I've been thinking recently about the scale at which it seems the vast vast majority of people participate in close to zero public discussion online and what a bummer it is.
Basically all discussion platforms are broken for any sort of long term meaningful discussion which I think is at least part of the problem. Even this thread and this comment just the fact that the thread is now 4 hours old the amount of views and chance of getting many responses drops precipitously. On most platforms unless you are someone with a large following you basically have to think like a marketer and post often and early on posts to stand a chance of getting a discussion going. It's always so ephemeral too. Even though posts on a platform like HN on reddit still exist and you can comment on old threads probably 99% of the activity happens in the first 6 or so hours and then it largely ends.
It makes me miss forums where at least you had long lived threads with simple time based post order and a good chance of replies. This doesn't seem to exist on only platforms now and forums have largely faded away.
The fragmentation of discussion has also messed things up. For example yesterday I was listening to a HardFork podcast episode which is a fairly popular pod, topping the charts in at least the tech category, and after listening I wanted to check for discussion around the episode and probably leave a comment or two. I assume this episode had to have gotten at least in the low tens of thousands of plays though perhaps that is way off. I went searching for discussion and basically found a largely dead subreddit for the podcast with no threads being regularly created for the episode and an empty comment section on nytimes which any site comment section is a useless place for discussion anyways. The pod is also posted on youtube which the youtube comment section had the most activity of anything I found but the youtube comment section and the way it is structured/operates is perhaps the most useless of all the platforms for trying to have any discussion. I just don't understand how if at least say ten thousand people listened to the episode surely at least 1% would be interested in discussing it and 100+ people going back and forth would be a large, active, healthy discussion somewhere.
Even threads that seem "active" on sites like HN or Reddit in the context of the actual audience sizes are shockingly small and confuse me. For example The Pitt season 2 just premiered and posted 5.4 million viewers, the subreddit post ep discussion currently has 5.3k comments which is quite high for a show. That is a joke of a percentage though, 0.1%! and even worse in the context of people that are posting probably post more than once in the thread. I understand many and even most people not wanting to post to discuss a show they just watched but how the hell is less than 1 in a thousand!
This post got long which also damages the chance of any engagement due to TLDR culture.
I like using various browser profiles to group projects or related kinds of browsing. I built a small extension called TabsIO that makes it easy to export/import tabs between different profiles or browsers and I also added statistics tracking on open windows/tabs count so you can see if you are making progress over time to cut down on open items.
Just writing off AI upscaling completely is bs. It's not some magic bullet to use on every video and there is a learning curve on how to apply but there are absolutely scenarios where you can get shockingly good results. I think a lot of people make judgements on it based on super small sample sizes.
On a separate note also not mentioned llm's are really good at generating ffmpeg commands. Just discuss with chatGPT your source file and goals for a video and you can typically oneshot a targeted command even if you aren't familiar with ffmpeg cli.
AI upscaling can also be done during playback, to the benefit of lower file sizes, but at the cost of higher processor utilisation. So it is a trade-off.
I don't understand why it feels like out of the blue there is suddenly a rampant and somehow worldwide effort left and right to increase censorship, age verification, etc on the internet. Also I don't get why it seems like so few people care in comparison to years ago during the whole SOPA/PIPA thing where there seemed to be widespread and significant vocal opposition.
On the age verification thing the only reasonable proposition i've heard would be a feature that allows parents to set some setting that gives a device users age or age range for mobiles and tablets. I think this covers a reasonable percentage of use cases if your goal is actually protecting kids and not just using that as deceptive cover to sneak in widespread surveillance laws. A simple setting that says for example this ipad user is 10-13yrs is privacy preserving enough and would not negatively impact adults and because it would be coming from the device itself would actually be harder to get around vs VPN's or spoofing IDs, etc.
The idea of trying to address all devices in all scenarios is absolutely preposterous in my opinion.
1. easy wins for politicians in conservative areas of "won't somebody think of the children?!?!" so they can look like they're doing stuff to stick it to big tech while appealing to their voters' sensibilities
2. wanting to de-anonymize the internet as much as possible in the name of CSAM and anti-terrorism but is actually about wanting unchecked surveillance. the same reason we have to bang the drum against anti-encryption laws that they try to pass every several years
The trick here is buying used. Especially for something like the m1 series there is tremendous value to be had on high memory models where the memory hasn't changed significantly over generations compared the cpus and even m1's are quite competent for many workloads. Got a m1 max 64gb ram recently for I think $1400.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt to have rarer and more thoughtful releases.
Or we end up with this modern disease where the OS wants to update itself, the browser needs to update itself, Acrobat wants to update itself, etc, etc, all the time.
It certainly feels like this should fall somewhere along a spectrum of antitrust behavior. It's astounding the degree to which they are able to operate as if money isn't real. Strange circular deals and infinite VC money really fuck with markets and these past few years we've been venturing down a particularly concerning branch of capitalism.
I was curious with this spike and while the amazon listing for 2x48GB DDR5 that I bought a year or so ago has indeed almost tripled the ebay resale value for similar packages sold recently is all over the map with some close to what I originally paid and some as much as double but probably on average 30-50% increase which is nowhere near the amazon listing.
I wonder if it would be in the governments interest to heavily subsidize streaming services. Considering virtually everything seems to be getting hopelessly more expensive and no real progress on economic inequality seems likely outside a slim AI path - dollar for dollar free or cheap entertainment provides a lot of utility and can help keep the poor masses complacent.
$30 a month makes a hell of a lot more of a dent in entertainment affordability than it does in healthcare. No clue on how accurate these estimates are but it seems like the combined budget of most shows and movies in a given year is somewhere around the 40-50 Billion range which in the context of all the other shit in the federal budget is kind of nothing.
Last thing I want is more billionaire handouts, with all due respect. As much as the rising costs suck, it is still better than the cable lock-in contracts and bundling deals. Netflix didn't lead to the cost of living crisis we arrived in today.
A single machine for personal inference on models of this size isn't going to idle at some point so high that electricity becomes a problem and for personal use it's not like it would be under load often and if for some reason you are able to keep it under heavy load presumably it's doing something valuable enough to easily justify the electricity.
Basically all discussion platforms are broken for any sort of long term meaningful discussion which I think is at least part of the problem. Even this thread and this comment just the fact that the thread is now 4 hours old the amount of views and chance of getting many responses drops precipitously. On most platforms unless you are someone with a large following you basically have to think like a marketer and post often and early on posts to stand a chance of getting a discussion going. It's always so ephemeral too. Even though posts on a platform like HN on reddit still exist and you can comment on old threads probably 99% of the activity happens in the first 6 or so hours and then it largely ends.
It makes me miss forums where at least you had long lived threads with simple time based post order and a good chance of replies. This doesn't seem to exist on only platforms now and forums have largely faded away.
The fragmentation of discussion has also messed things up. For example yesterday I was listening to a HardFork podcast episode which is a fairly popular pod, topping the charts in at least the tech category, and after listening I wanted to check for discussion around the episode and probably leave a comment or two. I assume this episode had to have gotten at least in the low tens of thousands of plays though perhaps that is way off. I went searching for discussion and basically found a largely dead subreddit for the podcast with no threads being regularly created for the episode and an empty comment section on nytimes which any site comment section is a useless place for discussion anyways. The pod is also posted on youtube which the youtube comment section had the most activity of anything I found but the youtube comment section and the way it is structured/operates is perhaps the most useless of all the platforms for trying to have any discussion. I just don't understand how if at least say ten thousand people listened to the episode surely at least 1% would be interested in discussing it and 100+ people going back and forth would be a large, active, healthy discussion somewhere.
Even threads that seem "active" on sites like HN or Reddit in the context of the actual audience sizes are shockingly small and confuse me. For example The Pitt season 2 just premiered and posted 5.4 million viewers, the subreddit post ep discussion currently has 5.3k comments which is quite high for a show. That is a joke of a percentage though, 0.1%! and even worse in the context of people that are posting probably post more than once in the thread. I understand many and even most people not wanting to post to discuss a show they just watched but how the hell is less than 1 in a thousand!
This post got long which also damages the chance of any engagement due to TLDR culture.