circuit10

Use cases for hardware encoders in PCs:

- Video calls

- Screen/webcam recording

- Live streaming

- Real-time transcoding for media servers (don’t know much about this but I’ve heard it’s a thing)

- Game streaming

- Video editing (making exporting less frustrating)

This is a software solution designed to work with existing multi colour printers, so you can’t “just mix” them as this would need additional hardware

For new games, they would know from the beginning that they’ll need to release the server software eventually, so they wouldn’t be able to agree with those terms

It is of course reasonable to restrict what you can do with a product you’re selling for money. There are plenty of laws and regulations that already do this. Without these kinds of laws intellectual property wouldn’t even exist - copyright was only created to benefit society by providing an incentive for people to create and invent things

It’s no different from mandating that the software can’t be malware that puts a ransom on your data, contain other people’s copyrighted content without permission, or just not work despite you claiming that it does when you sold it

And it’s not mandating that anything is structured in a particular way, just that the game works as the buyer would expect and how they achieve that is up to them

It would at least be reasonable to expect this for future games, just treat the server binary the same way as the client in terms of what code you include (there way be some more involved if they have to migrate off a reusable codebase but I think it’s worth it)

If this was about open source software I’d agree about not forcing people to do additional work, but if you’re selling something for money you should be obligated to do the bare minimum of stripping secrets out of a binary so the product you sold can actually work (and this will be barely any work if it’s designed with this in mind in the first place)

We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products

I interpret the “media” part as in “medium”, meaning it’s a medium/method over which you can be social, not “media” as in “multimedia”

When your code can be completely reshaped by earlier passes and macro expansions and inlining I don’t think it’s feasibly to make a useful warning for that

If you include a library function with a null check that gets inlined you probably don’t want a bunch of warnings there for code you don’t even control

I don’t mean this in a rude way but you should really read the posts I linked, it’s interesting and part 3 especially answers these questions

Direct link to part 3 (but read the others first for context if you can): https://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should...

You don’t want warnings for every piece of code in a library you’re not using or sanity check you added that isn’t supposed to be hit

And you can’t warn when you’re optimising based on undefined behaviour because you can’t know when it will happen, that is equivalent to the halting problem

If you warned whenever undefined behaviour could be happening then e.g. every single pointer deference would say “warning: compiling assuming pointer is not null or unaligned”

What if the compiler is able to use that to determine that a whole code path is dead, and then significantly improve the surrounding function because of that?

Compilers optimise in multiple passes and removing things earlier can expose optimisation opportunities later that can affect other parts of the code too

This series was a good explanation for me of why treating UB this way is genuinely useful: https://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should...

Being able to assume certain things don't happen is powerful when you're writing optimisations, not doing that would have a real performance cost

Seems like the anti-clickbait title editing removed the “hundreds of”? This confused me because I thought “oh, they’ve stripped down a Docker image to only 1 megabyte, and then a full game engine adds 34MB more” (I missed the WASM on the first read)

When I had a jailbroken iPhone my bank app (HSBC) would detect it and show a warning but let you continue anyway at your own risk, which I thought was a reasonable compromise

I think the disk space and bandwidth are what make consent needed, because it’s implied that the browser may download small pieces of data but the user would not expect such a large file be downloaded so it should check with them

It works fine if scanned by a machine though (ticket gate, self checkout etc.)

I've used a third party app for this for a UK weekly pass train ticket you could only buy physically, but if you buy it on a train rather than at a station they can't print you a ticket with a magnetic strip and they have to give you one with a barcode (technically an Aztec code), which you can then scan onto your phone and use at the gate. But I kept the original ticket with me too and would use that if a person asked to inspect it

This is not a reasonable size for something that's "just another part of Chrome", this blows up the file size by many times

I was replying to the hypothetical situation in the comment of saying "Awesome Notepad, a Notepad++ fork"

Can you really demand someone not have any references to your product? Surely people are allowed to refer to it to explain their fork's relation to the original, otherwise it would also be illegal to compare your product against competitors in advertising or to review anything

I guess it depends on whether it's likely to confuse people?

Do you mean Ctrl + scroll wheel? I use that feature quite a lot, I like my font size small but it can be difficult to see for other people so being able to quickly scale it up is really useful

Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool

For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either

"Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated

The point is Amazon is adding an “Alexa+” mode that uses LLMs. The plain voice recognition + keyword matching or however the old version works is more reliable (I assume, I didn’t use the new mode much because it immediately failed at what I wanted)

No matter how good the LLM features are, I just want to turn my lights on and off and check the time. A perfect LLM could maybe perform on par with a simple deterministic command system for these tasks, but not better. All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work

Also, one of my first interactions with this Alexa+ thing was “how long is it until 8:45am”, one of only a few commands I use it for to work out how much sleep I’m getting, and it proceeded to ask me what the current time was… I immediately turned it off after that

You can just the post the code somewhere, it doesn’t have to be good and you don’t have to do anything else with it

Apart from ensuring there’s not anything confidential in the code like API keys (which you shouldn’t have anyway, unless it’s just in comments) it won’t take any extra work unless you want to put effort into that side of things

You can have multiple WASM modules communicating with each other (though you would probably need extra interop code?), or statically link them into a single module, the concepts work mostly the same

You can ship an offline, standalone HTML file you can open in your browser too (this might not happen often but my point is it's not inherent to the technology)

Is it possible that a jailbreak is found that could allow a “kexec” kind of thing to load a new OS? Of course it would be a huge amount of work even if theoretically possible

At that point it’s not really a decompiler any more but a transpiler (high level language -> other high level language)

I once used Ghidra to decompile a hand-written ARM assembly floating point library and compile the result to a different architecture, and it was significantly faster than GCC’s built in methods…

But in general this kind of thing is very unreliable for any non-trivial code without a lot of manual work, so a better approach could be to compile to WebAssembly which can be translated into C

I don't think it matters if you can fork or exec, they're still running custom code

Not sure why this is downvoted, it's true:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ish-shell/id1436902243

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-shell/id1473805438