Author: riyad

Those ones were the expensive headcount anyway

Arstechnica reports on a study where they measured the productivity of software developers of different open source projects doing different (also non-coding) tasks.

In the comments there’s a snarky summary of the articles main point:

“These factors lead the researchers to conclude that current AI coding tools may be particularly ill-suited to “settings with very high quality standards, or with many implicit requirements (e.g., relating to documentation, testing coverage, or linting/formatting) that take humans substantial time to learn.” While those factors may not apply in “many realistic, economically relevant settings” involving simpler code bases, they could limit the impact of AI tools in this study and similar real-world situations.”

So as long as I cull the experienced people and commit to lousy software the glorious Age of AI will deliver productivity gains? Awesome, those ones were the expensive headcount!

Jon Steward on Trevor Noah’s What Now Podcast

No one has discernment for what they aren’t. […] You can’t. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s hard enough to have empathy to what they aren’t let alone discernment. […]
— Jon Steward at 50:30

If we were more understanding of prejudice and stereotype and less tolerant of racism we’d understand that prejudice and stereotype are functions mostly of ignorance and of experience. Racism is malevolent, right? But the other is way more natural, but we react as though it would metastasize immediately. And so I think we throw out barriers to each other […] before we have to.
— Jon Steward at 56:00

Century-Scale Storage

What would you use to keep (digital) data safe for at least a hundred years? Maxwell Neely-Cohen looks at all the factors, possible technologies, social and economic challenges that you have to contend with if you intentionally want to store data for a century. He explicitly chose that time scale, because it is at the edge of what a human can experience, but it is outside of a single human’s work life as well as beyond the lifetime of most companies or institutions. So the premise sets you up for a host of problems to be solved. He also analyses strategies for recording and keeping data past and present and evaluates their potential for keeping data safe at century-scale.
It’s long, but worth it.

Force VLC to use VA-API for Hardware Accellerated Video Decoding

tl;dr: add the --avcodec-hw=vaapi option on the command line or to the Exec option in the .desktop file.

It’s stupid, I know, but it’s been bothering me for a while now. Especially when I want to watch conference talks that are available in the AV1 video format (e.g. FOSDEM) the video always seems to hang (show an old frame indefinitely), have broken decoding (shows alternating weirdly colored blocks), de-sync from audio or just stay black. This is happening on both Intel and AMD integrated graphics for years now, and I somehow decided that VDPAU must be the culprit. I also definitely know that VA-API works on my machines, because I’ve tested it … so that can’t be the problem. 😇

VLC (generally) supports both VA-API (mainly for Intel and AMD hardware) and VDPAU (for Nvidia) libraries for hardware accelerated video decoding, but on my Ubuntu desktop machines prefers VDPAU on any hardware for some reason. The settings don’t even show support for anything else: “Simple Preferences” -> “Input/Codecs” tab -> “Hardware-accelerated decoding” only shows “Automatic”, “VDPAU video decoder” and “Disable” options. 😵‍💫 The only “variant” that correctly uses VA-API automatically on my machines is the VLC Flatpak. I checked which backend was used via the “Modules Tree” tab in the “Tools” -> “Messages” dialog. It will show “vdpau”-something in the “video output” subtree (or not).

The Solution

So I dug through weird forums and tried different suggested options, of those many weren’t even supported until I found the right incantation: --avcodec-hw=vaapi .

Fixing the .desktop file

To make your desktop always call VLC with the right options we have to edit VLC’s so-called .desktop file. Mine was located in /usr/share/applications/vlc.desktop.
The relevant line looked like this: Exec=/usr/bin/vlc --started-from-file %U .

Copy the vlc.desktop file to either the $HOME/.local/share/applications/ directory if you want to change the behavior only for you. Alternatively if you have root privileges you can update vlc.desktop for all users of that machine by copying it to /usr/local/share/applications/ . NOTE: you may need to create those directories first.

Then edit the Exec= line to look like this: Exec=/usr/bin/vlc --avcodec-hw=vaapi --started-from-file %U

Or if you want to just copy the relevant commands:

# create the directory for personal .desktop files
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/share/applications/

# copy the original vlc.desktop to this directory
cp /usr/share/applications/vlc.desktop $HOME/.local/share/applications/

# edit the copied vlc.desktop by changing its "Exec" option to include the relevant VLC option
desktop-file-edit --set-key=Exec --set-value="/usr/bin/vlc --avcodec-hw=vaapi --started-from-file %U" $HOME/.local/share/applications/vlc.desktop

Enjoy!

We’ll Ask The AI How to Make Money

We have no current plans to make revenue.

We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue.

We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built a general intelligence system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you.

Sam Altman to VCs in 2024

A video of this memorable moment … you can’t make this up.

We Don’t Want “Privacy”-“Enhancing” Technologies in Our Browsers

The current trend for privacy-enhancing technologies for surveillance in web browsers are going to be remembered as a technical dead end, an artifact of an unsustainable advertising oligopoly.

Don Martin has 10 succinct points on why users (aka we) don’t actually want so-called Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) … some technical, some social, some economic.