tal

I’m sure that you could use MetaPost to procedurally generate a frame, then merge them into an animation.

A newer, similar language is Asymptote, and it looks like it has animation support.

I’d guess that the argument on natural gas is one of the following:

It’s replacing coal and coal emits more carbon

The problem is that coal-based power is rapidly declining, at least in the West, and it’s not a huge chunk of the generation mix anymore.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/energy-2025

In 2023, the energy mix in the EU, meaning the range of energy sources available, mainly consisted of 5 different sources:

• crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
• natural gas (20.4%)
• renewable energy (19.5%)
• solid fuels (10.6%)
• nuclear (11.8%).

Oil is a pretty expensive way to generate power. I doubt that wood pellet power plants are very common. So if you want to reduce fossil-fuel-based generation past that, you probably do have to look at reducing natural gas.

We can use it in conjunction with intermittent renewables at lower levels to avoid expensive energy storage

Solar and wind aren’t always available when someone wants to use them; they’re intermittent. You have to fill in those gaps somehow. But energy storage is expensive and for pumped hydrostorage, the most-currently-economical form, somewhat geographically-limited. So the idea is that one uses natural gas instead of storing energy from a less-carbon-intensive source to fill in those gaps…but at least you’re using less natural gas than one would if one weren’t using renewable resources and just using natural gas all the time.

Also, one more tidbit:

Austria had sued the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, over the inclusion of gas and nuclear in the EU’s classification system for environmentally sustainable economic activities.

My guess is that Austria’s probably unhappy because Austria uses a ton of hydropower, is very mountainous and has favorable geography for hydropower, so they’d prefer to have hydropower favored.

kagis

https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Austria

This has hydropower in Austria being 56.2% of Austria’s electricity generation.

LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can’t exactly predict what they’ll say.

I mean…they can have non-deterministic outputs. There’s no requirement for that to be the case.

It might be desirable in some situations; randomness can be a tactic to help provide variety in a conversation. But it might be very undesirable in others: no matter how many times I ask “What is 1+1?”, I usually want the same answer.

I would guess that it’s probably not viable. Like, the problem isn’t that a tool isn’t processing the webpage correctly, but rather that the website isn’t actually giving access to the video at all unless you sign in.

In general, if you can view a video but just not download it, Firefox (using the desktop UI) will let you the URL of the video. You click on the lock icon by the URL bar -> Connection Secure -> More information -> Media. This also lets you download images and so forth that have ad-hoc website-level “DRM” and try to make it difficult to download images. cough Pinterest.

Someone could create a service that logs in and then proxies the request, but I imagine that Threads would kill the account they’re using — I expect that they want to disallow video streams to not-logged-in users, or they wouldn’t have done what they did.

One thing that could maybe be done technically is for some service to do a fuzzy hash of each frame of videos — kind of like TinEye does for static images — and then given a static frame like this, lists all the videos that it has indexed that contain something that looks like that frame. Assuming that some service hasn’t already started providing something along those lines. But that’d probably require more processing power, bandwidth, and storage than someone like TinEye is using, as I bet that there is more data going up to the Internet in the form of video frames than of static images.

EDIT: I do see other videos further down in the thread playing. So not-logged-in viewers can see some video content, just not that. Hmm.

That video has to be treated differently than the later videos — maybe it won’t play without in-browser DRM support or the like? Or maybe it’s above a certain size?

EDIT2: I don’t think that it’s in-browser DRM. I just checked, and WideVine works in Firefox on this test page. And your URL doesn’t work in Firefox (or Chromium) on this system.

Maybe it could be some sort of new codec? I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have a fallback, though.

EDIT3: This service can provide an mp4 link. Not sure if they’re proxying it or just digging through the guts more than yt-dlp does:

https://threadster.app/download

EDIT4: It looks like the actual mp4 link I get is from a “threadster”-specific CDN account, so my guess is that they may well be proxying it, else I’d think that they’d just be linking to the video on Threads directly.

EDIT5: The downloaded .mp4 — which may or may not be identical to the original video stream — has a size of 6216038 bytes, so if Threads is restricting it based on size, it’s a pretty low restriction.

One other thing occurred to me. A number of services block “adult” content for some definition of “adult”. This (a) conforms to laws in various jurisdictions about blocking children from seeing content, and (b) creates a hook to get people to create an account. YouTube, for example. It could be that Threads has flagged this as “not for children”, so it requires an “adult” account to see the thing. I could very readily see some white supremacy group marching as qualifying as “adult” for one of those definitions.

EDIT6: It may be that Threads generates a unique video for each request, does a digital watermark or something, to try to track down what account entities like Threadster are using to pull videos from. Or it could be that Threadster is modifying the video. But I ran the video from from Threadster through rhash to generate a magnet URL, so if (a) neither service is modifying the video to make it distinct and (b) anyone has uploaded the file to a BitTorrent node with DHT enabled, then I imagine that this should get you to it; I generated a magnet URL for the file with all supported hashes.

$ rhash --magnet -a threadster_0ovs0ywp.mp4 
magnet:?xl=6216038&dn=threadster_0ovs0ywp.mp4&xt=urn:crc32:ce0986c6&xt=urn:md4:7f1b446dafac136ef41d7c8211a153b2&xt=urn:md5:af199305ebd27c6ff34e890d36374d37&xt=urn:sha1:qjyppsc27vuazq6zgyr4vflkumpour64&xt=urn:tiger:bff86af09fa62a93c35a67902ffbca9bdab5cf52f4d41baf&xt=urn:tree:tiger:vrk7ux5qrfzip24d7su4fjavdbj5iadh5i4le5q&xt=urn:btih:7d08a14e90712580809379ddf43778e1440c8ee1&xt=urn:ed2k:7f1b446dafac136ef41d7c8211a153b2&xt=urn:aich:qikeur6cwalyy4qokt62raheyvg7a7nc&xt=urn:whirlpool:4d6ae4d5ba366c6a0ed783efdff5371b7e969e03905952abcec3a8f398af4f5d5bdb81e9eb3c1c522ab336dab155dd89729c533ddbe8c0d00e7ad1b7e411331b&xt=urn:ripemd160:6067eae597a4a5a0c077b8b934bd0609dcffbdb1&xt=urn:gost94:83e5f32ca72e8d7e78868fe7c40cf1488483a49feaad06565ce272976dca68c6&xt=urn:gost94-cryptopro:bad114d3021ac70074f4cf315d78825b40141faa6502dd25f90ae6097b4fb38a&xt=urn:has160:7b0d2f95b6bf9a2beb091ddb66fa58486a8e15ec&xt=urn:gost12-256:ef405a539e4c565119537fc927e8a437c570085161fba529395bee2470be1147&xt=urn:gost12-512:237d11bc5a7f3205988675d24ae59eae6fe9b5604ca9fefdce0007b2f1f3a322ee36b6a2268e0fd8a63a4b7eee631cec159125a34bad7640febca983e148616b&xt=urn:sha224:f2c43a2d1fcff46517805cae7b2704ffc307249e779f208156d78e38&xt=urn:sha256:10aa072e2a340490550b75a3b31cc7bc2477675a86545efe10485255aae52dc4&xt=urn:sha384:5baf49ca38a7520d83e32cd34ceff2307a9ab58a968b289f4af60c3ca4652f536cd37308c4399058172923766cab7d18&xt=urn:sha512:29a41cec78761ade9d4da49c16c2b24f62a437bd4eef97948a3ae8fdb4498f64783e66000b5d53ac46dc90ffe22d4dc0a43d3d108798663a97c46138efc72b5f&xt=urn:edon-r256:05b271edb1ee478361d2b8cf2c7e2b30a98e96dc07d05c9afff5f04313ea497c&xt=urn:edon-r512:8697ed76da42f16abe913bcc3c4b73b8511dbf6117db35e9373401d03e56853a4297eaa46a9aec1c32e050ca11b1c4da33869a06f758234dfd8a6178da2cacba&xt=urn:sha3-224:0ffb43bb4c352cc2b5ee8d1386ec8949eed32403130bf8bab71d3f02&xt=urn:sha3-256:835b2f4ffad2efad5fd67b84508dbc41b4d1f977aee2a76fcc47245681b68dc3&xt=urn:sha3-384:81cb38988764b1941f4d50cacbfa0e98989128319508940558c1665f3edddb79d475495cd9962b76b2409f35066fa8d6&xt=urn:sha3-512:d50d706b9cbdab52d1564f0f89013194c60e9d158ce6bf714f35742949bfa7cfc3f3716fd8f1577c3a4755b42a30091b113aa20d15608fccffde46c62494faa6&xt=urn:crc32c:86313da6&xt=urn:snefru128:5e2348a151afe2cd50cf46c36a265c05&xt=urn:snefru256:401be5eb26ad7ba6f75dbfab9d8b66692bca8f3090eb69b75657824d8cde09e5&xt=urn:blake2s:aaf9ad51bb34f13b934decdec05989012fb2d34641d4de901bda3cd217b2e64f&xt=urn:blake2b:92cec72f95822075735249de8bb4014386ba7a71c22428fd44e7a071ed372034c2b76bdefe45824d2ab7ba8d1fbaa726d5210aa10cec7510308528495cd2386d  
$  

Clearly you’ve made a mistake by even getting onboard the distro train in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_from_Scratch

Linux From Scratch is a way to install a working Linux system by building all components of it manually. This is, naturally, a longer process than installing a pre-compiled Linux distribution. According to the Linux From Scratch site, the advantages to this method are a compact, flexible and secure system and a greater understanding of the internal workings of the Linux-based operating systems.[5]

I have not done so in the traditional sense in quite some years. My experience was that it was an increasing headache due to crashing into a wide variety of anti-spam efforts. Get email past one and crash into another.

Depending upon your use case – using the “forward to a smarthost” feature in some mail server packages to forward to a mailserver run by a SMTP service provider with whom you have an account might work for you. Then it still looks to local software like you have a local mailserver.

If I were going to do a conventional, no-smarthost mailserver today, I think that I would probably start out by setting up a bunch of spam-filtering stuff — SpamAssassin, I dunno what-all gets used these days on a “regular” account — and then emailing stuff from my server and seeing what throws up red flags. That’d let me actually see the scoring and stuff that’s killing email. Once I had it as clean as I could get it, I’d get a variety of people I know on different mail servers and ask them to respond back to a test email, and see what made it out.

I think a more interesting question is why there aren’t major US TV news sources between Fox News and the center, occupying the area that the three-more-liberal-kids wanted to take Fox News.

To the right of Fox News, you have upstarts One America News Network and Newsmax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsmax

During the 2020 United States presidential election, President Trump began to promote Newsmax over its rival, Fox News.[80][81][82][83] Trump’s preference for Newsmax over Fox News became clearer after the latter became the first news outlet to call Arizona for Democratic challenger Joe Biden.[42] Newsmax has made their more conservative leanings a selling point to disaffected Fox News viewers, as well as employing Fox News alumni to join their lineup on Newsmax TV, such as Rob Schmitt and Greg Kelly.[42][84][43] Emily VanDerWerff of Vox reported that the outlet “spent lots of time arguing that other media outlets jumped the gun in calling the election for Biden and that Trump still has a path to win this thing”, and that it was one of the only networks that didn’t call the election for Biden, citing the Trump campaign’s legal challenges. However, she did write that “Newsmax doesn’t go full arch-conservative” and “doesn’t give airtime to QAnon paranoiacs”.[46]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_America_News_Network

OAN saw growth in its audience as a result of its election coverage. It was boosted in particular by Donald Trump, who expressed disapproval of Fox News’ reporting on the presidential election and encouraged his supporters to instead watch OAN or Newsmax TV, another conservative channel promoting election falsehoods.[150][151][152]

In the US, there there are a pretty broad range of media outlets on the left. On the right, things are considerably more concentrated. There’s a bunch of data out there on this, but just to dig up a quick recent Pew survey:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-political-gap-in-americans-news-sources/pj_2025-06-10_news-media-sources_0-02/

You’d think that there’d be space for a center-right TV channel to the left of Fox News.