But I wanted to go out of my way to comment to agree with you wholeheartedly about your claims about the irredeemability of the "microblogging" format.

It is systemically structured to eschew nuance and encourage stupid hot takes that have no context or supporting documents.

Microblogging is such a terrible format in it's own right that it's inherent stupidity and consistent ability to viralize the stupidest takes that will nevertheless be consumed whole by the entire self-selecting group that thinks 140 characters is a good idea is essential to the Russian disinfo strategy. They rely on it as a breeding ground for stupid takes that are still believable. Thousands of rank morons puke up the worst possible narratives that can be constructed, but inevitably, in the chaos of human interaction, one will somehow be sticky and get some traction, so then they use specific booster accounts to get that narrative trending, and like clockwork all the people who believe there is value to arguing things out of context 140 characters at a time eat it up.

Even people who make great, nuanced and persuasive content on other platforms struggle to do anything but regress to the local customs on Twitter and BS.

The only exception to this has been Jon Bois, who is vocally progressive and pro labor and welfare policy and often this opinion is made part of his wonderful pieces on sports history and journalism and statistics, but his Twitter and Bluesky posts are low context irreverent comedy and facetious sports comments.

The people who insisted Twitter was "good" or is now "good" have always just been overly online people, with poor media literacy and a stark lack of judgement or recognition of tradeoffs.

That dumbass russian person who insisted they had replicated the LK-99 "superconductor" and all the western labs failed because the soviets were best or whatever was constantly brought up here as how Twitter was so great at getting people information faster, when it actually was direct evidence of the gullibility of Twitter users who think microblogging is anything other than signal-free noise.

Here's a thing to think about: Which platform in your job gets you info that is more useful and accurate for long term thinking? Teams chats, emails, or the wiki page someone went out of their way to make?

Chatting with a bot and using it as a brainstorming or research assistant is the first time I’ve felt a since of wonder since Web 1.0. It offers a way to search and interact with knowledge that is both more efficient and different from anything else.

One of the most mind blowing to me is reverse idea search. “I heard the following idea once. Please tell me who may have said this.” Before LLMs this was utterly impossible.

But I also understand how these things work and that any fact or work that the LLM does must be checked. You can’t just mindlessly believe a chat bot. I can see how people who don’t keep that in mind could be led way out into lala land by these things.

I also see their potential for abuse, but that’s true of all tech. In prehistoric times I’m sure there were some guys sitting around a fire lamenting “maybe we should not have sharpened stick. Maybe we should not play god. Let stick be dull as god intended.”

It's insane.

Being a hypocrite makes you a bad person sometimes. It doesn't actually change anything factual or logical about your arguments. Hypocrisy affects the pathos of your argument, but not the logos or ethos! A person who built every single datacenter would still be well qualified to speak about how bad datacenters are for the environment. Maybe their argument is less convincing because you question their motives, but that doesn't make it wrong or invalid.

Unless HNers believe he is making this argument to help Google in some way, it doesn't fucking matter that google was also bad and he worked for them. Yes he worked for google while they built out datacenters and now he says AI datacenters are eating up resources, but is he wrong?. If he's not wrong, then talk about hypocrisy is a distraction.

HNers love arguing to distract.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game" is also wrong. You hate both.

Hypocrisy is when you criticise others for doing a thing you yourself secretly do. It is massively different then criticising a compant you work or worked for. You can even ve part of something, change opinion and then criticise it without being hypocryte.

Sometimes facts and logic can only get you so far.

To stretch the analogy, all the "babies" in the "bathwater" of youtube that I follow are busy throwing themselves out by creating or joining alternative platforms, having to publicly decry the actions Google takes that make their lives worse and their jobs harder, and ensuring they have very diversified income streams and productions to ensure that WHEN, not IF youtube fucks them, they won't be homeless.

They mostly use Youtube as an advertising platform for driving people to patreon, nebula, whatever the new guntube is called, twitch, literal conventions now, tours, etc.

They've been expecting youtube to go away for decades. Many of them have already survived multiple service deaths, like former Vine creator Drew Gooden, or have had their business radically changed by google product decisions already.

He's very much "selling out" but meh, he was never really a "high brow" creator anyway. Still managed to cover lots of cool things, but just not trying to make good content. They were optimizing for profitable content.

However, the couple of discussions around "how to think about electricity" and "how do sails work" he participated in and somewhat spawned were great, and showed how actual productive discussion among people genuinely trying to come to a real understanding works. Lots of groups chimed in and actual experiments were run to support arguments and the end result was essentially "eh, there's nuance"! Wonderful outcome.

It was clear for a very very long time that he wasn't doing it for the same reason as most of the good people: A desire to share learning and lust for scientific inquiry.

I also think the new animation style is mediocre, but that's just opinion.

Get out of the way, enjoy the life you have left, and let someone else blossom into the space you left!

This really isn't a defense of Veritasium, but this has become the case with most videos where the creator makes a living off their channel. Everything is poorly named like this just so they can at least continue getting the same amount of views, because most views come from Youtube recommendations. It's only anecdata I have, but I've heard a lot of creators say that these days recommendations is the only way they get views, even channels with tons of subscribers. I personally rarely get recommended content from channels I actually subscribe to. It's really a lamentable state.

Veritasium irks me more than others somehow, because it often seems like their clickbait titles are complete fabrications and don't even match the video content, but also because their eventual non-clickbait titles are pretty good themselves, and often catch my curiosity. I know I don't respond the same as the general audience though.

I'm much more sensitive to clickbait on science related content, because when GameGrumps make a clickbait title, it's not an issue. Nobody cares if they lie about what happens in a gameplay video.

It's too bad, because the videos are often about fascinating science history that isn't given an enjoyable narrative in other places, but the original title that pushes me away will be something insane like "THIS EXPERIMENT NEARLY ENDED THE WORLD" and it sucks. As I said, when the titles are changed to the more sane versions, I usually end up watching because it is interesting.

Like right now, their newest video: "There IS something faster than light". It's actually not as bad as they've done in the past. But eventually that title will change to reflect the actual video content and it will be much more obvious what it is about and I will likely want to watch it.

Trump tore up Iran's "we won't do nukes" deal, doesn't matter whether you think they were genuine or not, it demonstrates we will go back on a deal so our word isn't worth anything.

Ukraine shows that the west will not actually protect you like they claim, so your only option is getting nukes to really deter people.

North Korea and Pakistan demonstrate that you can pretty much do whatever you want with just a couple nukes, the west will cower in fear over idle threats.

No country would look at any of this and conclude that they have any choice but to build nukes to protect themselves.

Same with cops.

They also oppose removing things like three strikes laws that haven't done a damn thing to make our country "safer" or better.

The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on. They don't think of a PDF as a set of rendering instructions that can overlap. They think it's paper. Because that's what it pretends to be.

The best fix for this in almost any organization is the one that untrained humans will understand: After you redact, you print out and scan back in. You have policy that for redacted documents, they must be scanned in of a physical paper.

Sorry, but a professional user not having an operational understanding of the tools they're working with is called culpable negligence in any other profession. A home user not knowing how MS Word works is fine, but we're talking desk clerks whose primary task is document management, and lawyers who were explicitly tasked with data redaction for digital publication. I don't think we should excuse or normalize this level of incompetence.

Have you ever had to actually react a document in acrobat pro? It's way more fiddly and easy to screw up than one would expect. Im not saying professionals shouldn't learn how to use their tools, but the UI in acrobat is so incredibly poor that I completely understand when reaction gers screwed up. Up thread there's an in complete but very extensive list of this exact thing happening over and over. Clearly there's a tools problem here. Actual life-critical systems aren't developed this way, if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot. Boeing tried to do that with the max, but they weren't able to successfully convince the industry that that was OK.

That's true, we blame the manufacturer and demand that they fix their product under threat of withdrawing the airworthiness certification. So where's the demand for Adobe to fix its software, under pain of losing their cash cow?

Yet, people here are arguing that it is perfectly OK that professionals keep working with tools that are apparently widely known to be inappropriate for their task. Why should we not blame the lawyers that authorized the use of inappropriate tooling for such a sensitive task as legal redaction of documents?

You don't get to claim incompetence while being one of the richest people alive.

Something I want to harp on because people keep saying this:

Video streaming is not complicated. Every youtuber and twitch streamer and influencer can manage it. By this I mean the actual act of tweaking your encoding settings to get good quality for low bitrate.

In 3 months with an LLM, they learned less about video streaming than you can learn from a 12 year old's 10 minute youtube video about how to set up Hypercam2

Millions and millions of literal children figured this out.

Keep this in mind next time anyone says LLMs are good for learning new things!

Video codecs are some of the most complex software I've ever encountered with the most number and the most opaque options.

It's easy for streamers because they don't have options, twitch et al give you about three total choices, there's nothing to figure out.

I've built the exact pipeline OP has done - Video, over TCP, over Websockets, precisely because I had to deliver video to through a corporate firewall. Wolf, Moonlight and maybe even gstreamer just shows they didn't even try to understand what they were doing, and just threw every buzzword into an LLM.

To give you some perspective 40Mbps is an incredible amount of bandwidth. Blu ray is 40mbps. This video, in 8K on Youtube is 20Mbps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ

There's really no explanation for this.

I had a situation where I wanted to chop one encoded video into multiple parts without re-encoding (I had a deadline) and the difficulty getting ffmpeg to do sensible things in that context was insane. One way of splitting the video without re-encoding just left the first GOP without a I frame, so the first seconds of video were broken. Then another attempt left me with video that just got re-timed, and the audio was desynced entirely. I know encoding some frames will be necessary to fix where cuts would break P and B frames, but why is it so hard to get it to "smartly" encode only those broken GOPs when trying to splice and cut video? Clearly I was missing some other parameters or knowledge or incantation that would have done exactly that.

The few knobs that actual video encoder users need to tweak are clearly exposed and usable in every application I have ever used.

>twitch et al give you about three total choices

You don't configure your video encoding through twitch, you do it in OBS. OBS has a lot of configuration available. Also, those three options (bitrate type, bitrate value, profile, "how much encoding time to take" and """quality""" magic number) are the exact knobs they should have been tweaking to come up with an intuition about what was happening.

Regardless, my entire point is that they were screwing around with video encoding pipelines despite having absolutely no intuition at all about video encoding.

They weren't even using FFMPEG. They were using an open source implementation of a video game streaming encoder. Again, they demonstrably have no freaking clue even the basics of the space. Even that encoder should be capable of better than what they ended up with.

We've been doing this exact thing for decades. None of this is new. None of this is novel. There's immense literature and expertise and tons of entry level content to build up intuition and experience with what you should expect encoded video to take bandwidth wise. Worse, Microsoft RDP and old fashioned X apps were doing this over shitty dial up connections decades ago, mostly by avoiding video encoding entirely. Like, we made video with readable text work off CDs in a 2x drive!

Again, Twitch has a max bandwidth much lower than 40mb/s and people stream coding on it all the time with no issue. That they never noticed how obscenely off the mark they are is sad.

It would be like if a car company wrote a blog post about how "We replaced tires on our car with legs and it works so much better" and they mention all the trouble they had with their glass tires in the blog.

They are charging people money for this, and don't seem to have any desire to fix massive gaps in their knowledge, or even wonder if someone else has done this before. It's lame. At any point, did they even say "Okay, we did some research and in the market we are targeting we should expect a bandwidth budget of X mb/s"?

"AI" people often say they are super helpful for research, and then stuff like this shows up.