MudMan

We do “my dick sweats”, for the same thing, which I now realize sounds super gross.

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.

What nobody is saying is that if you go into a test with a near-empty ink cartridge your hipsterism has outpaced your skill.

Refill that stuff going in or bring a second pen, you pleb.

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.

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.

If the risk is that I’ll have an upset stomach for two days like a toddler coming down from a sugar rush and my knees will also hurt for some reason, then yes, the WHO is right.

I mean… alcohol? You can already buy it easily prepared in all sorts of delicious ways.

Am I not in the spirit of the thing?

Quit drinking if you haven’t. The cost/benefit analysis on that one probably broke a few years ago and you just hadn’t noticed.

Otherwise, meh, do your own thing.

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.

Well, tough luck. Should have been better at their jobs, then. They sure make enough money to expect them to be.

It’s not just the marketing, though, it’s the non-enforcement. “Cracking down” is only a thing if you weren’t cracking down before. If you allow the practice and then you don’t, you’ve downgraded the service.

Now, if capitalism didn’t suck and technocapitalism wasn’t fundamentally broken, the way this would work is you’d pay per screen and it wouldn’t matter where or when those screens are used. After all, the service itself has costs related to buying media, storing media and sending media over the Internet. One screen is one data stream is one payment stream. Makes sense.

But that’s not the idea. That was never the idea. The idea of tech start ups is that they’ll disrupt an old established business by losing money on purpose to grow very fast to a position of quasi-monopoly, then squeeze the newly captive audience for as much as possible. That’s what Netflix was trying to do, we’re all adults here, it’s not a secret.

What I’m saying is my fuse is super short on that one and I won’t play that game for too long. Which is why I’m here instead of Reddit, in Mastodon instead of Twitter and in the process of buying a bunch of 4K Blu Rays. I’m not gonna tell people how to live their lives, but I’d argue that both Netflix and the Internet at large would suck much less if I wasn’t in a very slim minority.

No, it wasn’t. They were VERY glad to suggest that password sharing was a feature, not a bug, while they were trying to drive cable TV out of business and establish a leadership position against other streaming services. They also allow you to watch on multiple screens, download files to watch offline on the go and, crucially, actively provide discounted accounts to watch on multiple locations even after reneging on the promises they made during the user acquisition stage. Nothing they do is consistent with the service being tied to households instead of accounts except trying to charge you extra for it. Hey, I know that tech start ups will eventually try to pee on me, but don’t come here to tell me it’s raining.

So I say again, Netflix doesn’t get to arbitrarily limit tech and back out of features just because they engaged in a suicidal business model in the pursuit of endless growth, and they don’t get to redefine my social relationships for me. I am the client here, and I get to say when their offer has enshittified enough that I no longer want it.

For now, I don’t want their overpriced premium tier anymore. It’s back to UHD BR for me if I want something to look shiny. And the moment they try to enforce their dumb password sharing rule I’m out entirely. I feel zero remorse or sense that I’m taking advantage of them for this. If anything, they are the ones “breaking things”, so they have the responsibility to fix them.

Hey, I wasn’t the one who switched the system to a username and passwod authorization. My “household” isn’t defined by the physical location anymore than their account system is. Friends and family groups don’t work however Netflix wants them to work for monetization purposes. There are blood relations who don’t sleep under the same roof but hang out daily. There are friend groups that share a roof. There are couples who spend weeks at a time apart but still live together.

It’s not my fault that Netflix borked the business model and then tried to walk it back once it lured everybody else to a profit dark hole. I’m not gonna change how my social relationships work for the sake of them having a neat revenue stream with no gray areas.

So no, PW sharing is fine, period, that’s what concurrent screen limits are for. What constitutes a “household” is not for Netflix to define, and I have a social group where some expenses just float around in limbo without a clear attribution or distinction between payers and users. Welcome to existing in real life and having zero time to worry about enshittified late captialist terminally online bullshit, honestly.