Gemini is one of if not the top model, but I intentionally avoid using it as the other models are within a few percent as good as it, and I'm not at all eager to feed the google machine this time around. Now that google search is irrelevant I have no incentive to "help" google along. Goodbye and good riddance.
Video games are on average horrible for training fine motor control; they are good for fast twitch hand eye coordination, within a very small envelope, and that's about it.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).
That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.
That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.
Yaz
Look — I’m a developer. I get it. I’m personally all for having organizations do more to support the OSS they rely on. But the people in the C-suite are more worried about organizational reputation and losing money to lawsuits. If a piece of software they rely on has a known critical CVE that allows for remote code execution and someone breaks in and steals customer data — that software either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be scrapped. Those are the choices. Our customers in the EU are allowed to request SBOMs of everything we use and pass it through their own security validation software — and if they find sev critical CVEs in software we’re using there is going to be hell to pay. And the people in the C-suite can’t abide that level of risk.
Most software development companies (outside some of the biggest ones) don’t really have the kind of expertise in house to supply patches to something as complex as ffmpeg. But a company like Google has the staff with sufficient experience in this area that they could fork the project, fix the issues, and redistribute it as their own solution to the problem — and now Google is driving ffmpeg development. Organizations that need a security-guaranteed version will simply switch to Google’s version, which will likely slowly become incompatible with the original. They’ve done it before — Chrome was Google’s fork of WebKit, huge swaths of users flocked to Chrome, and now Google has over the years made enough changes that their patches often aren’t compatible with WebKit (and, of course, WebKit itself did similar when they forked KHTML).
Now forking like this is great for the community, but it can be tough on individual developers who see their work co-opted and then sidelined by massive corporations. And that’s really why the ffmpeg developers need to be very careful about ignoring CVEs like this. They do so at their own peril, as anyone can fork their code, fix the issues, and slowly make it incompatible with the original. And a big enough organization can ensure they’re fork becomes the new standard, leaving the original developers out in the cold.
Yaz
Thanks for being the token doomer in the comments section, somebody had to do it.
Yeah, no doubt. But for all the good they do me, right?
There are no good android tablets. As an android user I have an iPad for tablet-y tasks, it doesn't get used much, but the iPad is the superior tablet for the average or power user android user. If there was a better option out there, I'd use it.
The fact that the iPad finally uses the USB-C standard has been really helpful, when my wife's iphone finally dropped the "lightning" connector we've been able to drop the number of charging cables in the house/car to 1, and drastically simplifies travel logistics.
I use Bing, and I get Microsoft Rewards points for that. Each month, the points I earn are automatically donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. Just sayin'.
Welllll, a bunch of countries use VAT, where you pay whatever is on the label. In the US, what you pay for a product will depend on where you buy it, despite it having the same price on the tag..
"Use" is relative, unless you mean "figure out how to cancel it."
I don't know. From what I can tell, Tizen seems OK. I just don't know how much "software" you really need in a television.
Hell, I don't like it now!
The other line moves faster.
