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Comment Re:Good products (Score 1) 88

Netflix and YouTube both use AV1, which is royalty free.

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.

Comment Re:Shit tier clickbait that answers in the end (Score 3, Insightful) 88

Smart. Instead of charging each customer an additional $0.04 per unit, or even eating those costs ($600k, in other word chump change), they use it as an excuse to upsell their product line.

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.

Comment Re:More IBM vaporware (Score 2) 17

OS/2 had no security features needed for multiuser support. It might as well have been classic MacOS. Citrix had a multiuser version of OS/2 with security tacked on, but it wasn't a realistic solution and was never popular. Building an OS without security was the moronic decision that killed it. Plus IBM never did anything meaningful to promote it so nobody cared. That it was used anywhere (especially in ATMs) was a horrible decision itself because of the lack of security features and has created untold woes. Maybe nobody ever got fired because they bought IBM, but they should have.

Comment to be clear (Score -1, Flamebait) 180

I think homeschooling is generally a bad idea; what you learn from school is imo only about 1/3 from books, it's at least half about socialization and how to get along with your fellow humans in the myriad of contexts of human interactions: friendships, fights, love, hate, power relationships to authority, conformance (or non-), etc.

NONE of that extra stuff is really available for homeschoolies, aside from pre-programmed 'playdates' or whatever is the equivalent at older ages which help but are insufficient: part of the lesson IS the spontaneity, unplanned context of humans in groups.

THAT SAID, at least in the US schools are deeply fucked up.
They throw more money at each student than anywhere else in the world, and get worse results than most of their industrialized peers.
There is little to no ability to discipline students. (St Paul public schools for example were unhappy with the higher rates of punishment for black students, their answer was to change the rules so black students were not punished as much for the same penalties as white studients....I shit you not: https://www.apmreports.org/sto...)
Seattle schools abandoned math standards as "racist". (https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/wfddoi/seattle_schools_teach_students_that_math_is/)
They are ideologically captured, with Teachers generally being the reliably highest % donors to Democrat candidates for decades. Moreover, the 'crazy years' that we're only just emerging from seem to have enabled the most radical teachers to believe they could bukkake their radical (eg trans & other entirely inappropriate) agendas all over the kids down to the kindegarten level without consequence, and largely they're right.

I think homeschooling is bad, but until schools stop abandoning actual education in favor of being bastions of leftist indoctrination, I fully see why parents will make such a choice.

My kids are in their 30s, thank god, because I honestly can't tell you what my reaction would be if I heard some teacher had the audacity to tell me to my face the words of their union leader: "The children are always ours. Every single one of them. All over the globe." and later "Yes, we do [think your children are our children]." (https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1937316711159443658)
I fear how I would react.

Comment Re: Good products (Score 3, Insightful) 88

It is neither right or wrong

It's wrong. The processor has a feature. People will reasonably assume they can use that feature. Then they find out it's disabled.

assuming the features or lack thereof is declared upfront.

If that declaration is not in the largest font size used in the materials then it's hidden.

Comment Obvious question: How? (Score 1) 42

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.

Comment Re:Sad (Score 1, Flamebait) 292

So I'm all for evidence-based medicine as a starting point, but when you realize it isn't behaving normally, you should adjust accordingly.

The thing about adopting evidence-based policy is that you also need to review and if necessary change policy when more evidence becomes available. The kind of situation you're describing would surely qualify.

They did review and change the policy. Just too late to do any good. The point is that evidence-based medicine has to be treated as a starting point for diagnosis and treatment decisions, not a rigid decision tree.

Of course, none of that makes the CDC's new claims that "vaccines don't cause autism" isn't an evidence-based statement any less absurd. You can't ever realistically prove definitively that X cannot cause Y, because that would require knowing that there exists no combination of recognizable human genetics in which X would cause Y. Evidence-based medicine would mean assuming that X cannot cause Y until evidence exists to prove that it does or can, which has not happened.

What they're doing is rejecting evidence-based medicine based on a belief that the anecdotal information they have should be taken more seriously than the broad evidence to the contrary. This would be fine if that anecdotal information were based on actual brain scans prior to vaccination that showed that the vaccine triggered a change, but it isn't. Rather, involves mistaking correlation for causation, and a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, with a complete lack of any actual plausible explanation for how vaccines could cause autism beyond some vague hand-wavey pseudoscience.

And on top of that, we have a bunch of people who lack enough understanding of the scientific method and/or lack enough understanding of the subject to recognize when it is not being followed properly, and they are getting misled by charlatans with a political or personal agenda, presented in the form of pseudoscientific bulls**t papers that don't hold up to even modest scrutiny by someone with limited understanding of the subject or the scientific method, much less actual scientists in the field.

We also have a bunch of journals that publish papers outside their area of expertise, relying on outside experts that are in league with the papers' authors, and all sorts of other fun scientific fraud, which further contributes to this problem.

I'm not sure how to solve this problem, because it seems like a large percentage of the public simply lacks basic critical thinking skills and the ability to read over a paper and think, "Yes, but did you consider the following twelve common factors that could influence both the proposed cause and effect?" and realize that the paper is garbage. But a good starting point would be to pressure the news media across the political spectrum to hire actual science writers who UNDERSTAND SCIENCE to cover science-based stories.

Another good starting point would be to get more science-based shows on PBS that can talk about these issues and explain them to people and debunk bulls**t every week.

Comment Re:Sad (Score 1) 292

While I count myself among the tribe of people who think we should govern ourselves based on evidence-based logic and reason, I have to admit, my tribe is a rather small minority.

Unfortunately, evidence-based medicine has become a code word for "treat everyone with the same illness identically even when the data doesn't support doing so. That's how I ended up fighting a c. diff. infection. I was hospitalized for a related condition, and the first day of antibiotics put me at no fever, but after a day, I got a fever again, and I asked if the antibiotic had changed, and they said no, but maybe the ER gave me something different. They checked, and determined that yes, I had been on a different antibiotic in the ER, but said that they should keep the current antibiotics, and used "evidence-based medicine" as the reason. I had my doubts.

They were wrong. And six months later, the general standards for treating the condition I came in with changed, and they now treat it with the antibiotic that the ER gave me instead of one of the two that the hospital put me on afterwards, precisely because the standard treatment had a tendency to make c. diff. take over.

Whoops.

So I'm all for evidence-based medicine as a starting point, but when you realize it isn't behaving normally, you should adjust accordingly. Otherwise, patients suffer enormously.

But in theory, I do agree with you that evidence-based medicine is better than evidence-free medicine based on gut feelings and assumptions that correlation means causation and other fallacious reasoning.

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