chisel
@chisel@piefed.social
- Comment on In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud 1 week ago:
They don’t care about quality, they care about cutting costs and keeping subscribers. That’s why they employ experts and why some even invent their own codecs and custom hardware to go with it.
- Comment on In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud 1 week ago:
Lmao, I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding, both in tuning and development. They have already poured through maximized quality vs cost. Tuning your encoder to allow for more bits in some scenes by definition ups the average bitrate of the file, unless you’re also taking bits away from other scenes. Streaming services have already found a balance of video quality vs storage/bandwith costs that they are willing to accept, which tends to be around 15mbps for 4k. 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.
Calibrating your tv, while a great idea, can only do so much vs low-bitrate encodings and the fake HDR services build in solely to trigger the HDR popup on your tv and trick it into upping the brightness rather than to actuality improve the color accuracy/vibrancy.
They don’t really care about the quality, they care that subscribers will keep their subscriptions. They go as low quality as possible to cut costs while retaining subs.
Blu-rays don’t have this same issue because there are no storage or bandwith costs to the provider, and people buying blu-rays are typically more informed, have higher quality equipment, and care more about image quality than your typical streaming subscriber.
- Comment on Claude Desktop Extensions 0-Click RCE Vulnerability Exposes 10,000+ Users to Remote Attacks 2 weeks ago:
Oh, for sure, the marketing is terrible and makes this into a bigger issue by making people over confident. I wouldn’t say the lack of sandboxing is a major problem on its own, though. If you want an automated agent that does everything, it’s going to need permissions to do everything. Though they should absolutely have configurable guardrails that are restrictive by default. I doubt they bothered with that.
The idea is sound, but the tech isn’t there yet. The real problem is that the marketing pretends that LLMs are ready for this. Maybe Anthropic shouldn’t have released it at all, but at this point AI companies subsist on releasing half-baked products with thrice-baked promises so at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI, in an attempt to remain relevant, tomorrow releases an automated identity theft bot to help you file your taxes incorrectly.
- Comment on Claude Desktop Extensions 0-Click RCE Vulnerability Exposes 10,000+ Users to Remote Attacks 2 weeks ago:
Bad, sure, but also a well-known fundamental issue with basically all agentic LLMs, to the point where sounding the alarm as much as this seems silly. If you give an LLM any access to your machine, it might be tricked into taking malicious actions. The same can be said to real humans. Though they are better than LLMs right now, humans are the #1 security vulnerability in any system.
LLMs can get around this by requiring explicit permission before being able to take certain actions, but the more it asks for permission, the more the user has to just sit there and approve stuff, defeating the purpose of an autonomous agent in the first place.
To be clear, it’s not good, and anyone running an agent with a high level of access with no oversite in a non-sandboxed environment today is a fool. But this article is written like they found an 11/10 severity CVE in the linux kernal when really this is a well-known fundamental thing that can happen if you’re an idiot and misusing LLMs to a wild degree. LLMs have plenty of legitimate issues to trash on. This isn’t one of them.
- Comment on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” 3 weeks ago:
That’s partly the point. Use words that accurately describe your evil group to incorrectly describe other groups and all of a sudden the words lose meaning and nobody can call you that anymore. Hooray!
- Comment on Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025 1 month ago:
Too late, I already had the first interdimensional handshake.
- Comment on Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025 1 month ago:
Is a line really the shortest distance between two points if I can fold the paper and punch a pencil through it?
- Comment on Grippy handles too. Luxury. 1 month ago:
It grows next to shrew bars and microbreweries
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 1 month ago:
My dog drinks just fine from the creek on the farm he ran off to when I was 7.
- Comment on Printed this extra long cat snake on my ender3v3 (this thing is longer than my 10yo!). The print came great for the most part. What do you think happened at this one spot? Bed adhesion issue? 2 months ago:
Anywhere from 5 to 7 bananas. Or about 0.01296 football fields.
- Comment on This would be terrible for my ad revenue 2 months ago:
Engagement bait
- Comment on snail lyfe 4 months ago:
Huh, TIL
https://www.kqed.org/science/1446777/everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-about-snail-sex
When snails copulate, two penises enter two vaginal tracts. Both snails in a pairing transfer sperm, but whichever snail got in the best shot with the dart has a better chance of ultimately fertilizing eggs.
First they stab eachother. The better the stab, the more effective the stabber’s sperm will be. Then they exchange fluids. Then they settle down, buy a minivan, and waste away in an office until they die.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
- Comment on How Do The Normal People Survive? 4 months ago:
How do nornal people survive? I have the answers!
Power bank stopped charging? Throw it out and buy a newer better one for $15.
Face seal aging? Buy a new one for $25.
Garage door opener not pairing to your fob? Play around with it a little and if that doesn’t work, contact support and make it their problem.
I’d argue it’s faster, cheaper, and easier to solve all of those issues the “normie” way. Maybe with the exception of the garage door. The equipment to do this costs, in some cases, a lot of money and even enthusiasts are unlikely to have the spare parts necessary to do a lot of this stuff just laying around.
Like, in the battery example, the author replaces the actual battery part and just keeps the shell. It’s really not that different from just buying a new one if you’re replacing basically the only part of the gadget. And how many people have a working (I’m guessing) 10k mAh battery just lying around that isn’t already in a powerbank?
Tinkering and fixing stuff like this is a really great hobby. It’s fun, you get to learn new things, play with cool tools, and be less wasteful. However, let’s not pretend like it’s necessary for survival or even the optimal way to handle most situations.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
Using 7 chars to represent 8. Now that’s efficiency!
- Comment on 4 months ago:
Do you, though? Pi starts 3.141592, but 7/22 starts 3.142857, already wrong by the 4th digit.
- Comment on Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets 4 months ago:
About time!
- Comment on YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump case go away 4 months ago:
That’s not the bet. It’s a frivolous lawsuit with no chance at succeeding.
They’re either betting that defending it would cost more than $25M, that a bribe will bring them favor, or, more likely, accepting that the cost of doing business in Mein Dönald’s America is to periodically pay large baseless “fines” at the whim of a dementia patient.
- Comment on Regulating AI hastens the Antichrist, says Palantir’s Peter Thiel 4 months ago:
Are we talking about Thiel or Elon?
- Comment on Immich mobile app sync V2 5 months ago:
If you’re fine with self hosting, you can just self host it and backup your local drives to a remote location. That’s what I do.
For backup software, I use Duplicacy. But Veeam, Borg, etc.. would work just fine. For images, since they’re just static files and you don’t really need a version history, you could get away with a scheduled rsync job. Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.
For remote storage, I’d first consider a Hetzner storage box since they are flat-rate pricing and pretty dang cheap at $13/mo for 5TB. You might also consider StorJ, B2, S3, etc… I’d just stay away from any lesser known ultra-cheap storage providers.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 5 months ago:
I hate this move and love my sideloaded apps. However, there are plenty of self hosted apps on the play store. It’s just putting in a unique address at setup, not compiling a whole unique app for each server.
- Comment on Autism has been announced! 5 months ago:
Wtf are you talking about? People buy Tylenol all the time.
- Comment on 9 months after its 1.0 launch flopped, an indie dev just learned that Steam never emailed the 130,000 people who wishlisted its game 5 months ago:
No, you’re wrong. Every wishlist is a guaranteed sale on launch day. When people see that number tick from 0.5937.5 to 1.0, they can’t help themselves. The trick is, they have to see it on launch day in an automated email. Otherwise the sale is lost for good. Literally every true gamer knows this.
- Comment on US | Trump to impose $100,000 fee per year for H-1B visas, in likely blow to tech 5 months ago:
They already can, but a local and well trained/vetted workforce has benefits that are worth the extra cost.
- Comment on Samsung brings ads to US fridges 5 months ago:
And Samsung just got rid of ads in their apps, like Samsung Health, a few years ago. One step forward, two sprints back.
