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.
I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.
Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.
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.
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.
In fairness, the headlines written around this were generally atrocious, save a few (shout out to IGN and the original reporter, which may or may not have been techradar). Sure, in most of those you could read a more complete quote inside, but… staying at the headline isn’t just a gamer thing. Clickbait is dangerous for a reason.
And also in fairness, the point he’s making is still not great. I mean, he’s the guy in charge of their subscription service, so I wouldn’t expect him to be too negative on the idea, but he’s still saying that it’s a future that will come. Not that all models will coexist, but that a Netflix future for gaming is coming.
But yeah, gamers can be hostile without justification and often default to treating every relationship with the people making the games as an antagonistic or competitive one, which is a bummer. In that context, letting this guy talk was clearly a mistake.
Oh, it makes sense. I think there’s a place for subscription services, absolutely.
I don’t think a transition to subscription as the default model for gaming makes sense, though. Which was the point of the question and the implicit goal in the answer. And even if it did make practical sense (if people “got used to it”) it’d be bad for the art form and the industry on the aggregate.
Alright, I was only gently pointing it out because what he actually said is still a pretty bad take, but at this point it’s just annoying.
No, he didn’t say that.
He said that gaming subscriptions won’t take off UNTIL gamers get used to not owning their games. Wihch… yeah, it checks out.
The all-subscription future already sucks, can we at least limit our outrage to the actual problem? I swear, I have no idea why gaming industry people ever talk to anybody. Nothing good ever comes of it.
So far I don’t know of any services that will just hand you a digital file of a movie outside of physical media.
I say that’s a damn fine business opportunity, because I’d be all over it, but hey.
This basically, which at that point rolls all the way back around to piracy, so hey, if you find an easier way to access a comparable file maybe it’s all shades of grey anyway.
If they have access to remove the media from your library on their end, then it’s a license and not a purchase.
That doesn’t mean they don’t owe you access to it, though. The fact that there isn’t a word for “I’ve acquired perpetual access even if I can’t back up the file itself” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the right to continue to access the media. Or to demand that right to be upheld in court, for that matter.
I mean, you can “buy” stuff in Amazon Prime Video off service. Unlike Netflix or other platforms, they will let you “buy or rent” streaming movies, which is the same as finding the movie on the Amazon storefront and buying the digital copy instead of a physical copy.
Now, does that mean they won’t yank it? Not really. A digital license is a license, not a purchase. Is the word “buy” or “own” inaccurate? I’m hoping not, because like the Sony thing showed, platforms are desperate to not have the courts improvise what rights they owe the buyers on digital purchases.
I’m still buying my movies in 4K BluRay, though. And working on ripping all of them for streaming at home, now that I finally have the space.
No, hey, let me be clear, I don’t think you’re actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.
What I do say is that the notion that “it’s not free, it all comes from taxes” is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn’t the same as paying for a service, and public services aren’t “services you pay with your taxes”, they’re… well, public services.
And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it’s a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you’re definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that’s not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that’s not the same thing.
So hey, I get it, you don’t ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you’re still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You’re right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you’re willing to explore.
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.