(Neue)Nazi-loving hypocrite!

We’re talking about fingerprinting stuff coming in via HDMI, not stuff being played by the “smart” part of the TV itself from some source.

You would probably not need to actually sample images if it’s the TV’s processor that’s playing something from a source, because there are probably smarter approaches for most sources (for example, for a TV channel you probably just need to know the setting of the tuner, location and the local time and then get the data from available Program Guide info (called EPG, if I remember it correctly).

The problem is that anything might be coming over HDMI and it’s not compressed, so if they want to figure out what that is, it’s a much bigger problem.

Your approach does sound like it would work if the Smart TV was playing some compressed video file, though.

Mind you, I too am just “thinking out loud” rather that actually knowing what they do (or what I’m talking about ;))

Well that makes sense but might even be more processor intensive unless they’re using an SOC that includes an NFU or similar.

I doubt it’s a straight forward hash because a hash database for video which includes all manner of small clips and has to somehow be able to match something missing over 90% of frames (if indeed the thing is sampling it at 2 fps, then it only sees 2 frames out of every 25) would be huge.

A rough calculation for a system of hashes for groups of 13 frames in a row (so that at least one would be hit if sampling at 2 fps on a 25 fps system) storing just one block of 13 frame hashes per minute in a 5 byte value (so large enough to have 5 trillion distinctive values) would in 1GB store enough hashes for 136k 2h movies in hashes alone so it would be maybe feasible if the system had 2GB+ of main memory, though even then I’m not so sure the CPU speed would be enough to search it every 500ms (though if the hashes are ordered by value in a long array and there’s a matching array of clip IDs, it might be doable since there are some pretty good algorithms for that).

Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.

Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.

“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.

If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.

Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.

To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.

Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.

That’s just how it is.

Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.

Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).

It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.

Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.

In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.

PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.

If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.

“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.

What! A! Surprise!

I’m shocked, I tell you, totally and utterly shocked by this turn of events!

I was curious enough to check and with 2KB SRAM that thing doesn’t have anywhere enough memory to process a 320x200 RGB image much less 1080p or 4K.

Further you definitelly don’t want to send 2 images per-second down to a server in uncompressed format (even 1080p RGB with an encoding that loses a bit of color fidelity to just use two bytes per pixel, adds up to 4MB uncompressed per image), so its either using something with hardware compression or its using processing cycles for that.

My expectation is that it’s not the snapshoting itself that would eat CPU cycles, it’s the compression.

That said, I think you make a good point, just with the wrong example - I would’ve gone with: a thing capable of handling video decoding at 50 fps - i.e. one frame per 20ms - (even if it’s actually using hardware video decoding) can probably handle compressing and sending over the network two frames per second, though performance might suffer if they’re using a chip without hardware compression support and are using complex compression methods like JPEG instead of something simpler like LZW or similar.

Liberals are just pro-Oligarchy - they think Money should be above the one power which is led by elected leaders: the State - which is against Democracy just like the Fascists, just with a different and more subtle mechanism determining those whose power is above the power of the vote.

They’re just a different kind of Far-Right from the Fascists, which is why it is so easy for them to support Zionists - which are ethno-Fascists, the same sub-type of Fascism as the Nazis - even while they commit a Genocide.

People with even the slightest shred of Equalitarian values wouldn’t ever support those commiting ethnic cleansing.

It seems to me they’re a country built on 19th century white colonialist values (Jewish white colonialism is no better than the once much more common Christian kind) and which has never evolved from those values but rather kept going until reaching the natural conclusion: Genocide.

(It’s not by chance that Israelis keep claiming that they have “Western Values” - it’s really just a politically correct way of saying “white values”)

Israel is similar to South-Africa, except that they were never forced to stop and just kept doubling down on the racism and violent oppression of the ethnicity they victimize.

I blame mainly the US and Germany for the continued support of Israel’s white colonialism and it’s natural outcome of Genocide.

I’ll hazard a guess that your circle is one mainly of highly educated city folk.

Quite independently of Religion, Education and one’s level of exposure to all sorts of people and complex social environments (which normally comes with big city life) seem to be the biggest deciding factors about people having or not “traditional values” (read: conservative) and the excessive and blind tribalism that makes them more likely to find excuses to support Genocide along ethnic lines “when our side does it”.

I too think that the best possible situation would be a World were it would be absolutely normal for everybody to move around as they saw fit and one’s place of birth was irrelevant.

The problem is how to realistically go from were we are now to that utopia.

Simplistic approaches of the “lets just one-sidedly act as if we lived in that utopia and hope we’ll get it” aren’t going to do it and neither will prejudices about people because of the genetics they were born with or the geographical area they were born in.

Things like for example being able to operate certain kinds of computerized industrial machinery does mean that a single individual can produce more than one who is not able to do so.

I agree with your point that such advantages for the West were for the most down to luck rather than any kind of deserving it. Some countries did use their luck more wisely than others, but that’s about it.

I also agree that quite a lot of the “extra” value being “produced” in the West is nothing more than pillaging of somebody else’s resources. My point #3 on my previous comment is anchored on that view - I might have given just a handful of the most obviously bad concrete examples, but there is a lot more than that at more levels, especially around mineral resources.

I don’t at all think that Europeans (or any other Westerners) are any more (or less) deserving or capable than the rest - my statement on the capability to do higher value added jobs was purely of the “things are as things are hence certain actions will have certain consequences” kind and not at all a value judgement, and in another comment here responding to somebody else I actually suggested that we should be investing in Adult Education, including for immigrants, and should provide Education for the children of immigrants the same as for the children of the locals.

Yes, that’s very much my point of view, only much more succinctly and well put than I managed :)

Immigration is a numbers problem: it’s the interplay of rate of arrival, rate of integration, how fast do the locals get used to immigrants and how wide are the educational and cultural differences between those already in a place and those arriving.

Immigration is also a racism problem because racism lowers the rate of “locals getting used to immigrants” and makes cultural differences seem worse than they actually are: for a racist there are no “low enough cultural differences” to make the targets of their racism feel like “one of us”, as can be seen in the US with racism against Afro-Americans who are fellow citizens with a shared culture.

All those things benefit from more Education, both adult education for the immigrants to help with flattening the educational differences (which is a good idea overall, not just for immigrants), education for their children to help integration and education for the children of the racists to stop the racism from crossing to the next generation.

This is, however a far more pragmatic take than the extremes of “we should help everybody that needs help in the World by inviting them to move over whenever they feel like” on the side of the Liberals and of “foreigners are bandits and eat other people’s pets” on the side of the Far-Right.

The kindness of that feeling if not tempered by hard-nosed pragmatism directly collides with the reality of what is actually achievable.

There are 8 billion people in this World, most of which have a lower or much lower “chance to live a life worth living” than the even the average Western.

If everybody outside the West that could have a better life in the West was allowed to come over what would happen is that the place would end up with lots of people with a far lower level of formal education (so less capable of doing the high value jobs that produce more wealth in the West), with different customs (causing lots of friction) and who do not know the language (again a problem for them to be productive alongside the natives), and its capacity to create wealth would most certainly collapse on a per-capita basis - essentially too many people coming over from places with very different quality of life and education system would kill the very golden eggs goose that justified them coming over in the first place.

There are limits to how much we can help without endangering the very thing that allows us to help, which means we have to look at it from a hard nosed pragmatic perspective. As I see it, it breaks down into 3 things:

• Triaging: we can’t help everybody so lets start by helping the ones with the most need (hence why I explicitly mentioned Refugees in my last post). In fact I think we should be actively going out and looking for those needing the most help and helping them, not waiting for the strongest and with the most capability to find the money to pay for it (so, not the ones with the greatest need) cross over on some boat.
• Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime: we should be investing in helping people to help themselves were they live, such as with Healthcare and Education. If the objective is indeed “do our best to ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living” then realistically for them to immigrate over is often the least effective option to achieve that, mainly because of all the 2nd and 3rd order negative effects from it when done in very large numbers without time for integration.
• Crack down on all those Westerners who. for personal upside maximization, are helping make the countries were those people live much worse than they should be. I’m talking Financiers and Weapons Dealers helping Dictators and the Corrupt in many countries stay in power and enjoy the money they steal from the rest. I’m also talking more indirect guilt, such as the pollution produced in the West (including Global Warming) that affects poorer countries far more or even the one produced in poorer countries whilst trying to make things to sell to the West.

A genuine will to “ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living” means we have to find solutions that actually work in the context of objective reality, not high-moral-horse-ridding simplistic takes on things.

I actually got some somewhat more recent AAA games from GoG (a store which I favour because of their No-DRM rule, though there’s a handful of games were it’s “kinda”) and I literally can’t get around to them because I’m just enjoying 15 year old games or Indie title as I tend to favour open-ended games.

Why should I buy, say, “must register and log-in to Rockstar services” Red Dead Redemption from Steam if my entertainment needs are fully fulfilled already and there’s even a backlog of “bought them but haven’t got around to try them” games (including stuff like Prey) plus a bunch of Indie infinite-replayability games (like Terraria and Rimworld) which I haven’t played for long enough now that they’re fun to play again?

This is not just to illustrate the point: I’m genuinely not getting around to play something like Prey, much less buying the original God Of War (available from GoG hence DRM-free, unlike Ragnarok) because I keep just having fun from a mix of really old games and far less “graphically impressive” open-ended Indie games.

I’m in Portugal were the single biggest immigrant group by far are Brasilians and the biggest discrimination is against Brasilians, even though they generally look like the Portuguese and speak the same language (though have a different accent) and there are also immigrants from Africa who are much less likely to be looked down on.

The whole thing is far from just plain Racism and is more broader.

Keep in mind that there are real problems associated with immigration, mainly that at least at first they put downwards pressure on salaries because of increasing the Supply of workers (it takes a while for the increase in consumption from immigrants to feed through into a higher Demand for workers), lower levels of formal education (some societal problems that the increase in formal education in Portugal since the end of Fascism in 74 had naturally corrected - such as religiosity, conservatism and illiberalism - are being imported again with immigrants) and due to different cultural expectations and behaviours so if they’re a large enough number and come from a heavilly nationalist country, that can be a problem (for example, over 60% of Brasilians resident in Portugal voted Bolsonaro, whose politics are far more Fascist than even the most Far-Right party in Portugal).

I think we need to separate Immigrants from Immigration: it’s absolutelly possible to be against “inviting more people over” (Immigration) and still think that we should to treat those who came at our invitation (Immigrants) with the respect that guests deserve - there really is no inherent right for people outside to be invited in (though I would say those who can do have a duty of within their possibilities help those in so bad conditions they qualify as Refugees, who are but a tiny minority of Immigration).

And yeah, I absolutelly agree with you that the anti-immigrant demagogy is a play from the rich to deviate the rightous anger of the locals who feel their lives are getting worse away from those who are trully to blame for it (the rich and their very much local wilful servants in the major political parties) and towards the people who have the least power over here of all people (immigrants can’t even vote). In some countries (such as the UK and US) you see the very same kind of group demonisation and scapegoating deployed against Immigrants also deployed against the Poor (anybody who lived in the UK should be abundately familiar with the “Lazy Poor” rethoric) which IMHO reinforces the point that this kind of demonising of the weakest in society is a propaganda technique rather than a natural phenomenon.

I would even go further and say that the conflation or anti-immigration with anti-immigrant is purposeful and leverages the liberalist takes that the “modern” Leftwing in Europe has copied from the Anglo-Saxons world to get them to end up taking pro-immigration postures thinking they’re defending an oppressed group (immigrants) and that puts them against an ever increasing fraction of the population who do have fair concerns (though they too have been swindled into being anti-immigrant when the source of their problems is high rate of increase in people competing for the jobs, with lower average education levels and different cultural norms and even political preferences - i.e. the immigration)

I think the “thinking” Left needs to separate immigration (inviting people over), from immigrants (people who came because we invited them over in the past, so our guests) and refugees (people who we are helping or should help due to their dire need and we being able to help them) and treat those things differently since there is really only a moral and ethical duty for the last 2, not for the first one.

One supports Fascism at home, the other supports ethno-Fascist Genocide abroad.

The distance between one posture and the other is small and far more easy to transverse than people want to believe, whilst the distance between supporting Fascism at home and not supporting Fascism at all (much less the same type of Fascism as the Nazis, whilst actively commiting Genocide) is pretty much an impassable chasm.

Just because their Theater Of Morality is different doesn’t mean Biden and the DNC are significantly less pro-Authoritarianism than Trump and his cronies.

Of course Neue-Nazi-loving Blinken would be hard at doing Modern Holocaust Denialism to support his favorite ethno-Fascist genociders.