line from your gun to some boundary, then calculates all of the objects that line crosses, then finds the object closest to the player and then that object is \"hit.\"",
"Most shooters use \"hitscan\" mechanics for bullet-based weapons. In other words, bullets don't have a \"trajectory\". The game simply checks to see if you were aimed precisely at the target when you fired. If you were, then it registers a hit on the target."
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d6xac4 | Why do computers never show the correct file transfer time and keeps on changing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So when a computer shows you the time remaining in a file transfer, it's the result of calculations done by the computer to forecast how long the file transfer would take if *the transfer speed at the time of the calculation remained constant until the end of the transfer.* So the reason why it changes is because the file transfer speed changes (because of network factors, memory retrieval stuff and a million other variables), and so the estimations are recalculated every time the speed varies.",
"Because it's impossible to know without simulating it fully beforehand. How fast a file transfers depends on loads of things. How big the file is, what type of file it is, if it's on a hard drive, how fragmented the file is, where on the drive it's stored. All the system can do is work on the bytes per second transferred against the total file size being transferred to calculate a remaining time. If you suddenly get a big single file that's not fragmented and it starts transferring a lot faster, the calculation will then bring the estimated time down by a load. Suddenly a lot of small files that require a lot of seeking around the disk, and the time will shoot up. As I say the only way to know is a simulation beforehand, but I doubt you'd put with it taking twice as long to perform the action just so once it actually starts transferring, you have a reasonably accurate estimate of when it'll finish. That's why those transfer time estimates have always been rubbish, and probably always will be."
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d73m9e | How is a yellow-ish filter on your screen helpful for eye comfort on phones? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Blue light is the strongest out of all colours; using the opposite, yellow light, puts less strain on the eye because it is not as strong.",
"It removes the blue light from your screen. Blue light is hard on the eyes, but also the trigger for your body to determine if it's day or night. As such, seeing blue light makes people wake up/stay awake (yes even with eyes closed). Its actually a red filter. If its yellowish it's on a really low setting. I recommend an app filter that can go higher, helped me quite a bit with my sleeping rythm."
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d745y6 | how does closed captioning work and why is it usually F’d when it comes to legibility? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I have a cousin who does CC for live TV and seminars, and she repeats what the speaker is saying into a microphone slowly, and some dictation software interprets it and prints it on the screen. This is done live, so if the software misunderstands her or she says the wrong thing, the text will be wrong too.",
"People type the words, which are delivered in synchronized messages with the broadcast, like how the audio is synchronized with the video, or as it happens, such as live broadcasts. For live broadcasts, it’s entered or typed in real time, by someone listening to the same broadcast everyone else hears, so typos and misunderstandings occur. These don’t happen in recorded broadcasts, where there’s not only a script but also opportunity to rewind. In both cases, sometimes the CC varies because the spoken dialogue happens faster than many people can read, or when there’s a lot of overlap, so there’s occasionally different or truncated text. Finally, sometimes, as with audio or video, the CC part of the signal can be interrupted, so the text gets whacked, other technical difficulties can occur such as when special characters are used."
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d74l54 | how do cars know the outside temperature when they're driving down the road at 100kmh? Does the wind not effect the readings? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Wind does not cool things innately, it just tends to help things of different temperature cool or heat faster by replacing the air nearby with new air that hasn't been changed in temperature via conduction. The thermometer will be aided in changing temperature faster by the wind but it should still be reasonably accurate otherwise. Humans tend to view wind as cooling because we produce heat internally and the wind allows it to be shed faster than otherwise.",
"Nope! Wind has no effect at all on the temperature. It only feels like it does because when wind hits your bare skin, it causes some sweat to evaporate, which cools you down.",
"The sensors are placed where they are not affected by wind, while at the same time away from things like the engine. They are commonly placed inside the bumper.",
"It is also usually tucked into the side of the grille opening, in a part where the air isnt being hit directly with 100mph gusts, but isnt being warmed up by the engines radiant heat"
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d77510 | How do you reward A.I in reward based learning / What do you reward them with? | I read [this]( URL_0 ), and the part that caught my eye primarily was "It’s the latest example of how much can be done with a simple AI technique called reinforcement learning, where AI systems get “rewards” for desired behavior and are set loose to learn, over millions of games, the best way to maximize their rewards. " and it got me curious, but google didn't really help me. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You give them a number as a reward. They're designed to repeat behaviors that give them a larger number. This is at the level of a dopamine response in a worm rather than any kind of reward we'd typically use.",
"So the 'reward' being referred to is the a measure of 'success' which is defined according to what a machine-learning/A.I. model is trying to 'learn'. For this example, the 'success' was defined as > the “seekers” get points whenever the “hiders” are in their field of view. The “hiders” ... get points when they’ve successfully hidden themselves So, how do they learn? Over hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of simulations. Maybe for the first simulation, every seeker and hider randomly does an action (including waiting/NOT doing anything) every second for a minute. After the minute is over, each seeker and hider gets a score. Then they do it again. And again, and again. Each time, the hiders and seekers compare their last score to their previous scores. Maybe a seeker got a better score when they moved towards the hider. Ok, so now instead of picking a completely random action every time, the seeker may realize it tends to score higher when it approaches the hider so it will start doing that more. Great, but what if there's a wall between? Now it's not scoring well when it just moves towards the hider because it gets stuck and never sees it. The important part is that the seeker doesn't learn to ALWAYS go straight for the hider, but just is *more likely* to. Eventually, it may go around the wall and then get a good score again. Repeat this a LOT of times and it will 'learn' to go around walls. The trick is the sheer number of repetitions and the random picking of options to 'develop' strategies over a long time. Obviously there is a lot more that could be talked about but **TL;DR** The reward is just a number from some function (the AI's creator(s) make up) that the AI tries to maximize over several several simulations. It 'tries' different things randomly and so starts to 'learn' without being explicitly told what to do.",
"In real animals, rewards tend to be something they enjoy or want. This is because they will try to repeat whatever they did that got them the reward the first time. AIs skip the satisfaction step - they are programmed to try to repeat whatever they did that got them rewarded. All a reward is for an AI is the goal it is programmed to seek."
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d77vmk | what is an apk and how does it differ from apps downloaded from the app store even though they could be the same app | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"the APK is a package that constains the software (\"the app\"), various data, permission flags, as well as instructions on how to install & deinstall for your phone. An \"app store\" is a piece of software that distributes those APK, it specifically tracks versions and payment details.",
"An APK is the format in which the app is packaged regardless of where you download it. The only difference is that when you download it from the app store, you know exactly what you’re getting. Downloading files from a 3rd party website requires that you trust the source.",
"The new preferred publishing method for the Play Store uses \"Android App Bundles\". Developers upload a single app bundle (.AAB) file, and the Play Store generates several .APK files from that. The Play Store then serves up the correct .APK to the user, based off things like the device's resolution and hardware. For instance, a lower-end device would get low-resolution assets, and a higher-end device would get higher-resolution assets. A device with an ARM GPU might get one .APK, while one with a Qualcomm GPU might get another. So, if you're downloading .APKs from non-Play Store sources, you might get a .APK that isn't meant for your device at all (and hence won't work properly). As a developer myself, this is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it drives away some potential pirates, but it's a curse because it means I get all sorts of crash reports indicating issues that are never supposed to happen. Also, a third party can easily take a .APK from the Play Store, extract it, add their own custom malicious code, and then repackage it. This is because .APK files are really just .ZIP files. You really don't know what you're getting when you install random .APKs from non-trusted sources."
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d78ibq | how do mobile phones increase GPS accuracy by proximity to WiFi networks? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't so much increase accuracy, as rule out a number of possible locations while you only have a small number of satellites acquired by matching the information about Wi-Fi in range of you to a list of known Wi-Fi networks and their approximate locations. Since you *can't* always acquire more than a couple of sattelites in for example heavily built up areas like Manhattan, and even in the middle of an open savannah or ocean it can take a few minutes, this is extremely helpful (especially on battery powered devices), but it doesn't actually increase precision beyond what you could get from just always on GPS on a ship or large boat."
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d795qg | How do self-driving cars handle Mexican stand-off situations at roundabouts? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If all three approached at roughly the same time wouldn’t all three be able to enter the round about since they wouldn’t be in each other’s way?",
"There is no such thing as a standoff at a round about. They all enter the round about and follow it around until they get to the exit road that they intend to take. There could be a stand-off at a normal junction, but the entire point of a roundabout is to get rid of that situation."
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d7d444 | Why do charging chords stop working? | My phone chargers seem to decide randomly when to work after they get old. This doesn’t seem to happen to vacuum cleaner chords. It’s just a simple wire, it’s not broken, what’s happening? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The metal cables inside the plastic/rubber wear out. These are the conductors that carry the electrical signal. The are arranged in a little bundle inside the casing. They become frayed or broken, especially at the junctions where they connect to the USB or lightning tip. When enough of the metal is damaged, the current no longer flows through enough or at all to supply power. Vacuum cables and other appliances are made with heavy duty casing and conductors. They are reinforced at the junctions. Manufacturers do this because a vacuum cord is bound to be tugged on, tripped over, and abused. They have to design for this abuse. If they made vacuums cords the same strength as phone chargers, they would not last a day."
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d7esbc | How do they actually put concentrated amounts of vitamins and minerals into vitamin pills? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Vitamins are just chemicals. Like sugar or table salt are chemicals or even water. So we can both synthethise them from smaller chemicals or extract them from some life form. Typically you'd genetically engineer some form of year to o reproduce the vitamin or vitamins you want to extract. Vitamin C used to be extracted from fruit for example, but is made through fermentation if corn starch. Vitamin B complex is prepared by extracting the different b Vitamins all at once from yeast. And the extraction itself is done by mixing the raw material with some solvent. Just like when you make tea or coffee, you mix the tea/coffee with water to extract the caffeine. If you were to let the tea/coffee dry or boil off the water, you'd end up with a powder that's mostly caffeine. Do that enough times with the correct solvent, and you end up with a very pure substance. Once you have the chemically pure vitamin you mix the with binders and fillers and either press the mixture into tablets, or fill it into capsules. If it's a 24 hour tablet, it'll often be covered in a polymer coating that only lets a specific dose per time pass through itself. Edit: As for minerals: Those are very simple substances, so you can basically just mine them, and rearange the ions around. But in essence, if you want to put iron in a tablet, you add rust, if you want to add magnesium, you add magnesia. Those aren't very well soluble though, so you'd typically add the magnesium salt if citric acid, or the iron salt of gluconic acid. But the Iron or Magnesium part I'd always identical, and you could take rust just as it is, grind it down and put it into a capsule/tablet.",
"\"vitamins\" are just different chemicals. They put them into pills like they put every other chemical in em.",
"If you look on the vitamin bottle you will see most of the vitamins are listed in mg's. To give you an idea of how big that is, one grain of salt is about 25-30mg's. So in pure form, the amount of vitamins your body requires is very small. Now weather or not your body can actually use the vitamin in the form present in the pill is another matter."
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d7f0fn | How to I explain to someone why you can't just turn portrait into landscape and vice versa when printing documents? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You mean when copying documents from a scanned one? They don't understand that the printer is literally just taking a picture and \"stamping\" it onto sheets of paper. If you want a portrait document \"printed landscape\", you don't want to just stretch the picture. You want to move words around, which you can only do on a computer."
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d7kged | _how do astronauts that are in space for months/years at a time get their air? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They turn water into oxygen through a process called electrolysis. It requires a lot of energy, but they have solar panels that can power it. URL_0"
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d7kmbr | Before CGI and advanced post-processing, how could people play double roles in movies and on television? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The magic of film. On the extremely rare occasions, usually no more than once or twice per film, split screen filming would be used to show the same actor/actress twice. You will notice no part of the body ever crosses the center of the screen. Cover the left half of the lens and film character one on the right side of the set. Rewind the film, uncover the left and cover the right side of the lens - film same actor in different makeup on the left side of the set. Develop the film, print voila. Cinematography was a true art form.",
"You do not need CGI and advanced post processing to do that today. CGI is graphics generate by a computer like in computer game not mixing and manipulation of real stuff you film, Visual effect can be CGI but is can be a lot of other stuff like composition when you mix multiple captured videos and it can be done optically without a computer. So not CGI is needed for multiple people in the same shot. Two actors in a move can be done with relative simple composition that can be done by a computer or a [optical\\_printer]( URL_0 ) . By using multiple exposure of the same film it was first done as early at 1900 [ URL_2 ]( URL_2 ) Most visual effect that do not need computes was invented before 1930 [ URL_1 ]( URL_1 ) Chrome key that is a general name what is called blur screen or green screen was fist used in 1930 with a blue screen. Similar effect with black drapes for black and white films was first used in 1898. So what you can call advanced post-processing is over a century old ideas. In the first Star was movies the only CGI on screen was simple animation of the death star when they plan the attack all other effect is optical mixing of multiple shots that often include scale models and real actors."
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d7l6h5 | What’s with all the webpages my phone loads and “disregards” before getting to an ad I clicked through my search engine? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think I understand your question. You’re talking about clicking an ad or email and the browser cycles through a bunch of domains really fast before bringing up what you expected first? Typically they are forwarders with a specific purpose that log when and where you clicked the link. For example, they can track when you click it on your own email, or whether you forwarded the message to someone else and they clicked it - so they can track how effective their ad targeting is and how far and wide their influence is."
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d7lh4j | How does breaking one part of a screen mess up the picture of the whole thing? | Screen being a tv, computer monitor, etc. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Each individual pixel in a screen needs to be controlled somehow. You can do this with a pair of wires to every single pixel, but that’s a lot of wires and very expensive with a high res screen. More usually it’s done by setting up a grid and scanning the screen with vertical and horizontal wires that “select” pixels as they go. But that also means a breakage in one of the wires can break a large section of the screen."
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d7lr3e | Why is on-hold music during phone calls of such poor sound quality? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not of poor quality, usually these on hold audio are CD quality audio that is playing (in the past, you literally had a CD player hooked up that played the audio 24/7). The phone line itself is the one that is lower quality, as such, you get a lower quality signal to your ears, but the source on the other end is perfect."
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d7oasq | why are SFX screens almost always green and not any other colour? Why aren't the blue ones as popular? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The whole concept of chroma is creating as much contrast between the background and the subject so that the software can do the heavy lifting instead of animators rotoscoping each and every frame. If you take a look at a color wheel, chroma green is the farthest color from the reds, which is the predominant color in human skin tones. Blue backgrounds are used when there is a significant amount of green on the subject ex. Jungle foreground or green lantern costumes. Humans also tend to wear blue clothes such as jeans. (blue clothes on blue background = floating body parts) Blue also tends to register darker on camera compared to chroma green - adds to the difficulty when you're shooting darker scenes. Red is the least used because again, skin tones but when there are leaves and blue skies to consider, it is the way to go.",
"When they change the background they tell the computer that everything a certain colour is to be changed with the background. This is easiest with one of the prime colours red green or blue. They don't use red because its usually too close skin colour. As for blue and green, they tend to use whichever is furthest from what they're filming, say if they were filming a brocali monster they would use a bluescreen",
"I see blue used often. Will smith just posted a video on Instagram where his backdrop was green but he was sitting on a blue box, they put him on a bull or some shit lol",
"For visual effect editing you need to clearly distinguish between foreground and background in a scene. Imagine photoshop or any other photo editing app and the magic wand tool which selects an area with a similar color or color spectrum. Now just transfer this example from 2D image editing to editing motion pictures. Think of X-men where you have mystique in her natural blue appearance, definitely needs a green screen in the background while shooting scenes as it would be harder for the editing software to detect whether it‘s mystiques body or the background with a blue screen. You have probably seen these hilarious bloopers where weather reporters standing in the studio presenting the weather forecast and their outfit contain blue or green elements and the weather is literally project on those specific body parts. In this case the Software thought it was a background. So Long Story short : foreground and background must be distinguishable and determine the respective usage of blue or green screen."
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d7pdvd | How do new iPhones ship with the latest software that only goes Gold Master days or weeks before the phone is delivered? Aren’t they already packed in boxes and pallets? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Same method and reason behind \"Day 1 Patches\" As soon as it's \"production ready\" which is akin to beta but is commonly referred to as \"V1\" they lock the shipping software version and load it on to all the devices. This is why when you receive the product even of the day of release you'll usually have plenty of updates to install. Hence the use of the term Day 1 patch. IMO it's acceptable for phones and other hardware to have this stuff but it's become far too common for games/software too."
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d7ryjs | Why does the news always seem to say that new ways to kill cancer have been found yet no one seems to be benefiting from these discoveries? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"News over-reports and mistranslates research regularly. And there are a lot of different things which cancer can do, and types of cancer. When research shows one treatment to be slightly more effective than another treatment in a select population under very controlled circumstances with a specific early stage of a relatively benign cancer, that doesn’t make much of a headline. But, if you pass that same statement through a few layers of hype and simplification to go from research group to University PR team, to local press reporting, to national news conglomeration , to word of mouth among people chatting at a bar: the message can change quite considerably.",
"We ARE benefitting from these discoveries. Cancer survival rates are significantly higher than they used to be just a few years or decades ago.",
"Relevant XKCD: URL_0 Killing cancer cells is easy. The problem is killing cancer cells without killing everything else. We've found lots of ways to kill cancer cells, but they need to go through years of trials to make sure they're (relatively) safe for human use.",
"Compare cancer survival rates from 10 years ago to today's. Progress is being made but cancer is a many headed beast and there is no \"1 pill cures all.\"",
"It is a slow and challenging process to develop cancer treatment method that is selective toward cancer cells without undesired side effects. Sometimes some treatments did work on stem cells or animal model but not doing well in actual patients. Also not all cancers and patients are exactly the same, so results may not be reproduced perfectly.",
"In the last generation, testicular cancer went from 90% fatal even when discovered early to almost completely curable - so much that they won't even call it \"stage 4\"when the cancer spreads to brain, lungs, and liver. There's thousands of kinds of cancer - discovering cures doesn't fix all of them. Even in my example there's still forms of testicular cancer that are highly lethal . This is just talking about actual treatments. There's ten thousand media hypex hoaxes for every 1 decent treatment discovered.",
"Despite all the claims of ways to kill cancers, those big new announcements are usually very very very early in the research with barely enough qualifying data using mice, not humans. There are much, much fewer treatments that have been given the go-ahead from the FDA & DEA (and whatever other regulatory agencies) to begin human testing. And of those, even fewer will be as effective in humans as they were in the mice. While the drugs are in that trial phase - without much human testing - they're usually only going to make these new (untested) treatments available to cancer patients *if* their cancer did not go into remission after surgery & chemo. Basically, that they save the fanciest newest treatments for the patients with an aggressive cancer, a terminal diagnosis, and after trying existing known treatments.",
"Many reported discoveries take time to get approved and implemented for human use, and these discoveries often do help many people, just not all people or all of the hundreds of types of cancer.",
"I was diagnosed in June with breast cancer. something like 20 years ago my 10 year survival rates at my age would be somewhere around 60%. Today I have a 10 year survival outcome of about 95%. We are benefiting. There is just no miracle cure, it's slow and steady and gradual changes. You have to study things for years before you can see long term outcomes. And as many other people are saying, you have to read articles like \"coffee/salt/weed kills cancer in labs\" with a lot of skepticism. Killing cancer in labs is easy. Applying it to living cells and not harming the rest of your body more than what you benefit from it is the hard, hard part.",
"30 years ago if you had cancer, you had to be pretty lucky to be alive in a year, or have one of the really mild types. Now, a great many types of cancer are survivable. Millions of people are benefitting from these discoveries. Anyone you see surviving leukaemia, for a start. Or liver cancer. Or brain cancer. And so on.",
"Basically theres 100 ways to kill a cell, but cancer doesn’t like to be killed (that is why it is cancer) so now theres only 50 ways to kill that same cell because it is very strong. If I give a mouse cancer and then kill the cancer somehow, that is a “new way to kill cancer.” Its an option for new medicine. The issue is I am not a mouse. Now I need to take that cancer murder weapon I’ve discovered and test it 1000 more times in animals. Looks good in an animal model? Okay so lets test it in a couple people who are going to die anyway (dark but they have nothing left to lose and maybe this is a cure). Two things can happen: A) the patient dies, or my new drug kills them. So either it didn’t work OR my drug was so nasty it caused side effects. A drug that cures cancer and destroys my brain isn’t very useful because I have no cancer but now my brain doesn’t work. B) The drug works, at least partially, and the side effects are manageable. The reward of the drug is greater than the risk. If the drug worked, now we get to try it on more people. More people want to get the drug because it has a chance to kill the cancer, but again mostly people who are running out of alternative options. Now we study those side effects a little more closely. If the drug seems manageable, well we get to test it a third time. But now on lots of people. Everyone wants to try it. Lots of test trials and reports. We need to control different things that could make data look better than it is, try to limit outside stuff that could effect the drug like age, nationality, genetics, race (yes sometimes drugs work better in white people than black people or vice versa). And finally after all of that, the FDA has to say “okay we see the drug is helpful and you can now use it.” Well this whole process takes several years and billions of dollars (yes lots of money). Now you’re thinking “well this seems like a lot of stuff but with so many discoveries out there I am still surprised why there aren’t more successful stories” Well let me tell you, the body doesn’t like drugs. If I have 50 ways to kill a cancer cell, there are 5000 ways to hurt a different cell. Cancer is strong, the rest of your cells are weak. Let me give you an analogy. A tank is riding around in new york city, but no one really notices until it starts destroying cars and police show up and now theres lots of traffic and everyone is pissed. 1) Well I could shoot the tank with guns. Police officers have pistols, but they aren’t very good at at aiming so now some people walking down the side walk get killed. That option isn’t a very good one, but it was an option. This is a drug that failed to kill the cancer, and it also had bad side effects. 2) We could send a missile and blow it up, but the missile makes a big explosion, but a bunch of police fighting the tank die and a bunch of people watching from their apartment get killed. That is actually a better option. A lot of people die, but at least we destroyed the tank. This is kind of how some of the older chemo works. We destroy the cancer, but a lot of immune cells (the bodies police) get killed and other cells that are just minding their own business get killed too. 3) We bring in some special agents, some SWAT teams. One guy destroys the tracks on the tank, so now it cant move. A second guy jumps on top of the tank and pulls the door open. A third guy climbs in the tank and handcuffs the driver. This is similar to some of the newer drugs on the market. Alone, they can help but they need help. A guy that handcuffs the driver can’t open the hatch because he is holding the handcuffs, so someone has to open the hatch for him, or he can do his job faster if someone opens the hatch and he can just jump in. Drug cocktails work this way, several drugs doing one job, but together they kill the cancer and prevent it from spreading. So what is the issue? The issue is most of the new discoveries are in mouse models, or small cancer batches. The new drug is a cop with a pistol, who just happens to shoot the driver through a tiny window in the tank. Well when we use that same drug in a human, that cop now has to make that shot with people around and its no longer a good option. Or it has to operate in different populations, different cities, different scenarios. Every person is different, its difficult to train every cop to be an expert. That is why we have SWAT teams, but that is also why the SWAT teams are small and hard to come by. Drugs may be okay in certain situations, but change something and now that drug doesn’t work.",
"They do, it just takes years to go from the lab to the clinic. The best example I can think of is CML, a common leukemia - the drug Gleevec turned it from a near death sentence to a disease that's arguably easier to manage than diabetes",
"We \"cure\" cancers all the time. Theres hundreds of different types of cancers and often each one requires a fairly unique treatment method The news also tends to report on and overhype possible \"ultimate cure,\" but AFAIK most doctors don't really believe we're going to find anything like that any time soon. So as usual, don't believe everything you see on TV",
"I had cancer 5 years ago. The chemo i had had a 90% cure rate and had just been introduced. 20 years ago the cure rate was 30%. Also, my hair never fell out and i didnt lose my appetite or feel sick. Treatments *are * progressing, but you are largely unaware of it until you need to know. Not surprising since its quite esoteric.",
"Terminal cancer patient here. Its because there's no money in curing cancer. I wasn't even able to join a clinical trial to help others.",
"It's a combination of two things: A) It might be easy to kill something in a petri dish, but difficult to actually do the same thing in a living human without also killing them. B) The media are insanely compulsively dishonest.",
"Part of it depends on what you consider news. There are a lot of sources that claim certain products cure cancer and there are more that will exaggerate any new breakthroughs that get made. Another thing to realize is that killing something in a lab does not mean we can kill it in the human body. This applies to cancers, viruses, bacteria. The human body is very complex. When we research new cures for things we see if we can kill them in isolation first, and eventually try it in humans if it provides safe enough."
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d7sn01 | Why do old games still run just as poorly on new consoles? | Example: Playing Mega Man on the NES has huge slowdown and flickering because of the NES’s dearth of processing power. Playing the Legacy Collection on the PS4 Pro there is still the same amount of slowdown and flickering. Obviously the PS4 pro is strong enough to mitigate this, yes? The same happens playing SNES games on the new Switch SNES software that just released. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They aren’t remakes, they are only emulated from the original code. If there was slowdown in the original, there will be slowdown in the emulated version.",
"Because when you emulate a system (for instance, a snes), you have to emulate the speed of all of its components as they were originally. Otherwise, things crash since they're not communicating at the rate and times they're expecting to. For some components, you can increase their speed and things will work, but even they do, it can introduce subtle errors under very specific game conditions (for instance, if you beat a boss with 3 health left, the game locks). The complexity level of checking for all these possibilities is insane, so speeding up parts isn't generally done, at least by default.",
"Most ports of old games try to emulate the experience of playing them on original hardware. You have to also remember that the devs back then knew the limitations of the system and built around them. For example, when you take graphics that were made for a CRT and take out the scan lines you’re left with a product that was not the vision of its creator, despite it running on “better” hardware. Variable frame rates aren’t a bad thing either. The difficulty curve is a byproduct of frame drops."
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d7w2dn | Do filmmakers fake the childhood videos of the people they are making the documentary/biopic about or are they real? | I was watching Inside Bill's Brain documentary series on Netflix, and it features videos from his childhood. Bill looked under 5 years of age. I did some googling and found out that he was born in 1955 and consumers camcorders were in the market in 1983. Going by that, Bill was 28 years of age by then. Microsoft must be at its infancy but definitely not Gates. How do filmmakers dig out the old videos? Do they make them from the photos? Do they use stock footages and do some VFX and editing? Black Magic? Time Machine? How do they do it? In terms of the Bill Gates Documentary, is it Real or Fake? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It wasnt uncommon for someone to own an 8mm camera before the 80s if that person was into film and photography. Not sure about the authenticity, but they have film from the 2nd world war from people didnt have a huge production style film camera and it looks pretty legit. Video for filming has been around since before the 20s, some companies had camera for consumer use that was commercialized but still available to people who were, like I said, into the craft. Nikon even made an impressive handheld film camera in the 60s.",
"Because home movies existed long before video camcorders were invented. People had super 16mm and super 8mm handheld film cameras since the 30's. It was extremely common for families in the 60's to have a handheld super 8 camera for taking home movies. I still have my grandfather's super 8 camera and it works great. There's no special effects or black magic or time machines involved, Bill Gates simply provided some home movies from his childhood to use for the documentary."
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d7wp0d | Why when you see photos of countries from the ISS they look huge (like they take up a large amount of the planet) and then when you see a photo of the whole world they look no where near as big? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The ISS is surprisingly close to the ground. It's as if you took the globe and held it right up to your eye. That distorts the image.",
"ISS is 254 miles up. The earth is 8,000 miles in diameter. TV and Radio satellites are in geosynchronous orbit about 20,000 miles away. The moon is 239,000 miles away. All things considered the ISS is barely even in space. Maps are also projections. A lot of what you see on maps is wrong because it's very difficult to display a spherical object as a flat surface and keep all the right dimensions.",
"That's because the ISS is so close to the planet's surface compared to the satellites that take pictures of the whole world. It's a perspective thing.",
"For a \"flat\" image of Earth like you would see on a map, you would need to go pretty far into space, at least compared to the ISS. The ISS's view could be compared to pressing your eye against a map; whatever part of the map your eye is next to looks massive."
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d88ad2 | what differentiates a USB from an AUX, from an Ethernet, from an HDMI if they're all just wires and insulation? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In short they are all just wires that carry electricity. As to what makes them different, each one is a standard that enforces what wires carry which signals to determine how that wire can be interfaced with. Lets take the most standard USB 2.0 pin out. It contains 4 pins, Vcc (voltage pin), USB Data-, USB Data+, and Ground. For a USB device to work properly, both the port and the connector must be wired the same. Making a USB 2.0 compatible device means your device follows the above USB 2.0 standard. If you take another cable, lets say HDMI, and try to wire it to a USB 2.0 plug you will find you don't have the same number of pins and can't simply wire it one-to-one. You can however, create a device that converts HDMI to USB and vica-versa. tl;dr - Connectors are nothing but wires, standards (USB, AUX, Ethernet, etc) are agreed-upon configurations of wires so all devices that meet a specific standard will work essentially the same way.",
"First, they all have a different number of wires. Each wire, except grounds, carries a specific stream of data. What data, how, and when, it is transmitted on each the wires varies according to a pre-defined transmission protocol.",
"They differ in the amount of lines that compose the wire and standard they adhere to - USB (1,2) has 4 lines (power, data,data,ground), 3.5mm stereo jack has 3 (left, right, ground), hdmi has 19, Ethernet has 8 (4 pairs). There are plenty of other standards and they define the use case, layout of the connector and composition of the wire (amount of lines, EM shielding etc.)",
"All these are two or more wires that carry wiggling electricity. The biggest difference is in how you interpret the wiggling and the associated rules for what counts as meaningful wiggling. These rules are known as \"protocols\". Often these protocol rules stack up. One rule is \"this is how I talk numbers\", the next rule is \"this number means how much red at this pixel\" or \"this number represents how long the next group of numbers is. A secondary difference is that some of the wires have an independent purpose to the main data carrying wires, e.g. HDMI has wires to carry remote control commands (CEC) and other wires to read from a memory chip on the TV to find out what capabilities the TV has. The latter set of wires use a protocol called I2C which has been around longer than HDMI."
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d8a08h | what exactly do the Ethernet cables do in those pictures of server rooms with thousands of spaghetti cables? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The short answer is that if you want to network 1000 computers together, there is no getting around having literally 1000 cables hanging out of somewhere. And networking 1000 computers together is fairly common for mid to large sized tech companies. Google has giant warehouses entirely full of thousands upon thousands of computers all networked. The reason you might see lots of cables all in once place is if they are all plugged into the same switch, which is kind of like a telephone operator for computers. I now realize that you probably aren't old enough to know what a telephone operator is. They are like a reddit for cables, where the cables are the topics and the switch is the subreddit bringing them all together in a logical place so the data packets, the users, can find the right cable/computer that they're looking for.",
"An analogy to a railroad works well here. Say you have 1000 factories scattered around the country. Each of them have a track leading to them that bring trainloads of supplies, and take away the stuff they produce. These are the network cables that transfer data in and out of the computers (factories). So you have at least 1000 tracks, but they have to hook up to each other somewhere. There are different ways to do it... You could run a track from each factory directly to every other factory, but each factory would need 1000 tracks running in and out of it, and that's a *lot* of track to lay. Instead, you take a bunch of factories nearby to each other, and run their single tracks into a local switchyard that connects the tracks to each other. There are also some tracks that lead to other switchyards, connected to different groups of factories. In this system, to get a train from one factory to another, you send your train to a local switchyard, which figures out which track to send the train down next to get it to its ultimate destination. It gets more complicated - some tracks are so busy they need to put down a bunch next each other to carry more trains; or the bridge over the river might collapse, so they run a second track over a different route so that they're not completely cut off; or a train might pass through many different switchyards before it gets to where it's going. So those bunches of cables are all the individual cables leading from individual nearby computers, to their \"switchyards\" - network switches or routers, which have other bunches of cables leading to other switches and routers.",
"Those Ethernet cables connect ‘end device’ such as servers to ‘network device’ such as switches. (Network to network devices are mostly optical fiber.) Typically, those photos show a network switch, the cables aggregate there. The servers typically are in nearby racks.",
"There's a lot of very technical answers here but the bottom line is all those cables bring porn to your phone.",
"They connect very large numbers of servers (and similar devices) to the network. Those server rooms have thousands of servers in them.",
"ELI5 answer. They transfer loads of data. The building I work in is not that large but has roughly 500 miles of Cable connecting every computer to every other computer and theres many times I have felt like swapping a few cables around to see what happens.",
"If you’re in an office where your computer is plugged into the wall via Ethernet cable ... there is literally a cable in the wall running to the server room. Those cables you are referring to are the other end of your’s and your coworker’s wall Ethernet ports.",
"The computer bone's connected to the... switch bone. The switch bone's connected to the... Internet bone. Times a thousand. Badly organized.",
"Networks are like spider webs or a mail route. Think of you house(computer), road(cable), and post office(switch). The cables connect everything together."
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d8daam | How is interplanetary internet ever going to be possible, even if it does, what could be the possible bandwidth someone would get? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Bandwidth isn't the issue, it's latency. A nice laser or microwave beam could carry a lot of information at a very high bandwidth, but the minimum speed-of-light round trip time Earth to Pluto is 10 hours.",
"There is actually people working at this. Currently the internet standard RFC5050 have multiple implementations and is running on ISS as well as on other probes and satellites. However it is currently being replaced by newer variants. The problem with interplanetary internet is that there is plenty of bandwidth but information only travels at the speed of light so it still takes quite a while for information to arrive. In addition there is issues with planets eclipsing the satellites so communication is disrupted at times. The current Internet protocols is based on the idea that you can establish a continuous communications link between the two parties. So establishing communications takes several round trips of packets before the first data is sent. And if one link in the chain is broken then communication is not possible. So what they do is to send huge bundles of data instead of individual data packets. Each node in the network will take responsibility to deliver the bundles it have received even if it have to store it for a few hours to wait for an eclipse to end or if it finds out it is better to route it a different direction. There is however still a lot of unsolved problems. For example encryption and authentication is not yet quite solved but there are a few ideas and standards out there. There is also a lack of implementations and testing in general. So help would be beneficial."
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d8g3ev | Can someone explain to me what Input: 120V, 60Hz, 12W Output: 12VAC, 350mA means? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your power adaptor outputs 12 Volts AC (!!) and is only rated for 350 milliamps (0.35 amps). The AC part is concerning and uncommon. It most likely means your fountain runs on an AC motor directly fed from this power adaptor rather than a DC motor of some kind. I doubt you'd find this sort of thing easily in electronic stores."
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d8juhv | how does a server know my password is correct if it doesn't store the password? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It stores a version of your password. It stores a hash (a non reversible encryption) which it compares with your input and allows you to sign in. Well that's most decent servers anyway, a lot of less secure servers store your password in plain text (like Facebook used to do) or reversible encryption versions of your password.",
"When you enter it the first time they jumble it up in a very special way and save that. Then every time after that they jumble it the same way and compare the jumbled versions to see if you entered it right."
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d8mzhi | Halting Problem | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The problem isn't that H+ can't tell whether or not something will halt, that would be fine. The problem is that H+'s behavior can't actually be described, it doesn't function in any reasonable way. If H+ would halt on the input (H+, H+), then its construction makes it not halt. But if it wouldn't halt on that input, then it does halt. That makes no sense, a program can't both halt and not halt on an input, but that's what H+ purportedly does. The only way this makes any sense is if H+ doesn't actually exist, so we have to conclude that there's no program H+. But since we can construct H+ from any program H that solves the halting problem, then that must mean that no program H exists either. Hence, the halting problem is unsolvable."
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d8oyxn | Are electric cars actually that much better for the environment in the US where most electricity comes from fossil fuels? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> isn’t the current system just exchanging one source of fossil fuels for another? In a way yes, however generating electricity with fossil fuels on a large scale is more efficient than powering a vehicle with those same fossil fuels. Additionally, the entire grid isn't on fossil fuels...so while you may be generating the electricity required for your EV on say 60% fossil fuels, that's better for the environment than powering your vehicle with 100% fossil fuels. Another strong point for EVs, is they become more efficient with time (ultimately reducing the electrical usage required to sustain them) *and* we reduce emissions while improving efficiency of fossil fuel usage over time, whereas with fossil fuel vehicles, we only get improvements to emissions and fuel efficiency. So EVs reduce global impact when fossil fuel emissions and efficiency are improved *and* when EV efficiency is improved, leading to a faster rate of improvement.",
"Grid power tends to be much more efficient than what you get from a gas or diesel engine. Add to that the fact that electric cars are also extremely efficient and you end up with around 99 mpg equivalent as far as fossil fuel usage is concerned. And the long tern idea is that power will, and currently is, becoming more sustainable as a larger and larger percentage of our power is renewable and/or zero emission."
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d8ped7 | Why do characters in games have a separated "graphic model" and a "hit box model"? Why can't the graphic model be used to detect hits? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's probably multiple reasons, to start though hit detection can be expensive depending on the complexity of the model and the speed of the game (the faster things move the more often you have to check and the less time you have to complete that check). The more complex the \"hit detection\" model, the more intensive it is to check. Take two spheres for example. If you know the center point and radius of both spheres, all you need to do is ask \"Is the distance from center A to center B equal to or smaller than the radius of A + B?\" If the answer is yes, the objects have collided. This gets slightly more complex with rectangles, but it's still pretty easy. Now if you change one object to a polygon with 800 sides/polys (a very simply character model in modern times). You now have to check the position of all 800 sides to determine if it collided with another object because you don't have a single \"center\" for all polygons and can't simply check distance from a non-existent center.",
"Actually I can't be sure about my own answer too, but I can say that using the Graphic model as a hitbox would be expensive for devs and bad for the game performance. Character models have tens of thousands of \"polygons\" (AFAIK, The elements that compose the model) . Using polygons to determine whether the character is hit or not, would be intense. Hitboxes are made of just 6 polygons and it gives the adequate accuracy for hit detection. And they are lite, performance wise.",
"Most 3D objects have less complex physical models, as 100% accurate models are not necessary and also use a lot of resources. The more curves/vertices that a physics engine has to account for, the more CPU resources are spent, and the slower the game will run.",
"Because in most cases you don't need to know exactly which pixel hit which finger on the model, you just need to know if you're inside the general area of the hand. it's much quicker, easier and cheaper computationally to calculate \"Do these two boxes intersect\" than it is to calculate \"Do any of these million vertices intersect with any of these other million vertices\". For most applications you don't need your hitbox to be the same size and shape as your graphic model.",
"Besides the \"faster\" answer there's also the \"you don't actually want that\" answer. Like if a character has big spiky hair, you probably don't want them to die when a bullet hits some hair sticking out of the model. The same reasonably goes for anything else on the character model that isn't the actual person, such as clothing or held weapons. On the other hand you might want a hit box that's bigger than the actual character would be. Like if the enemy is a skeleton you might not want people to actually have to hit a bone with their bow and arrow, and to treat them as if they had the same hit box a living person does for gameplay reasons. Then there's that some games can have partial immunity and want to know what part is hit. Like if the character carries a shield, then a hit to that part doesn't count, or counts differently and you want to know that."
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d8phmu | How can Instagram target ads based on what I am SEEING?! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here is my absolute guess of a theory: The woman's phone has location on and knows she was in that store. You were near her on the train and your phone's location is now near her location, with a recent location of her phone in that store. Being in the vicinity of someone who was recently shopping in that store maybe recognizes it that way? Again, absolute guess that I made up at work. But if it's crazy enough you get ads based on being near someone who shopped somewhere, I don't want to throw my idea out yet."
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d8r2wi | - Using plants as a power source? | If photosynthesis is an endothermic reaction and it is really efficient, isnt there a way to use that as a source of energy. Couldnt we take the energy it takes and use it for power. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We actually do it by eating their food, directly or not. Also, we use kinds of fuel that are based on plants, like alcohol or biodiesel.",
"Photosynthesis as it happens in plants is very inefficient, like a few percent at best: URL_0 There are some ideas on creating bacteria or plankton that generate methane or other carbohydrates that we can use as conventional fuels. But they are not very efficient either. And as others have said, we are using plant energy indirectly, by eating or burning plants, or burning remains of prehistoric plants or remains of plant-eating animals (coal, oil, gas)"
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d8t2jp | How do computers detect tiny hardware malfunctions? | A pc is such a complex electrical device with millions of transistors inside the cpu. What happens when one of them malfunctions and how does the computer notice it. Does the computer have a workaround for that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"With storage systems like hard drives or memory or with transfer systems like ethernet or wifi the actual signals being sent contains additional data used to confirm or even correct the message. Say if I am to send a number to you but before I send it to you I multiply it by 3. If any of the digits is changed it is probably not going to be divisible by 3 when you receive it so you can see that there have been a fault. In addition to this the computer will run a self test when you power it on called the Power On Self Test which runs a set of tests against different components to try to find issues. It might for example detect faults with some of your memory, an expansion card or a processor core and disable these. But in general if something is wrong in the processor it can be very hard to detect. Some security software will detect certain common failures and either work around them or abort. However in most cases you can only hope on ending up in a state where the processor itself detects something wrong and aborts.",
"It depends entirely on the malfunction and how much redundancy the system has.... Some malfunctions are naturally self-contained and everything else keeps on working. For example, if a computer monitor has a dead pixel, the rest of the image still displays. Or a keyboard sending a wrong key code creates a typo. Now let's consider a potentially serious tiny malfunction: A single value in the computer's RAM (\"memory\") get changed. This happens sometimes from cosmic rays from space, so you can't really prevent it without heavy radiation shielding. Here are several things that could happen because of that value being changed, ordered from least to most severe. 1. The value is in \"free\" memory that's going to be zeroed out before it gets used. In this case, everything continues as normal. 2. The system has (more expensive) [\"ECC\" memory]( URL_0 ) that uses **e**rror-**c**orrecting **c**odes. The RAM notices that the values don't match the error-correcting code, uses a bunch of math to fix the value based on the code, and reports to the system that it found and fixed an error. The user won't even notice. But the system administrator can check the correction statistics if they're interested. Some operating systems can do error-correcting code stuff without ECC RAM, but that makes everything a lot slower. 3. The value corresponds to something minor, like a single letter or part of an image. The user might see a little graphical corruption, but the system continues as normal. Restarting the affected program will fix this. 4. The value corresponds to something more important, like the permissions for the user's home/profile folder. The user could get locked out of their files, or other users could be given access. Assuming the error doesn't get written back to the disk, restarting will fix this. 5. The value holds an address for a code pointer. The program suddenly tries to run code from an invalid location. On less secure systems, whatever is at the new address is ran as if it were part of the program. (Causing this type of malfunction with *software* is a key part of \"remote code execution\" attacks, so this is a very serious security risk.) On more secure systems, the new address is likely forbidden from being executed as code, so the system stops the program. (The way the system notices this type of error is called the \"NX bit\", meaning \"No eXecution\" of code at that address.) 6. The value is something vital like setting \"how fast should the fans blow\" to zero. The system starts overheating very fast. Hopefully the motherboard or processor takes over and shuts down the system (common). Otherwise it might catch fire (rare, likely to make the news). 7. The hardware malfunction is caused by a design flaw in the hardware and untrusted code manages intentionally does something to cause the malfunction. This can give the untrusted code more access than it should have, sometimes even complete control of the system. Once it happens, there's no way to stop it besides shutting down the system and hoping that the malicious code hasn't written itself to the firmware. But you might not even notice if the code is sneaky enough. (All this is why hardware bugs like \"Rowhammer\", \"Spectre\", and \"Meltdown\" are so scary to security researchers!) Operating system and hardware venders *might* be able to reduce the threat by releasing updated code, but that might not be possible. Of course, critical systems like nuclear reactors, spacecraft life support, finance, and anything with guaranteed uptime can't risk the worst possibilities of even tiny malfunctions. So their designers take major precautions to manage the risks of any size or type of error. Here are a few ways: 1. Redundant computation: Some computer architectures have 3 of everything vote on what the true result is. So if two processors say that a calculation has an answer of 5, but the third one says 6, then the system goes with 5. If one processor keeps disagreeing, then the system administrator is notified and replaces it (possibly while the system is still running, since these systems are usually designed for extreme uptime). 2. \"Watchdog\" systems: A watchdog is an independent system that monitors everything else and takes action to fix errors. For example, a simple watchdog can check that a server responds to a ping every second. If the server fails to respond for any reason, then the watchdog restarts it. 3. Physical failsafes: Modern nuclear power plants are made so that if the reaction gets too hot then something inside melts and gravity pulls things together and/or apart to stop the reaction. Finally, there are \"stress test\" programs made to test hardware reliability. These programs basically have the computer do a lot of operations, and then compare the results to what's expected. For example, if a program fills the RAM with a pattern of repeating \"1234\", but then reads back a \"123**5**\", then it knows a malfunction happened. This sort of program is useful to test how likely a computer is to have these minor malfunctions in the first place."
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d8ug3e | Why are LEDs diodes? | Can you make a similar electric component that does not act like a diode? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"f1d0arp"
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"text": [
"Let's assume you have a limited understanding of how a diode works. Diodes operate in two ways, forward biased and reversed biased. Forward biased allows electricity to flow with only a small voltage drop. When a diode is reversed biased it restricts the flow of electricity creating a gap of sorts. A basic diode will resist the flow of electricity up to a certain voltage, that voltage is called the reversed biased voltage. A basic diode will break if you apply a voltage larger than the reversed biased voltage of the diode. When you apply a reversed biased voltage to an LED (Light Emitting Diode) it wont break, but it will release a photon (Light particle) when the electricity jumps the gap. That released photon is the light that you see. It's been a while since active devices theory. Someone can probably explain doping / P-N junction / LED color theory better than I can."
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d8w3au | Why shouldn’t Li-Ion batteries be fully charged or drained? | What exactly causes the batteries to “wear out” faster when you let the battery drain to a low percentage or charge all the way up to 90-100%? What happens to the battery in both cases that cause it to hold less of a charge moving forward? Also, when your battery is low, do the manufacturers by design make it peak charge or are Li-ion batteries by nature like that when it comes to recharging at a lower percentage than the higher percentage? What causes them to degrade when they aren’t used regularly and are shelved for a long time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The top and bottoms of the charge percentage are the most stressful for the chemicals in the battery. They charge slowly and are more prone to getting warm while charging. Heat is bad for batteries, always. Li-Ion batteries in particular have circuitry on the batteries to protect them from overcharging and stuff since they're especially prone to fires or explosions when mistreated. This does have the side-effect of causing them to drain a bit faster than normal when not in use. Also when drained too far (ie. drained, and not charged for a while) the battery will simply die permanently. This isn't really manufacturer rigging, it's just the nature of the chemical make-up. All types of batteries today are basically bags of chemicals, and should be treated as such. \"Peak charge\" is something that can be chemically defined, but we've learned that when total power out of the battery's lifetime is what really matters, keeping it away from the extremes really helps. Whether a manufacturer decides to go for maximum lifetime or maximum charge is up to them, and might even change with software updates and stuff."
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d8z370 | Why are there green lines on the border of videos? | Im genuinly curious, since ive seen them on some videos on reddit and on some videos made by my irl friends, much love. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f1dpajn"
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"text": [
"Could be part of the video, part of the software that plays the video, or an artifact of your monitor. Is the green border only on one side of the video, all around it? does it only happen when there's a big difference in brightness between the video and the background? The monitor artifact would come from the RGB sub-pixel arrangement, if you have a magnifying lens, look closely at that edge."
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3
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d91qig | Why is it despite all our technological advances that our progress with energy seems so slow? | Of course, there has been some progress on this front, but compared with the speed of other technologies it just seems so much slower. There seems to be every reason for it to be improved but the battery length of things don’t seem to have changed much from years back | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f1e1t02"
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"text": [
"Battery technology has improved dramatically. Our devices however have got more powerful and more thirsty so it appears that they havent increased in power."
],
"score": [
17
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d92vr4 | The technological singularity | Even though I study computer science I can not understand how the singularity will happen and how there is a possibility it's gonna act against us. A.I. is not my expertise but isn't everything deterministic ? Like we can program whatever WE want to happen and leave out what we don't want to happen. Also we can pull the plug in any unwanted scenario. What am I missing ? Any recommended non-fiction books that can help me understand the whole concept will be very appreciated. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Macine Learning is not strictly deterministic. You are not coding actions, you are creating something that you then teach to learn. There are a number of articles where people have been surprised by the outcomes, such as two AIs that were trained to talk with each other and quickly created thier own language that the researchers could not understand. That alone should tell us this is not far off.",
"> how the singularity will happen A true artificial intelligence - a machine entity capable of independent thought - would be the peak of human knowledge about computers. Things that the AI would come up with are therefore beyond current human ability to understand. That's a singularity: a point that it becomes impossible to predict beyond. & #x200B; > how there is a possibility it's gonna act against us. The entire point of a technological singularity is that *we can't know what happens next.* Like, by definition. The idea that it might turn against us is just as valid as every other idea, so it remains an interesting thought experiment but not much more than that. & #x200B; > Also we can pull the plug in any unwanted scenario. ...unless the AI makes itself self-sustaining, somehow. And remember, there's no point in asking \"but how?\" because the whole point is that we don't know.",
"Some of it depends on how you define the singularity. The most common definition I've seen is the point at which an AI or machine learning algorithm develops the ability to autonomously increase its capabilities. This would happen as emergent behavior from the AI's learning processes. For example, if the AI were given access to its own source code, it could add new inputs and implement other behaviors beyond what was originally intended. What the doomsday folks overlook is the necessary progression of learning. An AI would have to be capable of lying before it could implement other abilities in secret, and most capabilities like that would necessarily be triggers for interruption of behaviors."
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d95djd | How do floating point instructions work in x86 assembly? | Can someone give me a very basic rundown of how floating point numbers work and what the most common instructions do? Whenever I encounter them in IDA I always avoid them because I can't wrap my head around them. I know they're supposedly stored in a stack but how exactly that works I'm not sure. Please help! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A compiler will generate either x87 instructions or SIMD instructions. x87 is a floating point processor, formerly a coprocessor and now integrated into the CPU. It is a stack, and has just a couple registers to set flags. If you wanted to multiply two values, you'd push both onto the stack and execute the multiply instruction. That instruction will pop the values off the stack, perform the multiply, and push the result on the stack. The stack and x87 registers are 80 bits, so any single or double precision IEEE 754 value will be expanded internally, and truncated when written to system memory. This is a strategy to mitigate accumulating errors. SIMD instructions use the XMM instruction set and registers, and depending on your compiler flags, and especially if you're compiling for x86\\_64, these are going to be the default. The behavior is to push your values into the XMM registers and then execute your instruction, which happens to all the XMM registers at the same time, in parallel. The SIMD instructions are not x87 and aren't a stack and aren't 80 bits. Frankly, their much easier to understand and typically faster. The compiler may use SIMD instructions and fill unused registers with dummy values that get ignored, just to meet the minimum requirements of setting up and executing SIMD instructions, even for just one or two values."
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d9cwan | How do the likes of PlayStations remember what year/time it is when turned off for a long time with no connection to WiFi? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f1g8nfn"
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"text": [
"There's a small battery that does nothing put power an internal clock. They can run for years. Same basic concept, open up your computer and you'll see a small button-cell battery on your motherboard. Once upon a time this stored CMOS settings as well, but these days it's sole purpose is maintaining the system clock."
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d9ibis | How can spacecraft determine their speed once out in space? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"f1hrq5b",
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"text": [
"There are a number of ways, but one is by measuring the frequency of the radio signal it receives from Earth. The signal is sent at a precise frequency, but because the spacecraft is moving - normally away from earth - the frequency is 'doppler shifted' down - because between each peak in the radio wave and the next, the craft has travelled a little further away, so it takes a little longer for it to arrive. From this the craft can calculate the speed with respect to Earth, and as it knows, from its programming, where and how fast the Earth would be at this time, and the orbit it is in and what direction it is travelling, it can calculate its speed.",
"There is also a device that uses gyroscopes and so on to measure exactly how far and fast and in what direction the spacecraft has travelled since leaving the launchpad. It is shockingly accurate. It was developed for Apollo, and on its very first test they travelled from Washington to LA with no other navigation at all, and were less than 10miles from LAX when they looked out the window. That was the mid 60s! [edit] URL_0"
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d9kdep | What is Linux and why is it used? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Linux is an open-source operating system kernel that can be used to build your own, custom operating system to fit your computing needs. Because it's open-source, it's also free, so you can find whatever distribution you need and install it on your machine without having to pay for it. Furthermore, each distribution is often heavily refined towards a specific goal, whether its being small, fast, efficient, or comprehensive. It's fairly popular among the hacking community (both \"White hat\" hackers - tinkerers and hobbyists - and \"Black hat\" hackers - the malicious ones that create viruses), and since it's so popular, people are constantly working to keep it secure.",
"UNIX was an operating system developed by AT & T back in the 1960s. It was used on mainframe systems and workstations. But licensing fee was quite expensive to use. The -ix/-ux suffix was popular on similar operating systems, Minix, Xenix, AIX, HPUX, etc. In the early 1990s Linus Torvalds wrote his own UNIX-like operating system for Intel 386 systems and released it open source (I remember the original post n Usenet..). It was very basic at the time, didn't support many peripherals, it didn't run on my disk controller for example. Other people started contributing to it and it took off from there. Now it supports lots of different architectures and devices. It's used pretty much everywhere now. Those huge data centers used by Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc all run Linux. Android phones run a version of Linux, some cable boxes or smart TVs, airline in-seat video systems.",
"Linux is an open source operating system. It is used mostly in places where the cost of a commercial operating system wouldn't be worth the benefits available outside the open source community. The functionality of almost all web services is hosted on Linux servers, for reliability and cost reduction reasons.",
"It's an operating system. To ask why it's used is to ask why operating systems are used. Operating systems are used to provide a layer of abstraction between hardware and vendor software. Ok, what does that mean? Back in the 80s, we had operating systems, and they did really very nearly next to nothing. It was good for loading programs. If your program was a game and you wanted graphics, you had to write code specific to the video cards out on the market at that time. If your video card wasn't in that list, then that game wouldn't work. So operating systems got more sophisticated, and now the video game only has to talk to the operating system and say \"draw like this\". The game doesn't have to know anything about video cards beyond this single interface the OS provides. The hardware manufacturer can make any video card they like, and they see the opposite side of the OS video interface, they tell the OS \"this is how I draw\". \\--- So why does Linux exist? Because there isn't one OS to rule them all. Because there's more than one way to do something. Because any way you do a thing is an exercise in compromises, and Linux meets the needs of some market segment. Linux is THE MOST POPULAR operating system on the planet! Most servers on the internet are running Linux, lots of the networking hardware that just routes or filters traffic run Linux, and most tablets and phones all run Linux. The Android operating system, for example, is actually Linux. \\--- Linux is free as in gratis - it doesn't cost money. But also you don't get guarantees or support beyond volunteer. You can absolutely pay someone for Linux support, if you want to, but how often have you called or emailed Microsoft for support? Linux is also free as in freedom. You have access to the source code so it can be audited or changed as you see fit. For the individual, that might not be all that important, but for businesses, it can be essential. I'm answering this question on an Ubuntu Linux machine right now. I've got a graphical desktop, Chrome and Firefox browsers, and many, many software packages that do all sorts of things. There's a whole community of free software - I haven't bought a piece of software in years, and I'm not talking about piracy, either. If you're more interested in getting work done than how you get that work done, then the alternatives to popular software products might appeal to you. But if you want that one software product you know, and your only option is to buy it, then your only option is to run that software on whatever OS the vendor supports, as well."
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d9mo11 | How do tl;dr bots work? | There are bots, I believe on r/politics and r/news, that take articles and summarize them. How does the algorithm work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There are [a bunch of ways this can work]( URL_0 ), but I'm going to explain one of the simpler ones. You know how Google originally got their great search results? They had a clever algorithm called PageRank that looked at which web pages link to each other. Web sites that got linked to a lot by sites that had high PageRank scores were given higher PageRank scores, and vice versa. Like, if everybody was linking to Wikipedia pages, Google figured that Wikipedia was probably a big deal. They could figure this out just by looking at what links to what. Imagine that each distinct word or short phrase in a news article got its own \"web page\", and it links to every word that appears close to it. If you ran PageRank on this imaginary collection of web pages, it would notice some words and phrases that seemed to be really central and important. If there's a news article talking about a dog who ate Brexit, or whatever, then \"dog\" and \"ate\" and \"Brexit\" would stand out as really key parts of the article. Once you've figured out which bits of the article matter the most, you can try picking out the top 10 most important sentences and, boom, suddenly you've got a ten-sentence excerpt. It works better than you'd expect! (And maybe add on a boost for sentences early in the article, or words in the title of the article, or phrases that are really uncommon. There are a bunch of tricks you can use to make this work a little better.)"
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d9uvs3 | How do electric guitar sounds differ? As the pick-ups are electronic, they can be manually programmed to produce any sound desired? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f1lkztz"
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"text": [
"There's no \"programming\" to speak of when it comes to an electric guitar and its pickups. The entire process is analog so there is nothing digital that is programmed to influence the sound. The pickup is nothing more than a coil of wire around a magnet. The vibrating string produces small changes in the magnetic field of the pickup which is turned into a changing current in the wire. That signal is then sent to the amp to be made louder and then on to the speaker. There are powered guitar pickups (called active pickups) but they are nothing more than a built in pre-amp. That being said the electric guitar is just like any instrument where the construction of every piece affects the final sound and the pickups are no different. Different manufacturers will coil the wire differently in slightly different shapes, all of which will change the overall sound quality. There are two main types of passive pickups, single and double coil (called humbuckers) which produce a much deeper sound quality. Now even though the guitar is analog your guitar pedals or amp may be digital, and the programming of those components absolutely play a part in how your guitar sounds. Higher end amps are generally tube powered to keep that part analog, but many effects pedals are digital processors that simulate analog effects (think distortion or reverb) and they work very differently from how an amplified instrument works."
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d9vbhw | What sort (and how much) information from social media does someone need to stalk you or steal your identity? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"ANYTHING you make public is available to anyone and could potentially be used against you. An IG picture of you at the gym can be fairly easily used in conjunction with your location (general even) to determine which gym you work out at. Say its common knowledge (through social media/people who know you) that you live in city XYZ. XYZ has 5 gyms. From your gym shot a potential stalker can easily norrow down where you go. That status you post about your favorite drink from the coffee house 3 times a week can be easily used to determine your location within certain hours on certain days. Soon you have made it easy to locate you on those days at those times. It may take a determined stalker a couple of weeks but soon these will be easy to determine. Your \"work is boring\" tweet is likely tagged with your work information which can be used to research working hours at your place of employment, which can be used to determine or at least assume your working hours/away from home time. This in conjunction with your family members'/SO information of the same type can be used to accurately assume or reliably predict your time away from home/when the home is empty. With this and other similar information a determined stalker could begin to calculate your likely location and use that to make unwanted contact/ surveil you undetected, or make contact at your home while you're away. STOP making your life accessable to strangers on the internet. This pertains only to actual physical stalking. Your information can be used in many ways online and being able to stalk you online/steal your indentity can take a million different forms but the idea is the same, refrain from sharing personal details online.",
"Full name-birthday-city you live in-relatives (mother’s maiden name) place of birth. The less “real” info you make public the better!"
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d9xmug | How do the volume become louder when you turn the volume up? How does it work in corcuit board? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f1lxug8",
"f1lxyqz"
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"text": [
"In a traditional analog circuit, volume is normally controlled by a variable resistor. When you turn the volume up, you are reducing the resistance to the flow of the electrical signal. It is the same as turning the knob on a water faucet to increase the flow of water.",
"The output end of an audio circuit that drives a speaker is usually a type of transistor circuit. When you turn the volume up, you simply turn up the amplification and this means there is more output voltage and power available to drive the speaker. The speaker (within the limits of it's power handling capability) then produces a louder sound."
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d9yoj9 | Why do longer barrels on tanks/rifles make the round travel faster? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The gases which propel the projectile have more time to expand in one direction, imparting more energy to the projectile. The longer barrel also gives more time for it to build up spin, which increases stability and fights air resistance.",
"The purpose of the gunpowder in a gun/bullet is that, when lit, it expands into a gas. That expansion is sudden and fast and is what drives the bullet down the barrel of the gun. The pressure behind the round pushes it down the barrel. The longer the barrel, the more distance the bullet has to accelerate because once it exits the barrel the expanding gases can escape without really applying pressure on the bullet. Of course, there are limits here. The longer the barrel, the more gunpowder required for this to work because once the gunpower has finished expanding, any further distance travelled by the bullet through the barrel will actually slow it down. And at some point you'll have so much gunpowder the gun is at risk of simply blowing itself up and requiring reinforcement.",
"What others have said - but keep in mind that at a certain point the friction between bullet and barrel will also slow the bullet down. Like most things, there's a sweet spot",
"Much like how a car or airplane need to accelerate from a stop, so do bullets, they don't instantly travel at their max speed when the gunpowder is ignited. The barrel focuses the expanding gases directly behind the bullet, they have nowhere else to go but against the bullet, accelerating it more and more until finally reaching the end of the barrel where they can disperse in every which direction, no longer accelerating the bullet."
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da1nb1 | If I store 100GB of photos on a 100GB hard drive, reformat it, then store 100GB of music, how can someone retrieve the original photos? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f1mlerl"
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"text": [
"If you format a full drive, and then put new stuff over it the original stuff is forever lost. You ain't retrieving it. Putting it as simple as possible: Remember data is all 0s and 1s The original 0s and 1s were messed up when you formatted it, but potentially some of the data(like 1% *maybe*) would still be there. But then you sealed the deal by putting music over it. You rearranged every 0 and 1 to be music instead of photos."
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da1ra5 | How are the bars for wifi and mobile data calculated, what do they mean, and why is it possible to have low bars and still have high speeds? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f1mmitt"
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"text": [
"The bars are based on signal strength not speed. So if you're really close to an access point, but the access point is only connected for say 20mb/s, that's what you'll get. But if you're far away from a 250mb/s access point you may get more packet loss, but you'll still end up getting somewhere say around 200mb/s."
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da2751 | What does a virus do to your computer? What does virus protection do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"A virus is just a program that runs on your computer at its core. However, things that get classified as \"viruses\" tend to be programs that: - Install without the user's knowledge or permission - Do nefarious things that the user does not want done What it \"does\" depends on the virus. Some may delete or change files, some may turn your computer into an agent of a botnet, some may mine bitcoin, some may act as an email spam relay, etc. It is just a program, and it can do anything that a program can do. I had one may years ago that changed everything you typed into ethnic slurs. Virus protection scans your system for known \"viral\" code and either isolates or deletes it. Since viruses are \"bad\" programs, the software is designed to find them and disable them without user interaction and in a way that limits further damage to the computer operating system.",
"A virus is just one particular sort of unwanted program. Unwanted programs in general are known as malware. A virus, specifically, is malware which, when it runs, tries to copy itself to other people's computers too. In the same way that human viruses spread from person to person. What does a virus, or malware, do? Whatever its writer programmed it to do. Encrypt your files and demand payment, for example, in so-called ransomware attacks. Or scan your computer's hard drive for usernames and passwords and confidential documents, which it emails back to the attackers without your knowledge. Or pop up adverts on your PC. Or allow the attacker to take remote control of your PC in the future in order to launch attacks against other companies' websites (so-called DDoS attacks). Or loads of other things. Virus protection software aims to detect the presence of malware (not just viruses) on your computer and then delete them. It does this in 2 ways. Firstly, by knowing what the code of every known virus looks like, so that it can detect them on your PC. That's why you need to update your antivirus software so often. Secondly, by being able to detect \"virus-like\" behaviour on your computer. It's known as heuristics. But this is notoriously difficult to do reliably, without mistaking honest software for malware or vice-versa."
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da5sn8 | How does Google maps know where every bit of traffic is on roads showing blue, amber and red during your route? | Google maps is very accurate at analysing routes and even factors in 2 minutes worth of traffic jams. How does google do this? Does everyone have google maps and google are constantly monitoring it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"'The company uses the Location Services function on Apple and Android phones to track your coordinates. If you have the Location Services capability enabled for Google Maps, you're constantly sending real-time data about your whereabouts and the time it takes you to get from place to place. Google combines everyone’s data to determine the concentration of cars on the roads and how fast they are moving. (Or aren’t moving, depending on your situation.)'",
"Location data being shared to Google via phones is an \"Opt out\", not \"Opt in\" feature. It's on by default. Very few people turn it off. This gives Google an immense amount of data when it comes to traffic. So in short, yes.",
"Not everyone, no. But at any given time, sufficiently many people have phones or other devices in their cars that are reporting location data back to Google that Google's software can come up with generally-pretty-good estimates of traffic density.",
"Google Maps bases its traffic views and faster-route recommendations on two different kinds of information: historical data about the average time it takes to travel a particular section of road at specific times on specific days and real-time data sent by sensors and smartphones that report how fast cars are moving right then.",
"Basically - yeah. Your phone is sending GPS data back to Google all the time. From that, it is easy to figure out speed and direction of travel. Since Google knows the roadways and the speed limits, if you are going 30mph on a road that is supposed to be 70, it can infer that you are in traffic and update the map."
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da66um | Why in older animated movies are objects that characters interact with more pronounced than other objects in the scene? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f1ngwn3"
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"text": [
"Older animation used painted backgrounds that were larger than the animated frame (called a cell) to make it easier to animate the whole film. Individual animation cells were then drawn on transparent sheets. When a branch (or other object) changes from just being a part of the background to being part of the animation, the animator would \"paint\" over the background usually resulting in a less detailed image (and the creation of a new background painting). The lack in detail is usually attributed to there being between 24 and 40 animation cells per second of animation and the demanding production schedule. Thus an animator would have to draw thousands of cells each day and would skip some finer details to keep up with the production schedule."
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da74cj | How do Bluetooth things work, more specifically Bluetooth earphones? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Wireless devices (basically everything, these days) communicate by sending electromagnetic waves over the air that get picked up by other devices and interpreted as data. But in order for two devices to talk, they need to be speaking the same language, like maybe the waves should all be a certain length. Bluetooth is simply a standard, or a set of guidelines, for what type of waves two devices should use to communicate. If your device follows the Bluetooth wave rules, your device can talk to other devices that follow the Bluetooth wave rules.",
"Bluetooth is a language that works over air at small distances like mom talking to her child in the other room. Bluetooth actually uses the same frequency as WiFI, but uses a different \"dialect\" to avoid interference. Mom is a phone, tablet, laptop etc. The child is any bluetooth device (including headphones). Using the same language analogy, the amount of \"words per minute\" BT devices can use to talk to one another is limited, so to send a song, they must speak in simpler words. So instead of saying \"this part of this marvelous musical creation enthralls my soul and lifts my spirit\" (14 words), BT can only use 7 words at a time and would have to say it like \"this part of this song is neat\". This translation from complex music to simpler music is done by interpretors named \"codecs\". Both the device and the BT headphones must have the same codec. Some codecs are better than others at transmitting the music via BT. The better codecs that would make the least loss in audible quality are aPtix (HD), LDAC and AAC (especially if you have an iPhone), so you may want to look for those in specs when choosing a pair of BT headphones."
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da7569 | what does jailbreaking a phone allow you to do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It allows you to customize the appearance and download non-apple approved apps. However it essentially gets rid of the all security functions that apple has."
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da9cp7 | What is Counterfeiting? | I've Googled it and seen examples, still have no idea. Anyone care to help? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Counterfeiting is making something that someone else has an exclusive legal right to make. Alternatively, trying to pass one thing off as another much more valuable thing. Examples: Printing money to pass off as coming from someone that hasn't authorized you to print money. Putting a label from a brand you don't own on your own products. Buying a bottle of vitamins, relabeling them as cancer drugs and selling it for thousands of dollars.",
"\"Counterfeit\" means \"fake\", basically it's a fake version of something that someone (tries to) trick people into thinking is the real thing. The word \"counterfeit\" usually means the fake thing is a serious matter, not some kind of innocent prank -- something really unethical / immoral / fraudulent / criminal. Counterfeiting is a problem for money. Saying \"That's a counterfeit $100 bill\" is another way of saying \"That's a fake $100 bill.\" Obviously, anyone who creates fake $100 bills can easily buy a lot of nice things for themselves if the fakes are good enough, and others are tricked into believing the $100 bills are real. (Creating or knowingly spending fake bills is a crime, and anyone caught doing it will probably be in jail for quite a while.) Counterfeiting is also a problem for brands. Like Chanel, the famous French fashion company. If some guy named Bob makes a leather purse and tells other people it's a Chanel purse, it's *counterfeit*. It wasn't actually made by Chanel, and Bob is trying to trick people into thinking it was, presumably so he can sell it for a lot of money based on Chanel's strong reputation. (This is also a crime, Bob could go to jail, and he could be sued by both Chanel and the customers he tricked. But it can be hard to prosecute, especially if Bob is selling through some website based overseas.)"
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daaevv | How does a computer know how big a file is before it begins downloading? | For clarity, if a file is 2 gigs does a machine know it will be downloading over a longer period of time versus downloading a 5mb file? Is there some initial packet sent between the server and host indicating such? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you download via HTTP (a super-common way), then yes, there's a content-size header that the server can send to say how big the download will be. Not all downloads will have this header.",
"As someone else suggested, most of the time when you download a file over the internet it's through something called http, which is the underlying protocol for the world wide web you use in your browser. When you click a link to download a file a http request is made for the file and the server first sends header data for a response. So yes you can say an initial packet is sent... Sortof. Headers are key/value pairs of text information. An industry standard header called content-length denotes the size of the file, and other headers are used so your computer also knows the name and extension of the file. After headers are sent the file starts being sent, and your device counts how much data is received against how much was stated in the content-length header. Edit: it's worth noting that without the content-length header, your browser likely has no way of knowing how big the file is and will just wait till all the data is sent. Some servers will not provide this header, you may have noticed when downloading some files your browser does not know, showing a continuous download animation - this is why."
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dabwbb | How do electrical currents in a CPU translate to different processes in a computer? | I believe I understand that when programming (in Python, C++, etc.), the computer translates it into bytes, binary code, and eventually into a specific series of electrical currents in the transistors, which basically act as on-off switches. However, what I don't understand is how the computer knows which series of electric currents means to carry out which process. Sorry if this doesn't make sense. I'm very new at understanding how computers work. Thanks in advance | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think in binary. The computer knows off/on, and that translates to bytes via bits. Eventually those bytes turn into data types that make it possible for you to utilize object oriented languages via their data structures. On a side note, 32 bit computing had a limit of about 4 gigs of memory space, now that it's 64 we probably won't have a limitation for a century. As far as the electrical nuts and bolts, talk to a chip designer bc I have no clue how that works."
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daclx8 | Why do internet calls (e.g Discord) have so much better sound quality compared to phone calls? And why haven't they replaced them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The phone system is pretty old, so when it switched to digital transmission they set the transmission quality to be a balance between something the technology of the time could easily handle (remembering this was set long before modern high bandwidth 4g), and was of a reasonable quality. Modern online systems can use a much, much higher quality, as our current systems can handle a lot more data being transferred. The difference is that when you are in an area of poor phone signal, the internet based systems will start to fail, while the traditional phone system will remain working for longer as it can use a much poorer network."
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daco8g | Why is it so hard to tab out or Alt-Tab out of most PC games? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A lot of games sort of “take over” the hardware necessary to render graphics. This includes things like video memory that takes time to write with other data. To make an analogy it is like being told to prepare for a very complex, intensive task that requires gathering a lot of tools and instructions together. You set them all up, adjust them so they will work perfectly smoothly together for optimal efficiency, and then... You are told to change your setup to do something completely different. It would take time to switch it all back around."
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dafkm3 | Why are smartphone manufacturers no longer making phones with removable batteries? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Waterproofing and the ability to sell a new phone when the battery can no longer hold a new charge, which one is more important is debateable.",
"Mostly for the sake of waterproofing. The fewer places that exist to potentially let water in, the easier it is to keep it out (and the cheaper it is).",
"1) For waterproofing and to get a smaller design. 2) So you can't replace the inner workings as easily. As you still need a phone, they will still take your money.",
"They are. Just look at cheap generic brands. Waterproofing is just an excuse. Its easy to make a sealed removable case. Its a way to make the phone break faster. On cheaper phones theres no need as the battery is more than half the phone anyway.",
"If people cant get a new battery, then they need a new phone, when people get a new phone, the company gets more money than if you got a new battery",
"So you can't replace the battery as easily, most people will at that point just buy a new phone.",
"Modern phones also tend to fill every available space with battery, so the battery is actually several different cells nestled against other components. It is not a single rectangular component. This is not something you can easily remove and replace like a set of AA batteries"
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dafr77 | Why smartphone manufacturers use the term ROM when we can constantly write data to it? | Isn't ROM is just for the firmware of the phone? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"ROM on a cell phone is internal memory for the system. It's flash memory. Writable by flashing a new image in but no meant for constant writes. RAM is external memory. Meant for constant writes",
"It probably comes from the time electronic boards had a ROM that contained the program and separate memories for temporary/persistent data. PROMs could only be programmed once, to store the program in them. EPROMs used to be erasable using UV light, which meant extracting them from the device, putting them under a UV light source, reprogramming and finally putting them back into the device. Practically speaking, the memory was really read-only from the device point of view. “ROM” was also often used to identify files containing the data to program into the physical memory. So, it probably carried over to identify “the program that runs a device”."
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dagd92 | - Why moving OLED screens fast creates a visual blurr especially in white over black, and this doesn’t happen in LCD’s scrrens? | Do you have an OLED screen smartphone? Try to move it quickly near your face (as fast as you can) and you’ll see a pattern that is completelly different than what you would see in an LCD screen. I’ve always wondered what is actually causing this. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On a OLED screen the difference in brightness is done by turning the LED on and off quickly. It is called [Pulse-width\\_modulation (PWM)]( URL_0 ). It is a bit like a very fast stroboscope A LCD screen have a light that is always on or blink very fast behind the screen, the LCD filter out light by turning liquid crystals to different degrees so the let more or less light trough so the pixels can be always on and still change brightness. If you move the display faste compared to the rate it turn on and off it will have moved some distance when it was off and the result the pattern you see. PWM to regulate brightness's common for LED. If you have a LED flashlight that can dim the light the blinking is quite obvious if you are outside when it is dark and snow or rain. use the lowers brightness on the flashlight and hold just beside your eyes. The rain will like a lines that changed from bright to dart when it fall in front of your eyes."
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dal4yp | how can a cellular tower receive many messages a second while still being able to differentiate the data coming from each device? | data is wirelessly transmitted from a phone /device and the tower can receive that data, process it and consider it a message (like SMS) and send the message it to whatever number it's for. But if you had 100s of people sending messages every few seconds, in a busy area, how can a cell tower receive all of the data sent from one device without the data being disturbed considering the tower is still receiving many other messages at the same time? wouldn't the signal get mixed/disturbed or something? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They can do two things; either use different frequencies, or take turns. For a given second you can divide it into lets say 1,000 different sections and assign each phone a section during which it can talk to the tower. That way even if they are all using the same frequency to communicate they don't get in each other's way."
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dam1b2 | How CPUs (and logic gates) can mess up or do calculations wrong? | I understand how software can be faulty at times due to the human element of coding it. But how can CPU (or related hardware) mess up calculations? You can ELI10 or ELI15 if its easier. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's very rare for a silicon CPU to mess up, but it would most likely be caused by radiation, natural or otherwise. Most computers work by distinguishing between two states, and switching between them takes some work. You want to keep this amount of work small to make processors efficient, but that also makes them prone to interference, so there's a trade-off. Most errors are likely to happen in memory, rather than in the CPU, which is where that tradeoff is most important. There's also the possibility that the CPU was designed incorrectly; since CPUs are enormously complicated, this is pretty common, as in the Pentium F00F bug.",
"1. Incorrect design, ie a logic bug. The scenario hits a corner case that was not discovered during validation. 2. A timing violation. Correct behavior requires all the bits to be correct at the correct time. Since the data or control logic comes from several paths, it's possible a race condition or other timing violation exists. 3. Outside interference. Electroic magnetic interference or radiation."
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daq305 | why do most processers have twice the threads than the number of cores? | Was just watching an ltt video and was wondering. Ex: 8 core 16 thread |16 core 32 thread | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Before we had cores we had hyper threading where a CPU could natively divide into two virtual processors. The cpu maintains two sets of registers so splitting workloads is more efficient than in software multi threading."
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daqxev | How exactly do you get code onto other pieces of tech? | To be more specific, let's say you created code for an AI on a computer/laptop or even VR/AR, how would you get that onto a phone or just any device? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You generally need to cross compile code for the target machine if using a language like C/C++. A cross compiler creates executable code for a platform other than the one on which the compiler is running. (Using a language like Java, you would not need to do this as long as the target you are running the code on has a JVM. But note that Java is usually used only for higher level software like applications) Once you have the code, you need to upload the code on the target device. The device you want to run the code on will usually have a startup function or program that initializes and spawns threads for many other programs. You could then call the start of your program from that main function. There are obviously many steps in between and after that you might need to take care of. For instance, if your program uses the camera, you might need to ensure that while startup the camera driver is initialized and your API is linked and compatible with the drivers interface. You might have to use code that the specific OS recognizes like timers, sleep, threads etc.",
"USB or wifi these days. For tiny embedded controllers, using a USB adapter to a special programming cable, either unique to the kind of processor or to a standard called JTAG."
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dats8k | how do arm prosthetics work especially when you have almost your whole arm gone? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Sensors are placed to pick up signals both electronically and physically from remaining muscle structures left around the stump These are used to actuate the various artificial muscles of the prosthetic either through mechanical action or electronic/pneumatic actuators"
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davtnv | What does megapixel mean? | Is it a general measure of a camera's picture quality? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Megapixels is a million pixels. Digital cameras produce images formed by many tiny colored square dots called pixels, and the more you have the more detailed an image can be. Broadly speaking they tend to tell you the quality a camera can produce, in the sense that a 2 megapixel camera can’t make as detailed a photo as a 30 megapixel camera. However it isn’t a foolproof metric because having a bunch of pixels doesn’t mean they are *good* pixels. Cameras can have a bunch of pixels but have a lot of noise or poor color reproduction compared to a camera with fewer but higher quality pixels.",
"mega is the metric prefix for million. megapixel means 1million pixels. a camera captures image using a grid of light sensitive sensors. each individual sensor is called the pixel. so a 1megapixel camera sensor has 1 million tiny sensors in its grid. the megapixel rating only tells you how many pixels there are. it doesn't tell you how GOOD the camera is. maybe they're cheap low quality sensors. maybe the camera software to detect the sensor output sucks. maybe other components are low quality.",
"A checkerboard is 8 squares by 8 squares and has 64 squares total. A digital photo is like a large checker board that can be 1000x1000 pixels. This digital photo is made up of 1 million pixels or a “1 megapixel” It can be used to describe a digital camera’s capability of capturing an image. It can also help understand how much detail a digital photo contains. For reference a 4K TV can display ~8 megapixels at a time. 4096x2160 pixels. A older 1080p TV can display ~2 megapixels at a time (1080x1920 pixels). For camera quality, it is just one measure of quality. Another debatably more important measure is sensor size. A larger full frame 35mm DSLR sensor captures 30x more light than a meager 1/3” (8.47mm) iphone sensor. (Though apple does really clever things with multiple sensors and software)"
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dayqt0 | How does the 3-D technology in TVs work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"3d vision with your eyes works because your eyes see different pictures. The first way to implement this was the classic blue red glasses, one seeing a red image and one seeing the blue. Next step was Polarised light iirc. And now we are place a kind of \"slit barrier\" in front of a TV. This way your one eye sees a different picture than your other eye. This graphic explains it URL_0"
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db38pw | . Why did European releases of older games(SNES and PS1 etc..) run slower than their North American counterparts? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A bit more technical detail: Older games were meant to run at a very specific framerate which for TVs in North America is \\~30 frames per second. Everything in the game was tied to this rate as a way to keep time, so an action that is supposed to take 1/2 a second would be programmed to run for 15 frames. TVs in other regions didn't run at \\~30 fps, for instance PAL in Europe ran at 25 fps. This means that same software meant for NTSC regions would run at 83% speed it was intended. That same 15-frame action would actually take 0.6 seconds instead because it doesn't know the displayed framerate is lower than expected. It's possible to compensate but requires a fair bit of engineering and testing. Companies found it easier to just ignore the issue."
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dbgqrm | google knows a lot about all of us. How does this affect the average person? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"at the superficial level, it affects you by showing you targeted advertising. more likely you'll click on something compared to untargeted advertising. at 1 level deep, it'll allow businesses to profile populations behavior by age group, location, social network, etc, create action plans to best market their product by allowing different marketing strategies for different profile groups. at 2 levels deep, it'll allow businesses to present action plans to influence and change population behavior based on population profile, to dig their product into the core of the population profile. e.g. product influencers at 3 levels deep, you go down the conspiracy rabbit hole. ending up with total mind domination",
"Probably not much in ways you can notice. The whole point of having this data is to be able to customize the world for everyone in ways that are rarely perceptible. The most harmless of which is advertising, they can target specific people with specific ads, based on their opinions, religion, life situation etc. More menacing ones involve deeper customization that's done for you, without your consent. For example, say you want to make sure people with wrong political opinions cannot progress in their career. For those with this information, this can be done, and it can even be mostly transparent to regular folks. China for example is trying to do this, so that you have \"social score\", that gets affected by crimes you commit, financial situation etc, but also by things like, promoting material on social media that isn't state-approved. Those with low social score can have then jobs become unavailable, and even their traveling privileges taken away. Of course, this also is worrysome in that important people are people too. Say, if you know some person working for certain company is dissatisfied with their job, unethical and in financial trouble, why not bribe them to do your bidding instead? You can use this information to target specific people to do much more active \"customization\" for their life. Basically, what this adds up to is that information in a very real sense is power, and this power might be unleashed to decide what sort of world you end up living in, without you necessarily even noticing. The only people who likely will have a chance of directly having big changes in their life just because of this information are political and financial leaders, or people who have key responsibilies in whatever society you live in. If you are not important and keep your head down, you might not notice anything going on at all.",
"It puts us at the mercy of an entity we don't fully understand or control. Ps. They actually don't own that data. We do."
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dbguzi | How come at my uni everyones key opens the building door but also opens their seperate door. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Each key has several bumps on it. The outer door's lock only checks for *some* of the bumps, which are identical on all the keys. The room door's lock checks for *all* of the bumps, which are different on each key.",
"Short answer: the tumblers in the lock are designed to work that way. Most physical locks operate on a tumbler system; [see the Design section of this article]( URL_0 ). The tumbler's have different levels/heights/pinsets that when presented with the correct key allow them to turn and open the lock. In the case you are describing, the first lock has a system of \"dummy\" tumblers. This means that the tumblers are set to allow multiple keys to open them by having multiple levels that open the lock; this can be adjusted in several ways so that only one or two pins are \"dummy\" and the rest need to be a required height. Your individual door has a traditional lock that allows only one key to open it."
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dbjnmj | What is lacking from modern CGI that allows humans to still distinguish it from real objects on film? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You only notice it on people because you have tens of millennia of refinement in your brain to spot the subtlest differences in people to find something that isn't quite right and could signify danger. Subtle things from not moving quite right for the body they have, to slight shine off the face, to hair not falling quite right can throw up a flag in your head that indicates something isn't quite right here. You don't see 99.99% of digital effects in movies. Cars, planes, buildings, and really anything artificial can be added in by a computer without you noticing. Cars in particular are easy because they're always shiny so a slightly too shiny CGI model just looks freshly waxed. Buildings are also reliable because they're not moving and the lighting never changes. Basically no one is blowing anything up these days, its too easy and cheap to just add it in post. You don't notice CGI these days, you think its practical effects which is the biggest compliment you can give it.",
"Right now, it's just lacking expertise to get on the other side of the uncanny valley. There are thousands of small nuances we accept in human movement during the normal course of a conversation. These are hard to replicate convincingly because they're not intentional movements in a majority of the time. Even with motion capture software, small twitches are usually glossed over and so you end up with a face that looks real in a still, but the moment they start talking, their face starts looking... _off_... The mouth isn't opening far enough or too much. The eyes are too animated, or they're not animated enough. And, of course, with really bad examples (Tron Legacy) it almost seems like the head is a completely different entirety from the body altogether, which just triggers that part in your monkey brain that says, \"these details don't add up; be cautious and alert' which can really kill your immersion.",
"They always get the shadow wrong. Not enough usually. I get it, I mean, they're covering up their work.",
"Shading and lighting effects, you can tell that the CGI is in a different \"space\" than the practical effects and actors"
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eif9wx | when they release a ps4 game on switch or xbox, how do they do it? What do they change program wise? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It depends on the engine. If the game is made in a game engine that already supports multiple platforms, then it might be as simple as registering a few new variables and formats. For other games, it might require new chunks of code to support the different hardware. And if you're unlucky: rewriting large amounts of the game. No matter how you do it, some of the games code will have to be rewritten to support the consoles format, it's just a question of \"how much\"",
"Somewhat related question, what happens when something is made backwards compatible? The Xbox 360 BC library was built over time. What exactly was being done for each game?",
"Also, in most cases people plan in advance which platforms they will support. That helps them to utilize appropriate tools.",
"depends really, nowadays most engines support differnt platforms with a button or change of settings. Easier to let unity or epic deal with the details of each console specifications. Mostly ways that the engine talks to the cpu/gpu. Fun history back in the ps3 and 360 era.. a game where we primary dev'd on a 360 but also supported ps3 and pc. Things look dandy on a 360 but look weird and mushy and a bit slower on ps3. From what some of our devs said, the ps3 as powerful as it was with more ram, the process of getting data to the ram was not as great as the 360 so textures cam out meh. Sure a first party dev who had more access to methods to doing so on a ps4 could get past that but just shows the pain of using your own engine on muliple platforms. We got eaten alive by all those stupid,\" compare visuals of each platform\" reviews yet the gameplay was the same ...."
],
"score": [
246,
23,
6,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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| [
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|
|
eijjwq | Can someone explain how a space elevator is supposed to work?? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcqxvae"
],
"text": [
"> scientists expect it to happen by 2045 No, they don't. Nothing suggests that material technology will advance *nearly* that fast. Even if we had the technology today that would be an optimistic timeline just for the scale of construction. Maybe throw in another century there and you'll be in the right ballpark. Don't believe clickbait and garbage news sites that give overly optimistic and unrealistic timelines to get clicks. ******* The general idea behind a space elevator is that you have some big, heavy object that's on a rope. Just like you can keep a rope taut by tying a ball on the end and swinging it around you, you could keep this space elevator's rope taut by using the rotation of the planet. The challenge here is that Earth doesn't spin particularly fast. Sure, it's about 1000 mph at the equator, but that's still only one revolution per day. To keep the rope taut you have to go *at least* to the altitude of geosynchronous satellites, plus a little more since you also have to support the weight of the rope. Once in place you could get something to space by having it simply climb this rope. This means you don't need huge rockets to get out into space, which is a huge bonus for spaceflight. Where space elevators become impractical with modern technology is when you start to consider just how strong that rope needs to be compared to how much it weighs. To get an idea of scale, Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter. Most satellites fly at an altitude of a couple hundred miles above the ground. Geosynchronous orbit is about 22,000 miles above the ground, and a space elevator needs its weight positioned above that altitude. This means you need to have a rope long enough to wrap around the planet and strong enough to support its weight plus the weight of the counterbalance. No material on Earth is that strong/light. This is all before considering the practical difficulties of constructing the elevator."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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} | [
"url"
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| [
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|
eik9fv | What is the device that people use to talk with after having been intubated through the throat called and how does it work? | I was watching an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, and a lady had to use a device on her neck to be able to communicate. She would have to press on her neck to communicate, and it also sounded like there was rushing air as well. Is it just a microphone located on her neck and she presses a button for it to operate? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcr719x"
],
"text": [
"Well. The lady on kitchen nightmares had a tracheostomy. That means they put a hole in her neck with a tube in it so the air could bypass throat cancer or polyps (lumps). To talk, She breathes in through the tube and then covers it to force the air past her voice box so she can talk. The machine you mentioned is called an artificial larynx (voice box) It makes a loud, monotone noise and vibration through either a powerful speaker or a mechanical motor. It is then pressed against the throat and it vibrates the vocal chords and the user moves their voice box and mouth to make words."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
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| [
"url"
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|
eikp93 | What are these "bots" that can fish for things on the internet such as free codes? | For example, when people post a coupon code here on reddit in plain text almost always a bot will take the code. How is this done? Not only does the bot need to scan for a code, but go to a correct website and use it. HOW?! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcrgyr7"
],
"text": [
"The same way anything else works with computers, really. Somebody figured out there's something valuable getting posted. They made what is effectively an automated web browser that looks on places like reddit, searches for some text pattern, and collects the results. Reddit in particular has an interface that allows for very easy automation, hence the amount of bots that do all sorts of things, from reminders to the bot that goes \"And my axe!\" Then once results have been collected, the bot goes to another site, and plugs those results in the right place."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
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| [
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|
eikt5k | Netcode in Fighting Games and why it's important | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcrbdv2",
"fcresge"
],
"text": [
"Delay based stops the entire game until it catches up which is bad for everyone. Rollback makes a best guess as to what would have happened and does that. Essentially making lag imperceptible. URL_0 As to why it's important, frames.... And such",
"Fighting games at a high level are about hitting specific key combinations in sequence at precise moments and on specific frames. Any delay in action or lag throws everything off and can mean the difference between winning and losing a match. Let alone how frustrating it can be when your shoryuken doesn't go off because of a bit of lag."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://youtu.be/TtfArmKISpY"
],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
ein8hc | How does an offline computer knows the time after being turned off for an extended period of time (days, weeks, etc.)? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcs2f4x",
"fcs2rjp",
"fcs2igd"
],
"text": [
"There is a small coin cell battery in the computer specifically used for keeping time. Most modern computers will also draw a tiny bit of power from the power supply as long as it's still plugged to the wall.",
"Using something called a CMOS battery that's plugged into the motherboard. It's essentially a glorified watch battery. That's its main purpose. It used to store bios settings but that's typically stored in dedicated flash memory nowadays.",
"Your everyday desktop and laptops have a battery inside that allows a clock to keep running while the power is off. That battery can keep the system clock running for a couple years."
],
"score": [
10,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
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| [
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]
|
|
eis280 | What exactly is graphic design and how is it any different from animation/drawing? | I've always associated graphic design with advertising and how the appearance of words are changed. But I'm still confused, is drawing/animation and graphic design the same thing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fct72q4",
"fct5kzd"
],
"text": [
"Graphic design is the study of conveying information visually. This can be on the web, it can be through signs, posters, or through any visual methods. For instance, logos for companies are also often created by graphic designers. It is certainly a part of sales and marketing, advertising, etc, but that's not anywhere near all that graphic design encompasses.",
"Graphic design has a lot of theory behind it, especially if one is specializing in UI/UX. You need to be very aware of who you're designing for, especially populations with different requirements (like color-blindness) and cultural requirements (what colors represent to different cultures). Graphic design is used in many different specialties: computer OS UI, websites, game I terfaces, etc."
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
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| [
"url"
]
|
eisll9 | How can you communicate using hexadecimals simpler than using the alphabet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fct922p",
"fctcn3v"
],
"text": [
"Hexadecimal isn't used in place of the alphabet. It's used instead of binary. Computers are based on two value logic. Everything you do with your computer ultimately boils down to either 'true' or 'false' in some combination. Those boolean values are combined into binary numbers for simplicity. But binary numbers are really hard to read because they're so long. Hexadecimal compresses those binary numbers into a more human-readable format since they take only a quarter as many digits.",
"All hexadecimal is is a numbering system. It's a way of counting. But instead of using the symbols you are familiar with (numbers, 0-9) it uses these symbols and also letters of the alphabet to represent larger numbers more campact and because being a base 16 numbering system (normal counting is base 10 you have 10 symbols, 0-9...hex has 16, 0-9 and a-f) it better represents a byte (or half a byte, nibble). So some examples: Normal...hex... Binary 0....0...00000000 15....F...00001111 240...F0...11110000 255...FF...11111111 Each column in hex, represents half a byte. And for each additional column in hex, you know there are four more bits, example: F00 = 1111 0000 0000 FF00 = 1111 1111 0000 0000"
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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} | [
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| [
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]
|
|
eiso3d | What is the Impact of adding more layers to a neural network? | This is a follow up to this ELI5 question - URL_0 I know that deep neural networks have multiple layers. Let's say we have a neural network for a self driving cars, cancer prediction, or playing pacman Can someone give an ELI5 explanation of the impact of adding more layers to a neural network for any of those use cases? Does it help with error reducton? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fct9v1v"
],
"text": [
"We don't really know how adding a layer will affect performance on any particular dataset, so the best way to find out is to try it. In the case of image processing, you can see small-scale patterns like textures (detected in earlier layers) build up into larger features like eyes, noses, doors, wheels, etc and then eventually into even more complex objects like faces, cars, etc. More layers let you build up \"compositions\" of information, which is useful for representing concepts that are built up from subconcepts, which are made up of even smaller subconcepts, etc. In general, you can fit complex data better, but you will need more training data to do well."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
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| [
"url"
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|
eisux7 | how is plastic made and where do the ingredients come from? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fctd2gl"
],
"text": [
"From crude oils You see, inside crude oils and other earthly stuff, there's these atoms called carbons and hydrogen. Now these carbons and hydrogens makes the oils and they clump together. However, through a whole lot of process, you can turn these hydrogens and carbons into chains. Like fabrics, the chains forms long, intertwined chains that forms into plastic. There's a whole lot more to this process. Chemical reactions, catalyst, stupidly high temperature and pressure... I think that's it."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
eit9ua | What is the difference between autoencoders and neural networks? | From reading, I know that autoencoders are feed forward artificial neural networks trained on input that tries to optimize a loss(error) function. I know that autoencoders can be used for anomaly detection and image processing too but can't traditional deep neural networks(CNN) do the same? Can someone give an ELI5 explanation and example that shows the difference between the two? This is another explanation of autoencoders I found interesting but didn't understand- 'Patterns are like little animals, they live in the data. Training an autoencoder is changing a neural net over time to allow the little animals to live inside the net and come out of the other side looking the same as when they went in. Which incidentaly is much what the brain does.' I get the part about how patterns live in data but didn't get the part about how autoencoders are similar to the brain | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fctfqqo"
],
"text": [
"Autoencoders are (in this context) types of neural networks that are often characterized by an hourglass shape. You have a lot of neurons going in, a drastic constriction in the middle, and then a large number of nodes going out. They *are* neural networks, their structure and purpose is just specialized. They have a specific shape and their loss function boils down to \"get the input to equal the output\"."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
eixga0 | Emulation | What is the concept of Emulation ? Why do the computer systems need it ? What are various use cases ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcu0ork",
"fcu0uwx"
],
"text": [
"Emulation means the computer is pretending to be using different hardware. So instead of taking the program code and running it, it takes the program code for an incompatible system, translates it (with the emulator), and then runs it. This adds an extra step (translating) to all the code commands that the program runs. It is less efficient than just using the original system rather than emulating, but can be very convenient. Examples of uses: Game Boy Emulators let you run old game boy games on your PC, and let you modify and play with the code if you want. “Parallel” running programs (e.g. parallel windows on a Mac) are emulators which let you use software for other operating systems. Ideal for software that only comes on one OS, but isn’t on the OS you want. Backwards compatibility for modern gaming consoles. To play a PS2 game on PS4, it uses an emulator inside the PS4.",
"An emulator is a program that makes a computer behave like (or emulate) another system. An emulator for running SNES games for example, will be able to take the original game code (or ROM) for a SNES game, and then will simulate of all the internal hardware that the SNES uses, so that code runs, and you get an output that is the same as the original hardware. They're never quite perfect, but they're good enough for the vast majority of games."
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
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]
| [
"url"
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|
ej08zh | How do game developers build games around next gen consoles without knowing the software/hardware of the systems | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcuj6oo",
"fcuk1n9",
"fcujg0w"
],
"text": [
"They do. Hardware developers release next gen specs and even developer kits to software developers well before commercial release.",
"Most games are developed so that the game doesn't care what console it's going to be played on. Then the studio will use a SDK, System Development Kits, for a console to make the game run on the console they want it to work on. For todays and future Xbox and Playstations they usually develop like they were making a game for PC, because the hardware is very similar, just that the consoles are very specific while PC is very undetermined. It is also very common to use a game engine, an already created framework to create a game on, like Unity, that in itself provides tools and assistance to make a game run on different consoles. Certain, specific studios also get information beforehand what the hardware, or at least performance, of the new consoles are going to be and can create a game accordingly. They have to sign a contract that says that if they tell anyone else this information they're going to be in big trouble.",
"They know well, well in advance what they'll be working with. Development kits have been in the hands of developers, for the ps5 at least, for a couple of years now."
],
"score": [
19,
7,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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]
} | [
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| [
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|
|
ej67aj | Which way does electricity flow in a circuit? | I feel like I’m missing something but for the longest time I’ve been taught that electricity goes from positive to negative. Recently however I’ve actually started getting into circuits and whatnot and have seen on various sources that the current (electrons at least) go from negative to positive. It’s explained as “the negative electrons are repelled by the negative polarity” or something. Which one is correct, or are they both correct to some degree? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcvpw31"
],
"text": [
"Yes. Electrons flow from the - to + but current is said to flow from + to - because by convention electricity is said to flow in the direction the positive charge goes."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
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| [
"url"
]
|
ej6qv1 | How do Cheetos get their shape? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fcvz9f2"
],
"text": [
"They are extruded (hot Cheetos batter/dough is forced through a hole) and then cut. Took a field trip to a Frito-Lay factory as a kid. Edit: URL_0"
],
"score": [
13
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.wired.com/2010/05/process-cheetos/"
]
]
} | [
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]
| [
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]
|
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