• 5 Posts
  • 229 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • Alright, lemme try to explain this:

    1. You stated you don’t care about FFmpeg.
    2. Someone asked why and stated it was useful.
    3. You brought up “bad journalism” in response, implying your lack of care for FFmpeg was due to the article not describing why it was useful.
    4. To refute your accusation of bad journalism, I pointed out the first paragraph of the article, which directly makes a case for FFmpeg and which you seemed to have missed.
    5. You somehow seem to think I’m defending FFmpeg in some fashion, thus missing my point. (Also, you seem to be calling FFmpeg a “format,” presumably because it has “mpeg” in the name? FFmpeg handles a litany of formats.)

    The author has not done bad journalism. You just missed stuff while reading. That’s fine so long as you address it. I would ask you not insult me for pointing this out, though.


  • Bad journalism has nothing to do with this. Literal first paragraph of the article:

    You may never have heard of FFmpeg, but you’ve used it. This open source program’s robust multimedia framework is used to process video and audio media files and streams across numerous platforms and devices. It provides tools and libraries for format conversion, aka transcoding, playback, editing, streaming, and post-production effects for both audio and video media.

    If you weren’t paying attention until someone pointed out your error, just say that. We won’t crucify you.






  • I’m not ragging on this particular post - this one’s obviously important - but I’ll be honest, I really wish I could spend less time hearing about what Trump is doing and more time hearing about what’s being done about it.

    Getting constant doom-o-grams about the current administration’s latest horror-show is particularly exhausting when you almost never hear about people working to fix it, and frankly I doubt I’m alone in that. It’s pretty counterproductive for us to be spending so much time fixating on what the fascists are doing. Helps them a lot more than us.

    I just wish this site had a healthier evil-to-good-news mix, you know? Prevents doomerism.



  • The fundamental issue is and has always been that automation is being used to replace people, when it should be used to free up their time. Productivity increases could’ve meant shorter work weeks. But that didn’t generate as much money for the shareholders, so it didn’t get pursued. And now we’ve got LLMs and generative AI, which could’ve been a (admittedly rather shitty and niche) tool, but for the same reasons as before, companies would rather throw people under the bus instead.

    Artists aren’t telling you that people washing dishes don’t matter. They’re telling you they might be getting fired just like those dishwashers were. If you care about either, I suggest standing up for the artists here. And once that’s done, they can stand up for everyone else right back. I think you’ll find they’d be happy to return the favor.








  • I was suggesting that no one else needs it explained to them either.

    You’d hope so! But alas, some idiots exist. And when a title like this appears, it becomes difficult to tell if such an idiot wrote it at first glance, and more to point, a title like that tends to create more idiots (and it’s also just kinda offensive). That’s why it’s important not to write headlines like this.

    Sidenote: If you want people to not take things personally, avoid personal pronouns. “Is that something that you need explained?” → “Is that something that people need explained?” It makes a world of difference and I’m confident I’ve avoided several arguments that could’ve spawned from my own posts thanks to making that kind of change. Not foolproof, sure – we are on the internet – but it helps.





  • You can read that from the article text, but a) the text doesn’t appear to actually suggest autistic people do have empathy, which is a problem since b) the title absolutely implies they don’t.

    At best, this is a terrible headline. But if I’m being honest, I don’t have much respect for an article that seems to be all too eager to tout the erstwhile benefits of an LLM, let alone one that is in all likelihood teaching people how to act more like an LLM. So I’m not inclined to take a charitable interpretation.