It's over.

I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

l think this comment wins the thread.

The time has come for a European University CSE department group to reverse-engineer HDMI 2.1 and publish a compatible implementation on Github.

There's a solid history of this category of work going back 30 years.

They have certain legal protections for compatibility and public interest work.

This 1990's licensing model is antiquated and obsolete.

IEEE and ITU have abdicated their responsibility so sombody like Valve needs to do for transport spec what AV1 did for codecs and linux did for operating systems.

"A rising tide lifts all boats" is common among free marketeers and communists but opposed by fascists.

> Is there a huge difference between a criminal organization and a multinational corporation?

Yes, huge difference.

The common-law criminals running corporations get statutory protection from liability for the crimes they commit under corporate letterhead.

A regular mafia has individual liability.

These laws they are referring to, they are only fooling themselves when they pretend that they might apply to the richest people in the world. It doesn't matter how "clear" one might think trademark laws to be, when the other side can spend more on lawyers than the GDP of many small nations, you don't have a chance of winning.

All Mars trips that involve landing on Mars will be one way for the foreseeable future. We're likely 200 years away from being able to get someone back from Mars, and that's only if we find a fuel source there.

Thank you for the correction on that. I had always heard it was for the NY Times, until I looked it up on wikipedia.

I would counter though that even with the Times of London being considered a "centre-right" newspaper in the UK, it is still a "far left" paper compared to anything Trump associates himself with.

That Times New Roman is of course named for one of their least favorite newspapers.

Or maybe we should, so we can watch some heads explode and witness the next round of glorious infighting.

That's an understatement. I know I've been predicting the fall of this conservablog for years now but seriously how will we know if there's even someone left to turn out the lights? Some front page articles generate discussions now that are barely longer than ones I've had with my dog.

To watch your dogs a wifi device is OK but if real security is a concern understand that home invasion gangs use ~10W wifi jammers as standard practice now.

Amcrest supports RTSP pull and SFTP push which is handy.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

We really need standardized protocols for garage doors. Chamberlin had a near monopoly on the market and had proprietary protocols.

If you want to make a compatible garage door opener, you have to use their HomeLink chips. My Tesla had HomeLink integrated, and it's awesome having the garage door just open when I pull into the driveway with GPS activation, but now they charge extra for this, in part because HomeLink is a proprietary chip, and they can't just integrate the functionality directly without an additional part. That's also why it's limited to only controlling three garage doors (which is an issue for some people with overly complicated lives).

Now it's a similar situation with WiFi control, where they have a proprietary protocol that goes through their servers simply so that they can charge a subscription fee.

What is needed is some good open standards.

An open standard for the RF signals: Let anyone implement the hardware. Allow for separate open/close signals, as well as the current activate signal. Allow for separate authentication for the signals, so you can do things like have a keypad access outside that only needs the code to open the door, not close it.

An open standard for WiFi control. This is likely already covered by Matter.

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."