cogman

@cogman@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, can we stop calling everything with a computer “AI”? Order management systems have been a thing long before LLMs were invented (I’ve worked on one). This was perhaps one of the first applications of computing. Humans hand writing an order form in a major grocery store hasn’t been a thing since like the 80s.

  Also, I’m like 80% sure this article was barfed out by an LLM. The em-dashes be everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Trek: Starfleet Academy actor Kareem Diané decides to do their AMA on Lemmy!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s possible, you copy the post id and put a number in front of it, like the following:

  #43294288@startrek.website

  However, it doesn’t autoformat to a link (unfortunately). To do that you need to do regular links. IE: [link](#43294288@startrek.website) which produces this link

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Regardless, I’d bet anything that you are not able to reencode blurays to 15mbps without substantial quality loss.

  It’s crazy how confident you are about something you’ve never done.

  Yes, I’ve gotten transparent encodes with 15mbps. Lots of people have.

  If you don’t believe me, go to the AV1 subreddit and ask “can you get a transparent encode with only 15mbps”. Or just go read up on svt-av1 and av1an and do it yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Look, this is just an incorrect oversimplification of the problem. It’s popular on the internet but it’s just factually incorrect.

  Here’s a thread discussing the exact problem I’m describing

  www.reddit.com/r/AV1/…/av1_in_dark_scenes/

  The issue at play for streaming services is they have a general pipeline for encoding. I mean, it could be described as cheaping out because they don’t have enough QA spot checking and special purposing encodes to make sure the quality isn’t trash. But it’s really not strictly a “not enough bits” problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding

  They don’t really care about the quality

  It’s funny that you are trying to make both these points at the same time.

  You don’t hire world class experts if you don’t care about quality.

  I have a hobby of doing re-encoding blurays to lower bitrates. And one thing that’s pretty obvious is the world class experts who wrote the encoders in the first place have them overly tuned to omit data from dark areas of a scene to avoid wasting bits in that location. This is true of H265, VP9, and AV1. You have to specifically tune those encoders to push the encoder to spend more of it’s bits on the dark area or you have to up the bitrate to absurd levels.

  Where these encoders spend the bitrate in dark scenes is on any areas of light within the scene. That works great if you are looking at something like a tree with a lot of dark patches, but it really messes with a single light person with darkness everywhere. It just so happens that it’s really easy to dump 2mbps on a torch in a hall and leave just 0.1mbps on the rest of the scene.

  That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.

  I can tell you that this is simply false. And it’s the same psuedo-scientific logic that someone trying to sell gold plated cables and FLAC encodings pushes.

  Look, beyond just the darkness tuning problem that streaming services have, the other problem they have is a QOS. The way content is encoded for streaming just isn’t ideal. When you say “they have to hit 14mpbs” the fact is that they are forcing themselves to do 14mbps throughout the entire video. The reason they do this is because they want to limit buffering as much as possible. It’s a lot better experience to lower your resolution because you are constantly buffering. But that action makes it really hard to do good video optimizations on the encoder. Ever second of the video they are burning 14mb whether they need those 14mb or not. The way that’d deliver less data would be if they only averaged 14mbps rather than forcing it throughout. Allowing for 40mbps bursts when needed but then pushing everything else out at 1mbps saves on bandwidth. However, the end user doesn’t know that the reason they just started buffering is because a high motion action scene is coming up (and netflix doesn’t want to buffer for more than a few minutes).

  The other point I’d make is that streaming companies simply have a pipeline that they shove all video through. And, because it’s so generalized, these sorts of tradeoffs which make stuff look like a blocky mess happen. Sometimes that blocky mess is present in the source material (The streaming services aren’t ripping the blurays themselves, they get it from the content providers who aren’t necessarily sending in raws).

  I say all this because you can absolutely get 4k and 1080p looking good at sub-bluray rates. I have a library filled with these re-encodes that look great because of my experience here. A decent amount of HD media can be encoded at 1 or 2mbps and look great. But you have to make tradeoffs that streaming companies won’t make.

  For the record, the way I do my encoding is a scene by scene encode using VMAF to adjust the quality rate with some custom software I built to do just that. I target a 95% VMAF which ends up looking just fantastic across media.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Blocky artifacts typically appear in low light situations. There will be situations where it might just be blocky due to not having enough bits (high motion scenes) but there are plenty of cases where low light tuning is where you’d end up noticing the blockyness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People don’t like hearing this, but streaming services tune their codecs to properly calibrated TVs. Very few people have properly calibrated TVs. In particular, people really like to up the brightness and contrast.

  A lot of scenes that look like mud are that way because you really aren’t supposed to be able distinguish between those levels of blackness.

  That said, streaming services should have seen the 1000 comments like the ones here and adjusted already. You don’t need bluray level of bits to make things look better in those dark scenes, you need to tune your encoder to allow it to throw more bits into the void.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Noooooo⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had that recently. The call and meeting “here’s x, can you do x?” Me: “yes”.

  Was a bit crazy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ms Rachel forced to hire security over Zionist threats⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Such hateful words have never been seen on the Internet

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ms Rachel forced to hire security over Zionist threats⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Israel was a Nazi concept. Hitler wasn’t right. The idea of “this land should be for the X” is a core part of Nazi ideology.

  Basically everywhere the British tried to divide things up on ethnic, religious, or cultural lines has ended in a perpetual shitshow. India and Pakistan is another example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Definitely spongeworthy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes.

  my.clevelandclinic.org/…/24324-birth-control-spon…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, the band is already littered with 6g devices. It’d be a stupid purchase.

  But also, 6GHz is somewhat of a useless band for carriers. It’s high enough frequency that it’ll get absorbed by most things yet low enough frequency that it’ll struggle to really carry a whole lot of data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Every CEO thinks like this. CEOs are so incredibly bullish on AI BECAUSE they want to replace people and not tasks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When old people tell you about "the good old days" and how great things used to be⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Truly some excellent adventures were had in those boxes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This queue for the new swasticar⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You kidding? This is probably the best use of cops. Instead of harassing minorities they’ve created a human shield that will scare off people from purchasing Nazi mobiles.

  If tax money is going to cops, they might as well be doing the job of a protest but more effectively.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fucking leeches⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  if money had an expiration date.

  That’d just lead into investment into non-monetary things. For example, buying precious metals or bonds or stocks or property and selling them as needed.

  To actually fix problems with wealth disparity, you need a wealth or property tax.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fucking leeches⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is mythical thinking. Frankly, there’s just not that many products that need inventing, particularly that need a factory. We are past the era where a revolutionary bread slicer will change society. Most of the actual advancements we are seeing come from grants into general scientific research. Not from some lone Einstein with a vision.

  What actually is happening is some of these discoveries are very good and they ultimately get scooped up and patented by some corporate entity that thought the research was marketable.

  Recognizing that reality, that innovation basically never comes from the founders of a company, should really lead you to understand what’s broken about the US economy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, not possible.

  The closet we’ve seen are the zodiac killer’s scribbles and they lasted as long as they did because he made a mistake (and frankly because no security researcher was really trying).

  Modern cryptography works because it shuffles data around so much that it appears random. There’s simply no way to do those sorts of operations with just pen and paper.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hate your job? how about you die and still have to do it⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it is more obvious in the book compared to the film.

  The film was loosely based on the book and was explicitly written as a critique on fascism and the book. Verhoeven and Neumeier have said as much.

  But also, I don’t think you know what fascism is. There’s always people in a fascist state that have a good quality of life. The question is what happens to people that don’t fit in the state mold? What happens to enemies of the state? Who gets classified as an enemy of the state? Who holds power or can hold power in the state? The fact that to be a citizen you’d have to start by joining the state party is de-facto a fascist state.

  In the film, the enemies were the Arachnids. War started because of the colonization of arachnid territories and extermination was the next order of business. Even though Arachnids are depicted as being thinking and intelligent beings. That was the point of the final scene “It’s afraid!”. Rather than try to understand or communicate with the alien/foreigner/etc, the government prioritized extermination and learning to make it fear them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hate your job? how about you die and still have to do it⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Robocop is a scathing critique on capitalism. What’s nuts is O doing think everyone gets that. It’s literally the underlying theme of the movie.

  Same thing happens with starship troopers. People miss the fact it’s a critique of fascism and colonialism even though the movie ends with Nazi uniforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately, the web is pretty much captured by google/apple at this point. I don’t think it’ll be long before gecko and spidermonkey die. When that happens, we are looking at a web that is basically over-fitted for webkit and v8. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what lead us to the bad old days of internet explorer (Ironically now just a webkit skin).