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Comment Re:Does this need to be a meeting? (Score 2) 61

And their inability or unwillingness to do their job is my problem... how again?

I found it saves a lot of time for everyone if I refuse to indulge the person who didn't read the e-mail and proceed with everyone else's questions, or if it's wide-spread enough just reschedule the meeting to give everyone more time and call it there.

Comment Re:Three years is too short nowadays (Score 4, Insightful) 49

Indeed. I learnt recently that one of our GitLab VM hosts for Linux build runners is is hardware from 2012. The dev team discovered this when a vendor sent us an updated library that dropped SSE4.2 support and required AVX2, causing our smoke tests to fail and thus fail the builds. Why throw away hardware that is still working and performant?

Comment Re:I just want video patents to go away (Score 1) 41

The baseline profile of MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) (ISO/IEC 23094-1) is supposed to be the modern MPEG codec that only uses tools made public 20 years ago or have been declared royalty free. It hasn't really gathered traction though either because there's not enough incentive for the stakeholders or because nobody wants to invest in adding another codec to their pipeline that doesn't improve enough beyond HEVC.

Comment Does this need to be a meeting? (Score 1) 61

The first thing to do is ask "Does this need to be a meeting?". If all you're doing is disseminating information, it doesn't. Send the information in an email instead. If you expect questions, send it in an email and have people ask their questions via an email thread. If you start getting debate on a question, then you need to schedule a meeting or take it to real-time chat. If you want feedback and expect debate on changes, send it in an email and schedule a meeting later to give people enough time to understand the information and get their feedback ready.

TBH I think any meeting that has a detailed agenda doesn't need to start as a meeting. My experience is that the productive meetings always involve a starting point so nebulous that the whole point will be to throw ideas at each other and work out what we're actually doing.

Comment Re:Old News? (Score 2, Informative) 131

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

Comment Re:I just want video patents to go away (Score 0) 41

The recent stories of laptops having their decoders removed because of patent frees are infuriating.

Maybe you're referring to this story:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fgadget...

It says:
Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States ... "This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine, are part of a 'Pro' line (jabs at branding names are warranted â" HEVC is used professionally) ..."

It's such a small percentage of the price yet some bean counter has decided to make user experience shit. Moral of the story for me is to not buy the cheapest shit on the market.

Comment Re:Of course it does (Score 1) 76

Indeed. The Germans started strategic bombing of civilian areas about 88 years ago, and in fact, the German president was just in Guernica paying his respects to the victims of that attack: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fwo....

We haven't stopped strategic bombing of civilian areas just because they don't work, it's also because it amounts to war crimes. Britain bombed Germany like that as a response to Germany doing it to Britain and that being the only response Britain could muster at the time, but RAF Bomber Command has always been down played because of the perception that it was wrong; they didn't even get a memorial until 2012.

Russia is behaving like it's still the 1940s. 27 Russian soldiers dead for every square kilometre of Ukraine they've taken. They don't value their own lives, and so they certainly don't value those from other countries.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 1) 43

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

Comment Re:Decentralized services (Score 2) 237

Looked up details on the wording, and it may not be just a logistical nightmare but a legal impossibility. The law appears to only apply to specific platforms, and no Mastodon servers appear on the list. New instances wouldn't either, so there'd be no legal basis for trying to force them to ban teens.

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