You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.

Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.

Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.

Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"

This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.

...or decoding...

You mean like... anyone who wants to watch Netflix or YouTube or any other streaming service's high-res content?

No, because a surgeon can tell you WHY he washes his hands and point to the historical evidence for the practice. He won't say "God tells us to wash our hands".

I wouldn't call it a GOOD solution, more a default if nobody comes up with something better.

It would have reduced it to an extent that it would be as good as stopped.

The fact that surgeons today wouldn't think of operating without washing their hands. I never said it was a quick victory.

It was my example. It came from a photograph of the worksheet posted to Reddit by the child's father, who was wondering why the answer was 'wrong'.

Surely you don't expect the 2nd graders to start on Clifford algebras any time soon. They need to learn to walk before they run. Note that by the time you're multiplying vectors and matrices the process involved is sufficiently different from multiplying real numbers that not being commutative is not going to be an issue. I recall my high school math teacher demonstrating non-commutative multiplication. I was not confused in spite of having figured out the commutative nature of simple multiplication in elementary school.

When I see things like "facial age verification", I have major concerns, whether we're talking about a site like Roblox (whatever that is — I don't know, and don't really care), social media, porn, or any other site. How are you going to do it without violating the privacy of every person who creates an account? And how are you going to verify that the person using the account is the person who created it without causing an even bigger privacy violation?

We do need some sort of age verification system, but we need it to be designed in a way that protects privacy. I have less than zero faith in any individual website to come up with such a system, and approximately zero faith in any individual government to do so. There really needs to be an international age verification working group that spends the next five years coming up with a system, then pressures everyone to implement it.

Doing it the other way around, with companies or governments shoveling bad, partial, or even dangerous solutions to the problem down everyone's throats, can only result in greater levels of push-back by the general public towards a proper scheme if someone ever creates it.

Sure, under the hood, but the end user is more concerned with the application than he is with how it got there.

The speech to text can be nice (even if my phone keeps writing "free cat" when I say FreeCAD), but it clearly has significant limitations. I still can't even guess why my phone can respond to "flashlight on" but fails at "flashlight off".

It's also amazing that it's possible to draw a metal wire thinner than a human hair and even more amazing that it's possible to drill a neat hold through it's width without breaking it, but I really don't have much use for that day to day.

As for image generation, quick, how many fingers am I holding up on my right hand? (hint: not 6).

The thing is, it wasn't lying. First there wasn't much evidence for the myocarditis, then it was confounded evidence. Did the kid get myocarditis from the vaccine itself, or was it from the beginning of a COVID infection aborted because the immune system was already actively reacting to spike protein at the time.

Of course, over-arching all of that, COVID causes myocarditis too, and often worse so it wasn't all that clear if mild myocarditis from the vaccine would even matter. Try explaining that to people ready to eat horse paste and unsure why people are laughing at Trump's suggestion to inject bleach.

Then there's a question of how much of the distortion came from scientists and how much from journalists (mis-)quoting them?

Now that the data is in, we can see that there is some possibility of mild myocarditis from the vaccine.

The thing about science is that as more data comes in, theories change and so actions suggested by those theories also change. In emergent situations such as the COVID pandemic, data and change can come fast.

Perhaps a sports analogy. After the first baseball game of the year, plenty of batters have an average of 1.000 for the year. Plenty have .000 for the year. That will change a LOT in the next day. By the end of the season, batting averages don't move that much in a single game.

Naturally vaccines increase your risk of shark attack. Sharks don't attack dead people. By keeping you alive through a disease outbreak, you are left vulnerable to shark attack later in life.

At this rate, I wonder if the only remaining solution is Darwinian (which they also don't believe in). Hopefully some of the unfortunate children of anti-vaxers will learn the truth and get their doctor to give them the shot anyway (but I'm guessing MAGA will move to make the punishment for that worse than for murder).

They were challenged by other doctors and scientists. The challengers won the day. The MAGA cultists would have been demanding a dose of horse paste before surgery and no Tylenol after.