MudMan

I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?

It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.

I haven’t faceplanted, but I have punched myself in the headset repeatedly. Turns out looking at things up close is not advisable when your face happens to have an invisible box strapped to it.

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

Hi, yes, I’m here. The user. Of both, in fact.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren’t relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the “fediverse”.

I’m not sure about the digital-only stuff, but the OP is specifically talking about yt-dlp as an alternative to ripping the BRs, and I have to agree that ripping the disks will be easier and yields better results.

Hardware availability is the trickiest part, especially for UHD, but if you have a drive that will deal with the disks you have I certainly wouldn’t bother with the stream rip.

But hey, as a fallback, it’s good to have the option.

I’m not sure what you think “our” game is.

I mean, in my game there is a functioning rule of law where separation of powers is real and universal access to the justice system is enforced regardless of income level. In that game when you set a rule that rule is applied across the board. And yeah, if the system is not playing that game you’re supposed to make it play it.

Is that the game? Because it’s a good game.

Right, but that’s my point, compute is compute is compute. There are tensor acceleration cores in commercially available hardware dating back five years. They capped things above a specific performance threshold, is my understanding, but that just means you need more of the less powerful hardware, so all you’ve done is make things more expensive/less energy-efficient, but not block any specific application. Not in cheap, portable chips, not in huge industrial data center processors.

So not particularly useful to stop cyberwarfare, not particularly useful to stop military applications. The only use I see is making commercial applications less competitive. Specifically on the training side of things.

None of that makes any sense. “Western chips” all come from Taiwan in the first place. “Western designed chips” are also in laptops and mobile phones, including tons of Chinese devices, and that’s assuming you mean to include South Korea as “Western”, which is a bit of a stretch. Those are fundamentally interchangeable with military hardware. Nobody is putting 4090s and A100s in ICBMs.

Make it make sense. What specific hardware is this stopping from getting to China and for what application?

I am very confused about this ongoing thing regarding “stifling China’s access to AI models”. Does the US government think GPUs are magic? All you need to make a ML model is some tensor math and a web crawler, maybe some human processing on the later bits. You’re not gonna stop China from making them. You’re not gonna stop college kids with gaming rigs making them.

I’m guessing the endgame here is to make it slightly more expensive to do this in China to get American companies to have slightly better versions in the market and prevent a TikTok situation, rather than any legitimate strategic goal. Right? I mean, besides commercial protectionism I don’t see how this type of language makes sense.

Ah, great, we should just let them run with it and never try, then.

I swear, defeatism gets me so bad. It may just be the most conservative power at work, along with “all politicians are the same”.

Incidentally, anybody thinking about a class action over Sony removing lifetime access to Funimation movie downloads? Because it’s the second time in a year they risk it on that one and I deeeeefinitely want to see that tested in court.

I mean, good luck getting past entertainment industry contracts.

But also… please, please, PLEASE make it so that political opinions and conspiracy theories can’t be used to fire people. I double dare the CEO of a social media network, an electric car company and an aerospace company create a labor market where you can sue for discrimination for that reason.

I mean, I only want to see it if I can reset the timeline back to this point, but still, I REALLY want to see it.

It’s not lip service if I can send messages and other people can receive them.

Again, the status quo is you can’t do that. Hell, in the spectrum of being dragged into reasonableness by the EU kicking and screaming, Meta is orders of magnitude below Apple here.

I mean, we can debate the finer points of the implementation once it’s live, but for now this is nothing but positive movement. If people got over rejecting cookies they can get over dismissing warnings regarding interoperability, and if they don’t, the same regulators have a history of re-spanking unruly malicious compliers.

But what would be the point?

I swear, people have all these weird conspiracy theories around supposed “EEE” tactics, but Whatsapp already dominates the instant messaging space. It’s pretty much a monopoly. The simplest solution to continue to dominate basically the entire market is do nothing.

Somebody explain to me how literally having the entire market to themselves in exclusive is somehow worse than any interoperability at all. You can’t tank the use rate lower than zero.

Yeah, but you do realize all that you’re describing is still more open than “this is a closed app that interops with nobody and also is permanently tied to your phone number”, right?

I mean, I don’t like the guys and I avoid their services whenever possible, but… man, as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward. I literally surfaced the idea of migrating to the WhatsApp group I thought would be most willing today and got nothing but crickets.

Well, yeah. So much of this conversation has gotten really dumb, with both advocates and detractors misrepresenting the tech and its capabilities and applying it to the wrong uses and applications as a result.

Honestly, early on I did think as a summary service for search queries it’d be more useful than it ended up being. It quickly became obvious that without the search results onscreen you basically have to fact check every piece of info you get, so it’s only really useful to find answers you already know but had forgotten or that you need a source for.

But hey, at least I noticed that it kinda isn’t before I built it as a key part of Windows. At this point if I was going to build a search app around this tech I’d use it for a short summary to replace Google’s little blurb cards and still give you the raw results immediately below. It’s only really good at parsing a wonky search prompt into a more accurate query. That’s why when I have to use one of these I go to Perplexity instead of raw ChatGPT or Bing or whatever, it’s the one that’s built the most like that, although you still end up having to argue with it when it insists on being wrong and gets sidetracked by its own mistakes.

It depends. Chatbots are terrible at broad queries or parsing very detailed information, but they’re surprisingly good with very fuzzy searches. If I want a link to a specific website I go to a search engine. If I want to ask “hey, what’s that 80s horror comedy that’s kinda like Gremlins but not Gremlins and it has one of the monsters coming out of the toilet in the poster?” I go to a chatbot.

EDIT: Heh. Just for laughs, I tried that exact query on Perplexity.ai. It got it right:

The movie you are referring to is “Ghoulies.” It is a 1984 horror comedy film that features small, impish creatures similar to those in Gremlins. One of the iconic images associated with the movie is a Ghoulie coming out of a toilet, which is also featured on the poster.

Honestly, it should be a public resource.

I mean, public libraries and archives being a mandatory requirement for copyright enforcement and publishing records is a thing, and the Wayback Machine proves it’s technologically feasible to approximate it for the Internet, so…

Well, it’s not the lawsuit that would trigger it, it’s the outcome of it. So yes.

Yes on the other things, too. I can’t imagine they would be opposed to working with alternatives to provide Wayback Machine fallbacks.

IA is quickly becoming a massive, risky single point of failure that is one bad lawsuit away from causing a major problem.

I want to hope they have an exit strategy, but I’m thinking we need to start providing alternatives. A single backup is no backup at all, and all that.

I mean, yeah, turns out that when you are in a quasi monopolistic position in many different markets and you get to decide the rules for all of your competitors you can absolutely integrate your “ecosystem” very smoothly. Go figure.

Their stubbornness on this makes the software/hardware divide the most obvious and a good place to start. Right now they’re keeping the hardware hostage to benefit first party software and exclude everyone else’s. That clearly has to change.