SirEDCaLot

The article suggests this was a more secret room, not the sort of thing any random person could join.

Nobody knows what to do with it because it's proprietary and requires a license. If it was not encumbered, windows would ship with a decoder built-in for free and nobody would have a problem. If Apple devices didn't use it by default, no one would have a problem because they just wouldn't use it for anything ever.

If Apple got sick of paying the fee, they could switch to AVIF or JPEG XL or anything else. It wouldn't be hard, just bake native support into the next OS of everything, and have the next iPhone take pictures in that format by default. The rest of the world will catch up right quick.

Actually come to think of it I'm kind of surprised Google doesn't do that. Make the native Android camera shoot in AVIF by default...

My take is that he's only working for himself. Across both terms, he has a track record of rewarding personal loyalty and looking out for his own interests above most else.

Yeah but look at the AV1 hardware support matrix. A lot of current mobile silicon supports decode, not nearly as much supports encode. To have AV1 truly replace MP4/MP5 a hardware encode is necessary so you can do video calls in AV1.

The one who could really make this happen is Apple. If they decided to move away from MPEG-LA and embraced open codecs (AV1 / VP9 / Opus / FLAC / AVIF / JPEGXL / JPEG2000), supporting them in software, hardware, and their services (imessage/ichat/facetime, music store, video store) that would single handedly push the industry.

They did that with HEIC- before iPhones switched to HEIC by default nobody bothered with the encumbered format. Now it's become de facto standard. That SHOULD have been something open like AVIF, JPEG XL, etc.

I'm kinda in the same boat. My main box was used, only a couple hundred bucks and it's served me pretty well. Same thing with all my other personal PCs for the last 5-7 years.
If you're not gaming, the benefit of going new is pretty limited. The hardware outpaced the software.

Perhaps, but if that involves desoldering BGA chips and remounting them on new cards, do you really think someone's gonna bother to do that?
Especially if the chips are optimized for AI and don't perform well for games?

US is certainly no angel. Saying that as an American.
At the same time, there's a difference between shit we did in the 70s (and so did many other nations including RU) and today. In this millennium the closest we came to conquest was Iraq but we dumped that pretty fast.

'We're going to conquer this territory by force and add it to our own' hasn't been an internationally recognized valid move in decades. We should not validate it.

Have you seen Russian ‘democracy’ before ? Gee whiz 100% of people voted to join Russia shocked

Obviously there would have to be some kind of neutral 3rd party overseeing the vote...

Yup. And the only reason for Russia to insist Ukraine never join NATO would be so Russia could attack them again in the future without consequence.

Exactly.

How exactly is this going to be worse? Putin keeps a bunch of territory, gets welcomed back into the global economy, Ukraine gets hard limits on NATO membership and they're on military in exchange for a weak non-guarantee of security. You could sum the whole thing up as 'let's all agree Russia won'.

It's bullshit. It legitimizes military conquest of territory. The only compromise should be that Russia stops their illegal invasion, Russia's internationally held funds are 100% given to Ukraine for reconstruction, and the border territories get to hold a vote to decide which country they want to be a part of.

As this is now, it's just legitimizing the occupation. As an American I am very disappointed that our President would push such a thing.

Sadly I think you may be disappointed. The GPUs used for AI are not typical graphics GPUs, they aren't on PCIe cards with video ports. They are set up in configurations designed to cram as many chips as possible into as small a space as possible while still providing power and cooling for 100% output on all of them.

100%. Ukraine would be stupid to sign this, unless their military situation is truly desperate. The basic treaty is Russia gets no more penalties, they keep everything they captured, Ukraine never joins NATO, Ukraine's military is limited to 600k people, and there's no concrete guarantee against further Russian aggression on any other country. And if Russia goes after after Ukraine again in a few years when they rearm, they don't seem to be any hard guarantees for Ukrainian security.

As an American I have no idea WTF our president is thinking. Russia has stated ambitions to reconquer former USSR territory, Ukraine steps up to fight and die to stop it and all they need is ammunition which is the bargain of the fucking century for the rest of the world. Meanwhile we have this golden goose opportunity against Russia and our priority seems to be let's cook it as quickly as possible.