We’re talking about a hypothetical. I’m not the ffmpeg maintainer. The person got help in their thread and everything was courteous. I wouldn’t even be rude about it, I just wouldn’t hold their hand, and I might make a comment about the value of doing some legwork on your own when an update to a core dependency seems to break something. If this kind of behavior is considered sensible for a project manager at MS, then apparently I’m more qualified to manage projects than a lot of people at some of the largest corporations on Earth.

The maintainer always has the decision how they’ll respond.

That is literally the opposite of what you were just saying. You were saying that open source developers can’t even complain when responsible people at gigantic corporations file dumb bug reports against their project.

That’s not even the issue. Nobody cares that MS is using ffmpeg. It’s just rude to have as much money as MS does, integrate ffmpeg into one of their core products, then apparently not know anything about it and file hilariously bad bug reports that are actually just support requests after never contributing anything back.

Like, I’ve used ffmpeg probably since it was released. I’ve never given the ffmpeg developers anything, and I expect nothing in return from them. They don’t know me, they don’t know I exist, they don’t know I use their software. I could not reasonably file a support request as a bug like they did and expect to be taken seriously. Why does Microsoft get to have this expectation when they behave the same way? They’re a big company who asked ffmpeg to do extra work to support MS’s ignorance and laziness, and they didn’t even offer an ongoing support relationship. They wanted to throw a few grand at ffmpeg once to make the problem go away. This is completely ridiculous.

If they release a software package with a license that explicitly states that they allow the whole world to use it freely without any expectation if return, they cannot complain afterwards that some particular people in the world end up using it. … likewise for bug reports

Literal nonsense. If someone abuses my bug tracker to act like a clown, I have every right to decline their support requests, even if I licensed my software open source. Nothing in open source philosophy requires you to bend over backwards to cater to every MS project manager’s poorly thought-out whims. You’re literally just making things up.

There was no bug to fix, the PM didn’t keep up with developments in an (apparently) core dependency and was passing outdated arguments to ffmpeg. The fix was for the project to update how it was passing flags to ffmpeg. They’d rather spend the time opening a ticket on ffmpeg’s bugtracker and spend thousands of company money begging ffmpeg to help them, when MS is a massive corporation, is apparently relying on ffmpeg, yet has hitherto established no support relationship and also has developed no internal expertise on ffmpeg

They easily could have opened up the code and looked around to find the problem, or checked the changelog since an update broke it, or just rolled back to the last-known working version until they had time to figure it out, instead they just dumped it on ffmpeg’s doorstep like their hair was on fire. FFMPEG’s development model is explicitly that they iterate quickly and there are very likely to be poorly documented breaking changes between versions. It’s not one you pull a new version of casually.

I was joking in response to OP’s joke about guillotining everybody who had been a landlord? Even in China, where I think it was 4 million landlords got killed during the land reform movement, there wasn’t an intentional policy of just reprisal killing entire classes. (No really, read the history of the land reform movement, it was absurdly violent but even then it wasn’t “let’s guillotine every single landlord”) It’s a silly concept and I’m surprised it needs to be explained that murdering entire classes at a time isn’t actually the point of revolutionary violence, but hey, it’s Lemmy!

If they ever owned any land, they get guillotined twice. Reasoning: ultraleftism hasn’t worked so far, so clearly we haven’t gone ultraleft enough yet

Depends on how you use them, I think. Magic boxes that are tied into the cloud and just give you an app to control your lights, dumb. Setting up a system that automates your home electrical appliances in a thoughtful manner can actually deliver savings and maybe even improve your life. Even as someone getting into smart home stuff, though, mainly what I’m seeing is the ability to save power by having some kind of intelligent control over your devices. Everything else is flashing lights and surveillance.

Problem is, your average user isn’t going to be setting up a LAN-only, zigbee-to-homeassistant automation. They need the magic box type of interface. So as a mass market thing it seems kind of doomed.

Yeah, bullshit. People have been prophesying the end of the world practically since it started, and we haven’t had ONE apocalypse. With our luck, this shit’ll never end!

You’re basically completely wrong about how AI is going to scale. We’re not going to be stuck on, say tinkertoy models on our phones and gigantic mega-models exclusively in the cloud. That’s insane. We have good language models that will run on an ordinary laptop already. You can scale models to more or less any size and there is amazing research coming out constantly regarding how to do AI more efficiently. People are running tons of ML code on their PC’s already and the demand will only go up as companies – like Microsoft – bundle more and more features that rely on AI code into their software, more SDK’s and libraries come out that support it, etc.

Also, the feasibility of deploying AI code to more users goes up the more users have them in their devices.

Also, the main trick of NPU’s is efficient matrix math, especially the use-case of applying a single operation to entire matrices at once, which AIUI is foundational to tensor math. Plain old CPU’s are trash at this because they have to iterate over each individual entity in the matrix and apply the operation separately. NPU’s, as I guess they’re coming to be called, are designed to do those operations massively in parallel. There are likely tons of applications for this beyond just ML code that we haven’t even imagined yet.

It’s a bit like asking in 1995 what the use case for a graphics card is when you can go to an arcade and gameboys exist. At that exact moment in time, based on the exact cards that were available in literally 1995, it might have been hard to imagine that by 2024 we’d all have dedicated graphics chips of some kind in our computers – in fact, we’d be hard-pressed to imagine devices without them – and that some of the biggest computing companies in the world would be graphics card manufacturers. Yet here we are.

You have to pay attention to the research as it develops, and you have to realize that they don’t just show up to markets to satisfy pre-existing demands, they create markets and create new demand where none existed before. That’s how the tech industry works.

Who’s going to be buying and using Bitcoin if it’s not affordable?

Fuck’em! Start a driver’s cooperative!