The thing is that some section of the right has convinced itself that Calibre is some DEI font. Meanwhile the rest of the world is just living life and having to deal with people getting this worked up about the default font of Microsoft Office since what, 2008?
> Standards are different. The purpose of the standard is that Alice wants her output device to be compatible with everyone else's input device and Bob wants his input device to be compatible with everyone else's output device.
I do think there's value and a lot of work in coming up with a standard that manufacturers agree on. It's a huge coordination problem, based on the idea of unlinking a standard's success with the success of, say, a hardware competitor. It's real work! And like.... HDMI is an invention, right? If that isn't then what is?
"we should have drivers for the hardware that relies on this tech" just feels like an obvious win to me though. The (short-term) ideal here is just the forum being like "yes it's good if HDMI 2.1 works on linux" and that being the end of the story
I don't have much love for things that mean that like VGA info online all being "we reverse engineered this!!!" so they're not my friends but I wouldn't succeed much at standards coordination
> I do think there's value and a lot of work in coming up with a standard that manufacturers agree on. It's a huge coordination problem, based on the idea of unlinking a standard's success with the success of, say, a hardware competitor. It's real work!
It's work they would be doing anyway because they all benefit from it, which is why it isn't a coordination problem. The known and effective coordination solution is a standards body. Everyone sends their representative in to hash out how the standard should work. They all have the incentive to do it because they all want a good standard to exist.
Moreover, the cost of developing the standard is a minor part of the total costs of being in the industry, so nobody has to worry about exactly proportioning a cost which is only a rounding error to begin with and the far larger problem is companies trying to force everyone else to license their patents by making them part of the standard, or using a standard-essential patent to impose NDAs etc.
> And like.... HDMI is an invention, right? If that isn't then what is?
It's not really a single invention, but that's not the point anyway.
Patenting something which is intrinsically necessary for interoperability is cheating, because the normal limit on what royalties or terms you can impose for using an invention is its value over the prior art or some alternative invention, whereas once it's required for interoperability you're now exceeding the value of what you actually invented by unjustly leveraging the value of interoperating with the overall system and network effect.
> It's work they would be doing anyway because they all benefit from it, which is why it isn't a coordination problem
HDMI: tech is shared between you and competitors, but you don't get to collect all the licensing fees for yourself
Some bespoke interface: you can make the bet that your tech is so good that you get to have control over it _and_ you get to license it out and collect all the fees
in the standards case, the standards body will still charge licensing fees but there's an idea that it's all fair play.
Apple had its lightning cable for its iPhones. It collaborated with a standards body for USB-C stuff. Why did it make different decisions there? Because there _are_ tradeoffs involved!
(See also Sony spending years churning through tech that it tried to unilaterally standardize)
> HDMI: tech is shared between you and competitors, but you don't get to collect all the licensing fees for yourself
> Some bespoke interface: you can make the bet that your tech is so good that you get to have control over it _and_ you get to license it out and collect all the fees
Except that these are alternatives to each other. If it's your bespoke thing then there are no licensing fees because nobody else is using it. Moreover, then nobody else is using it and then nobody wants your thing because it doesn't work with any of their other stuff.
Meanwhile it's not about whether something is a formal standard or not. The government simply shouldn't grant or enforce patents on interoperability interfaces, in the same way and for the same reason that it shouldn't be possible to enforce a copyright over an API.
That's definitely a thing that happened, but it's minimising so much other important work that it's misrepresenting the whole thing.
Do you know how much bandwidth six channels of uncompressed audio needs? Home theaters would be a HUGE hassle without a single cable doing all that work for you.
ADAT Lightpipe supports up to 8 audio channels at 48 kHz and 24 bits - all using standard off-the-shelf Toslink cables and transceivers. MADI can do significantly more.
Let's not pretend surround sound is a nearly-impossible problem only HDMI could possibly solve.
I... think you might be proving my point for me? The ability to have a single cable that can do video AND a bunch of audio channels at once is amazing for the average joe.
Don't get me wrong, I use optical in my setup at home & I'd love to have more studio & scientific gear just for the hell of it, but I'm the minority.
I'm not trying to defend the HDMI forum or the greedy arsehole giants behind them. The DRM inbuilt to HDMI and the prohibitive licensing of the filters (like atmos) is a dick move and means everything is way more expensive than it needs to be. Was just pointing out that parent's comment was reductive.
I'm pretty sure in most places in the world if you are travelling from abroad you are asked to share your passport, and have been for a very very very very long time.
The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it or types in the data into the computer) feels almost academic. Though at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.
> The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it [...]
The difference is that the paper copy is local and only accessible to the hotel (and any government employee that might come knocking).
The digital version is accessible to anyone who has access to the system, which as we know well on HN includes bureaucrats (or police) with a vendetta against you and any hacker that can manage to breach the feeble defenses of the computer storing the data. That computer isn't locked down because the information is not valuable to the person who holds it; they're paid to satisfy a record-keeping law, not maintain system security.
> at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.
Agreed, except now uploading a scan is the easiest way to file the data.
I do agree that "not without a warrant" is a pretty load-bearing thing and it _should_ be tedious to get information. When a lot of info is just so easy to churn through that can activate new forms of abuse, even if from an information-theoretical point of view the information was always there.
And it's not even just about public officials. All those stories of people at Google reading their exes emails or whatever (maybe it was FB? Still) sticks to me.
I think people are overindexing on how much of this is "get more data on users".
I don't get why people believe there's a conspiracy here. There's perhaps a large tent, but "social media bad" is not a controversial opinion! "The gov't should do something about it" is more controversial, though I think the controversiality is less heavy in spaces with parents, teachers, places where people have to deal with kids.
Not that this is how things should be determined, but... I think reading this as a "get more data and track people" play feels like giving everyone involved too much credit. It really just feels like what it says on the tin here.
It’s pretty disgusting how much the SV zeitgeist had spent years talking about liberty from tyranny and less than a year into this admin so many people are totally in line.
This just feels so downstream of “the people I dislike are against this so I will be for it” logic. At least the libertarians had some form of principled reasoning … sometimes.
Sadly, this is the inevitable result of so-called "right Libertarianism" at the large scale. With its axiomatic framing, emphasis on individual freedom for yourself, and ignorant rejection of sticky market effects (ie computational complexity), its basically a recipe for power-hungry individuals to justify creating new authoritarian power structures with de facto governmental effects.
I think if you want to make this argument you can go look at the stats. Look at the relative cost of vehicles in the EU over the past 25 years, compare to the cost of vehicles in the US over the past 25 years.
Obviously the lack of difference there wouldn't prove much (if I had to bet I'd bet cars in the US have gotten way more expensive faster than in the EU, just from labor costs), but the lack of a major difference would complicate the theory that new regulations in the past 15 years have massively improved costs, absent a theory that some other thing the EU is doing but the US is not doing is also kicking in to similarly counteract that.
The numbers exist, this isn't in the abstract. Just a question of doing the legwork
I think we should not compare EU vs US costs but rather predict what would be the decrease in costs (relative to EU itself) due to reduced regulations in EU.
Huh, but this is a terrible comparison.. the cars in both unions have been made the same, of course they cost similarly. In other words the US buyers partially pay for the R&D cost to keep to EU standards. And the US population also get the EU regulated-safety requirements (although only partially, since the US also allows Cybertrucks to drive around).
A comparison would be comparing a car that can ensure the survival of their passengers, proven with test crashes, vs e.g. Chinese-made cara for the local market that have terrible crumpling when crash-tested..
> the cars in both unions have been made the same, of course they cost similarly
I'm really not sure what you mean, many of the most popular cars in the EU aren't even sold in the US (Renault, Dacia, Opel, Peugeot/Citroën although they have taken quite a hit in the last few years) and they are generally cheaper than US cars.
And quite a few US cars aren't available in the EU either (although they can sometimes be imported privately, which bypasses the regulations somewhat) which is the very topic we're discussing.
As for Chinese cars, the recent ones are performing adequately in crash-tests.
A bit off-topic, but lots of the top ranked Euro NCAP crash tests have been chinese-built cars for a few years now. Their industry has evolved insanely fast, that perception of low standards is long gone.
they're going to compete on ad unit economics against a company whose entire bread and butter has been selling ads. All while increasing unit costs to provide their service (like all the AI companies seem to be doing by just having more and more planning layers)
If ChatGPT went away tomorrow everyone who wanted to would be fine just moving to one of the other random chatbots from one of the other providers. ChatGPT is the default name that people know, but I don't think that's the same as a moat. A moat would allow OpenAI to go really hard on pricing and ads, and I don't think they have that margin!
I understand not having a link to the primary source at the top of an article because you might be trying to write an explainer, but if you want to avoid confusing your readers but still do the right thing at the very least include a bunch of source links at the bottom of the article!
I know all the cynical reasons not to do it, but I feel like even the good faith objection has a pretty straightforward solution.
Parallel universes
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