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Apple + Sony sounds like a pretty nice combo, although unsurprisingly, right? It is a combination of premium brands. (Of course often premium brands are actually garbage in a nice shell, so maybe it is surprisingly not surprisingly bad, haha).

Other than the TV, although its opinion carries a lot of weight in this discussion unfortunately.

I think that's more forced to by inertia, and the HDMI push for mandatory DRM

What is the dam against DisplayPort anyway? I never see it on TVs for whatever reason.

Actually it’s a bit odd, in my mind DisplayPort is highly associated with quality. But I don’t actually know if it is the superior connector or if it just seems that way because monitors are usually better than TVs in every metric other than size and brightness.


HDMI Forum don't like TV SOC boards that have both kinds of ports and discourage them from being made.

Also, HDMI Forum don't like converter boards that support every advanced feature at once (Variable Refresh Rate, HDR, etc.) and won't license them.

DisplayPort and HDMI kind of leapfrog each other in terms of technical superiority, so neither is definitively technically superior in the long term.


Mass-market compatibility.

It's already difficult to find TVs with four fully-compliant HDMI ports; often you'll get a TV with one HDMI 2.1 port and three HDMI 2.0 ports, and sometimes the 2.1 port will also be the only eARC port so you have to choose between high framerates/resolutions and using a sound bar. In other words, even with just HDMI getting a decent set of ports is difficult.

The idea of TV manufacturers also adding DisplayPort ports seems ludicrous to me - not because it's a bad idea, but because I can't imagine them going to the trouble if there's no tangible demand. At best I could see them replacing HDMI ports with DP ports because there's limited space on the motherboard, but that would still require the board to have both HDMI and DP circuitry/chipsets and HDMI/DP certification/testing.

Then you have a TV with, say, two HDMI ports and two DP ports - which, for most users, means "two ports" since 99% of people don't have any hardware they want to connect to their TV that supports DP anyway.

So basically unless we start seeing game consoles, AppleTVs, and Rokus supporting DisplayPort we won't see TVs supporting DisplayPort, and we won't see any of those devices supporting DP because they don't need to - HDMI works fine for them and it's sufficiently universal.

Maybe China's new HDMI replacement will take off over there and make its way into devices over here, but I'm not holding out hope.


Apparently, the Hisense U8QG has DP-over-USB-C support. This might be the Trojan horse for DP in the living room.

Many TV manufacturers are part of the HDMI forum...

https://hdmiforum.org/members/


Here's a stupid question: per the site, "any entity wishing to make an active and material contribution to the development of future HDMI Specifications" can join the HDMI Forum for $15,000 p.a., and the Board of Directors is elected by majority vote by members.

Is there anything other than the money and desire to do so stopping 100 well-heeled Linux users from joining up and packing the board with open source-friendly directors who would as their first official act grant AMD permission to release its driver?


You’d want to submarine it because the forum could change its rules in “defense”.

But yes, it wouldn’t be much to do.


DRM, I believe

I don't think so, DisplayPort incorporates the same HDCP encryption standard that HDMI uses.

edit: the source that I found was incorrect, and this statement is false.

DRM is optional with DisplayPort but mandatory with HDMI.


Did that change in a more recent version? According to the (admittedly old) source linked from the Wikipedia article, integrators are allowed to skip HDCP but incentivized with reduced royalties if they do support it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081218170701/http://www.hdmi.o...

> For each end-user Licensed Product, fifteen cents (US$0.15) per unit sold.

> If the Adopter reasonably uses the HDMI logo on the product and promotional materials, then the rate drops to five cents (US$0.05) per unit sold.

> If the Adopter implements HDCP content protection as set forth in the HDMI Specification, then the royalty rate is further reduced by one cent (US$0.01) per unit sold, for a lowest rate of four cents (US$0.04) per unit.


You're right, the source that I found was incorrect.

It seems pretty difficult to prevent two other countries from trading, especially when it is sort of low-volume (I mean how many boats full of GPUs was this? It isn’t like oil or something, where we can see the infrastructure to consume it via satellite).

Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes.

I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.

Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.


> I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.

Your idea obviously doesn't work. You're basically advocating for something like Chronic lymphocyte leukemia at the society level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_lymphocytic_leukemia).


> Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.

It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.

0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...


Well, thanks I guess. I think it is a cute idea, not a serious one really. At least, I definitely haven’t worked the details.

We’d have to be maintained. Maybe that could be part of the deal. Humans are always changing anyway, so I think we’d couldn’t be left entirely at rest. Maybe we should be run slowly, to just to make sure things are still working. Then we don’t have to worry about at-rest type bitrot.


If my files could beg for their lives to be kept up-to-date with new storage media, I probably wouldn't have lost so many over time.

Me too, definitely. Should I get bored I could always go about and insult every being that ever lived and will live in the entire universe - in alphabetical order.

I feel that those that would choose immortality are so self-important that they would not get any wiser from their additional time on earth.

Maybe you are overthinking it.

Maybe you're under thinking it

Contrary to what one might think, if you were to live forever, you might end up taking insane risks and trying anything and everything.

> Put us in computers.

Unfortunately, that's only available for premium max customers. Also you should know, plus is now standard.


whenever I imagine immortality en masse I imagine the hobbies that people started experimenting with after exposure to the concept of deathlessness in the short story 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect'.

that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.

it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.


I think that if no one died of old age, predators would eventually emerge that preyed on the old. It seems like it's an inescapable part of nature.

As I said in another comment, I'm against immortality because old people need to make way for new generations. But this comment is cute. I like the idea that we'd be there and we're able to see how people are doing, but we're not influencing the world anymore. Though I could also imagine at some point it could become depressing in bad times when there's nothing you can do, or boring after tens of thousands of years of repetition. I can also imagine some bad spirits trying to break out and influence worldly affairs.

> old people need to make way for new generations

The main problem with extended lifespan will not be that some people will amass extreme wealth and power while living centuries, and they'll oppress the younger generations, who will not have a fair chance in life.

The much more likely problem will be that old people will not adjust to the new technologies. Lots of them will be victims to "pig butchering" schemes. Or they'll simply be illiterate in the new ways of life. If medicine makes tremendous progress, we might end up with a good chunk of our society being elderly, healthy, but socially unadjusted and estranged. Especially with more and more people being childless. Imagine someone who is 110 years old, with no living relatives, secluded in a nursing home, not knowing how to use the internet, or whatever the equivalent of that will be at that point in time.

These people deserve pity. But to they need to "make way for new generations"? That feels a bit eugenic to me.


I'm not sure why people have it in their heads that this "making way" requires one to be cast into the formless void instead of, like, a gated community.

I do think we're significant more likely to solve immortality than the problem of getting old rich powerful people to relinquish their grip on wealth and power

> the problem of getting old rich powerful people to relinquish their grip on wealth and power

This is a solved problem, guillotines worked wonders for this back in the day.


Exactly... Nothing can stop the masses. Plus, we have laws that can change and adapt.

Maybe we could set it up so the “spirits” can just talk to the “living” when the latter start the conversation. That seems like a reasonable way of setting things up.

It’s all a bit fanciful of course—we’d basically be setting up an emulation of various spiritual beliefs, and there’s no reason to believe anybody would go along with the constraints. But it is fun to think about.


Impossible to know if there is something like Sheol after death, so we thought, "why not make our own eternal emptiness?"

Being stuck in a computer might not be so bad. "Wake up" once a year decade for a few hours, see what happened, go back to "sleep". Immortality on call.

> Put us in computers

I feel like this is a modern version of believing in souls. You are matter, not data. If you find a way to simulate yourself on a computer, this will not prevent you from experiencing death. And if that's the case, what's the point? Stroking your ego with the knowledge that a simulation of you will stick around for some time after you give up the ghost?


Maybe we’re already the simulations, just, this part of our memories is the back-propagation used to figure out where the saved copy came from.

>But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point.

And how is that supposed to happen once the rich and powerful who finance and own the rights to that immortality tech succeed in their research?

In a world where basic health care is barely accessible in the US and under constant attack, how is immortality supposed to be given to the common men and women? Through asinine "work requirements", like Medicaid? Through UnitedHealthcare's insurance?


"I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice."

Get out of here, Nwabudike. This doesn’t concern you.

You won't have immortality, but Jeff Bezos & friends might.

How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?


Agreed. If immortality was discovered tomorrow (or at least some sort of anti-aging treatment), there’s no way it would become available to a regular person. All of us would still age and die, but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.

> but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.

We all know what the ruled do when they get really pissed. The prospective ghouls know it very well too.


Somebody should try a smart populist movement instead. My least favorite thing about my favored (or rather least disfavored) party is that we seem to believe “we must win without appealing to the populace too directly, that would simply be uncouth.”

Is there any reason to assume they are “so focused” on it? Keeping an eye on unit or per-weight prices is somewhat conventional and pretty easy—at least I think most major grocery chains around here include that info right on the sticker.

At least where I'm at they're legally required to include that info and they appear to comply maliciously whenever possible. Sometimes it's slightly wrong. Often the unit of weight changes between items of the same sort. It's absurd.

I've been using Gemini or Chat GPT in store to quickly calculate the cost-per when two like items use different measures ex. ounces vs. lbs.

Is philosophy actually hung up on that? I assumed “what is consciousness” was a big question in philosophy in the same way that whether or not Schrödinger’s cat is alive or not is a big question in physics: which is to say, it is not a big question, it is just an evocative little example that outsiders get caught up on.

That's just one example sure, but yes, it does still take up brain cycles. There are many areas in philosophy that are exploring better paths. Wheeler, Floridi, Bartlett, paths deriving from Kripke.

But we still have papers being published like "The modal ontological argument for atheism" that hinges on if s4 or s5 are valid.

Now this kind of paper is well argued and is now part of the academic literature, and that's good, but it's still a nerd snipe subject.


The UI of the Internet (search) has recently gotten quite bad. In this light it is pretty obvious why Google is working heavily on these models.

I fully expect local modes to eat up most other LLM applications—there’s no reason for your chat buddy or timer setter to reach out to the internet, but LLMs are pretty good at vibes based search, and that will always require looking at a bunch of websites, so it should slot exactly into the gap left by search engines becoming unusable.


The reason search got so bad, even pretending google themselves are some beneficial actors, is because it is a directly adversarial process. It is profitable to be higher in search results than you "naturally" would be, so of course people attack it.

Google's entire theory of founding was that you could do better than Yahoo hand picking websites with an algorithm, and pagerank was the demonstration, but IMO that was only possible with a dataset that was non-adversarial because you couldn't "attack" yahoo and friend's processes from the data itself.

The moment that changed, the moment pagerank was used in production, the game was up. As long as you try to use content to judge search ranking, content will be changed, modified, abused, cheated to increase your search rank.

The very moment it becomes profitable to do the same for LLM "search", it will happen. LLMs are rather vulnerable to "attack", and will run into the exact same adversarial environment that nullified the effectiveness of pagerank.

This is orthogonal also to if you believe Google let search be shittier to improve their ad empire. LLM "search" will have exactly this same problem if you believe it exists.

If you build a credit card fraud model on a dataset that contains no attacks, you will build a rather bad fraud model. The same is true of pagerank and algorithmic search.


Oh, that’s an interesting thought, I was really hoping LLMs would break the cycle there but of course there’s no reason to assume they’d be immune to adversarial content optimization.

I dunno. It kinda works, and points for converting the whole article. But something is lost in the switch-up here. The size of a laptop is more or less the size of the display (unless we’re going to get weird and have a projector built in), so it is basically a figure-of-merit.

Nobody actually wants more weights in their LLMs, right? They want the things to be “smarter” in some sense.


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