Anything that makes companies lose the slightest bit of control they want to make illegal. If they can’t endlessly milk you for money it’s a problem.

If Minecraft came out today it would be a subscription service or at the very least would have season packs and cosmetics.

I’m sorry, but it’s not my job to clean up a billionaire’s rotting platform.

X and Facebook profit from petty conflict, spread misinformation for clicks and their leaders are horrible people. Those platforms can die for all I care. The less people are on there the better.

If people want to talk to me, they can and do contact me directly.

I think I’ll pass. Left Facebook over 5 years ago and I haven’t used it in 10.

Another minor point of contention: Lamborghini’s are at best 4-5 times faster than a shitbox car. A single-billionaire earns 20 000 times more than the average person. The scales are all out of wack.

A closer comparison would be the difference between a private jet and a person walking. Even that would only be a 200x difference. A snail and private jet is much closer to that 20 000x difference.

It’s so absurd a difference in scale that the comparison is hard for people to imagine.

A world where the difference between the average person and the richest people is only as large as a shitbox and a Lamborghini’s speed would be actually be a pretty palatable society to live in.

Presumably this is satire, as these are clearly not equivalent statements.

We don’t share limited horsepower, but we do share limited wealth, and it can be redistributed.

This anaology also implies there is an essentialism to people’s financial situations. That rich and poor people are inherently different. In reality rich people have been allowed to be rich by current societal structures.

Looks like I have over-analyzed the meme. If you are a troll, you’ve got me.

It’s pretty obvious they are asking if the UK is next to block VPNs.

That said, I will agree that there is a second layer meaning. “These are the sorts of governments you will be aligning with following this policy”.

The UK is/was a colonial power. Usually those oppress people outside the country, but keep the people within relatively happy. Rights for the internal group but not external ones. A form of profiteering and oppression.

By comparison, most of the countries listed here crack down regularly on the rights of people within their country, and this is the direction the UK goes in when they ban protests and privacy.

Oppression is oppression, and oppression is bad.

To avoid you all a trip to reddit:

You’re right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.

Vincent Lapierre’s channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.

Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn’t have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that’s on us.

We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn’t. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator’s views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.

But that distinction doesn’t excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn’t meet it this time. We’re now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance.

Yeah as a result of this post I decided to look into AV1 grain synthesis again. That’s the only way I can see that AV1 can meaningfully “improve” over h265 right now for noisy content like movies, which is what enthusiasts care about.

Grain synthesis is where you analyze noise on the original file, denoise the video stream and reapply artificial noise of a similar style as the original at decode time.

It relies on a lot of assumptions:

• The denoise doesn’t kill your quality
• The grain synthesis looks convincingly like real film grain.
• decoding devices will support rendering the grain

From a short experiment, I found that VLC was able to render the synthetic grain, but MPV(.net) did not out of the box. I had to play around with gpu rendering modes to get it to work.

As for transcoding, it’s unclear what happens to the synthetic grain, whether it is burnt in or simply ignored. At least one or two people have reported it will just be ignored and you’ll get a weirdly smooth movie.

Typical end users do not. Companies do because it will save them money.

Enthusiasts will care because it could save them storage space for equivalent quality, though if the cost of encoding is so high then just in terms of energy costs you may save money just going for a cheaper codec and upgrading storage with the saved money.

I guess that means people can go and run the reference code and start comparing the results for real now.

Hopefully an adaptation will get added to FFMPEG and Handbrake so we can have a play with it too.

❤️Columbo my love❤️

I don’t know what you were expecting.

You more or less have to have an account to use a paid feature. Especially for a free trial.

It’s only Mulvad (which is apparently what Firefox uses under the hood) who doesn’t use an email address as an identifier.

I’ve never heard of this guy. This the only thing I could find that seemed to give context here.

During the race, far-right accounts claiming to be Stancil supporters harassed his opponents, who obliquely criticized his use of social media.

I use VBR and adjust the quality slider until I cannot see artifacts. I don’t do anything particularly special and maybe there’s more that could be done.

I once heard of an approach where you remove all grain and reapply it live to reduce the bitrate. That sounds interesting but denoising usually results in quality loss and it will likely look pretty artificial. My tooling also does not support it, so I’ve not bothered.

If someone can recommend me a good encoder or tool I can try that is better than whatever comes with handbrake I’m happy to give it a go.

Having tried AV1, I found that it was worse than h265 for what I use it for: high quality movie encodes.

It doesn’t preserve grain well, and if struggles with maintaining quality in low light scenes.

On top of all of this it tends to be more CPU intensive than h265.

For this testing, I used Handbrakes CPU encoder.

I realise that this is maybe not what AV1 is intended for. It’s probably best suited to making low bitrate streams more tolerable. Maybe AV2 will be better 🤷

Columbo my love

ACAB should always come with a single exception: Columbo.

A man of the people, who only puts rich assholes behind bars.

The full translation of the clip of Gaël Duval provided by GrapheneOS:

There’s the attack surface, on that front we’re not security specialists here, so I couldn’t answer you precisely, but from the discussions I’ve had, it seems that everything we do reduces attack surface.

However, we don’t have a “hardened security” approach, we aren’t developing a phone for pedo(censored) so they can evade justice. So there aren’t difficult things to check if the memory is corrupted, really hardened security stuff that could clearly be useful for executives, in the secret service, or whatever.

That’s not our goal, our goal is to start from an observation: today our personal data is constantly being plundered and that wouldn’t be legal in real life with the mail or the telephone, we want to change that. So we are making you a product that changes that by default for anyone.

As a french speaker, I can attest that the translation is fairly accurate.

While I don’t agree with the characterisation Gaël Duval makes here, I believe the statement from GrapheneOS here:

Duval and his organizations have consistently taken a stance against protecting users from exploits. In this video, he once again claims protecting against exploits is for only useful pedophiles and spies.

Is a bit disingenuous. It sounds like they do make some efforts to secure their device, but it’s not their main focus. Theirs is to improve privacy first and foremost.

I would take anything GrapheneOS devs says with a grain of salt, as we all know that they have quite an adversarial relationship with… well… everyone. But especially other OS makers.

I was trying to figure out why people still use Axios, when the built-in fetch works just fine. Is it because people are still sending XML requests?

Look, from the little I know about the Iran government I do not like them much.

But this is really funny.

I agree it would be good to have third party integrity checks to not require Google Services etc. as part of the chain.

In GrapheneOS, many Google Play integrity check pass, but payments still do not work. You are notified when an app uses the integrity API, but probably only because they have spent a bunch of work sandboxing Play Services. This is what you see when you look at those details:

I guess the obvious problem is that so many apps rely on Google Services, such as for payments, opening the store, checking for integrity etc. On stock android, you can’t pick and choose these services separately or use third party ones, unlike using a third party keyboard, for example. Everything is one big proprietary, data guzzling lump.