It's not new, it's been the prevalent way of being for thousands of years - we had a brief moment of piece with the creation of the UN.
But apparently there are a lot of countries that think the UN and international law is cumbersome, and are in the way of securing their "sovereignty" (more like securing regimes) - it was obvious this was going to be outcome.
Funny enough, some of those have collapsed or are in the verge of collapsing: Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Russia...
Let's hope Europe doesn't flip to far right and start their own campaign, history shows they can be quite effective and destructive.
The best outcome is that this is just the final breath of those old regimes, and this is temporary.
Including but not limited to: A Turkish supply convoy, reportedly carrying small arms, machine-guns and ammunition, was bombed by what is believed to have been Russian airstrikes in the northwestern town of Azaz, in north-western Syria.
I've seen this rhetoric of "Russia made Turkey pay just two short years later!" on reddit as well, and it sounded just as farfetched there as it does here.
And what makes you think Russia didn't pay a price for that? Look at the Turkish support in Ukraine, or look at Syria - they literally removed Russia from the middle east.
They were warm words from two men seeking a good working relationship.
Russia wants continued access to its Tartous naval port and Hmeimim military airbase on Syria's Mediterranean coast.
Sharaa suggested he would allow this, saying Syria would "respect all agreements concluded throughout the great history" of their bilateral relations.
In turn, he wants help to consolidate his power in Syria, secure its borders and rescue a parlous economy with access to Russian energy and investment.
Where are the concrete actions? Is Russia going to surrender their puppet and the stolen assets? Is Russia going to pay for the reparations of their destruction?
Those words mean nothing.
Do I need to grab the quote from Putin stating that no one will interfere in Syria or they will have to face Russia? (I'm paraphrasing but you get the point)
At this level of diplomacy it's actions that matter, not words. You have these guys say one thing one day, and do the opposite the other day.
They weren’t saturation attacks; in fact many were surprised by their small size compared to preceding True Promises. Unlike Israel, which had to tap out after 12 days, with a face-saving intervention by the US, Iran was in for the long haul.
> Missing something
Israel + US + friends had the highest density air defence network with plenty of interceptors and it wasn’t enough. They had all the time and space to operate without threat and yet by the end Iranian drones were hitting Israel. Given area and supplies and proximity, it’s just hopeless for Ukraine. Also, previously claimed interception rates were exaggerated.
You are massively downplaying the scale of the attack. Iran sent hundreds of missiles in a go. They had something like 1500 launchers so that was a major portion of their capabilities. Perhaps everything they could muster.
By the end the attacks tailed off, because they simply ran out of launchers and missiles. True their strikes got more successful as they started avoiding central israel, but it was more like a 5% hit rate instead of 1%.
At the end of the day the attacks led to a couple of dozen deaths instead of the predicted 500 to 2000. Irans entire command structure had been battered and they were desperate for an exit, even though it's true that Israel would have been unable to sustain the war for too much longer. In the end israel was able to shrug off everything that Iran could throw at it, at the same time as severely degrading their capabilities. I think a more accurate conclusions is that you need to combine air defence with intelligence and offense in order for it to work.
That 70% figure sounds wrong. I've seen wildly different numbers online. One thing is certain that hundreds of interceptors were fired. I would be surprised if just 2 thaad systems did the lions share of the work. That certainly doesn't match up to the claims of the IDF, and if it was true the Americans wouldn't stop boasting about it.
> You are massively downplaying the scale of the attack. Iran sent hundreds of missiles in a go.
The report I linked and you obviously didn’t read directly contradicts you: 574 ballistics total with no wave larger than 40.
> because they simply ran out of launchers and missiles
No evidence of the former and the latter is laughable.
> In the end…
… they murdered a bunch people, destroyed a bunch of things and achieved no strategic goal. No follow-through, no follow-up. Luckily, being the Jewel in the Crown, they are largely isolated from the consequences of such aggression and failure.
> 70% figure sounds wrong
Feelings. Wild claims online. Well, it’s quite possible Israel as well the US used even more interceptors than they care to admit. But that doesn’t help your case.
> That certainly doesn't match up to the claims of the IDF, and if it was true the Americans wouldn't stop boasting about it.
I highly recommend them as they test well for freshness, but if you aim to get around 2G of EPA/DHA, you'll need 8 capsules. To your point that's a lot of capsules if you don't like swallowing pills. Compare with prescription below:
Kirkland Signature Fish Oil provides 151.8 mg EPA and 119.1 mg DHA per tablet, totaling 270.9 mg EPA+DHA (Softgel).
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Because of the issues with rancidity, I strongly prefer Costco because they churn through the stuff like there is no tomorrow. Their supply chains seem to be pretty straightforward from OEM to internal warehouse to to clearance. Just make sure to keep it refrigerated and move it from shelf to a cool place in a timely fashion period.
These days, when we see noise/grain in an end product it has likely been added in post-production. So, ideally, studios would provide distributors with a noiseless source plus grain synthesis parameters. Bonus: many viewers would welcome an option to turn it off.
> provide distributors with a noiseless source plus grain synthesis parameters.
What parameters would that be? Make it look like Eastman Ektachrome High-Speed Daylight Film 7251 400D? For years, people have taken film negative onto telecines and created content of grain to be used as overlays. For years, colorists have come up with ways of simulating the color of specific film stocks by using reference film with test patterns that's been made available.
If a director/producer wants film grain added to their digital content, that's where it should be done in post. Not by some devs working for a streaming platform. The use of grain or not is a creative decision made by the creators of the work. That's where it should remain
> If a director/producer wants film grain added to their digital content, that's where it should be done in post. Not by some devs working for a streaming platform. The use of grain or not is a creative decision made by the creators of the work. That's where it should remain
Why? If you're spending a significant chunk of your bits just transmitting data that could be effectively recreated on the client for free, isn't that wasteful? Sure, maybe the grains wouldn't be at the exact same coordinates, but it's not like the director purposefully placed each grain in the first place.
I recognize that the locally-produced grain doesn't look quite right at the moment, but travel down the hypothetical with me for a moment. If you could make this work, why wouldn't you?
--------
...and yes, I acknowledge that once the grain is being added client side, the next logical step would be "well, we might as well let viewers turn it off." But, once we've established that client-side grain makes sense, what are you going to do about people having preferences? Should we outlaw de-noising video filters too?
I agree that the default setting should always match what the film maker intended—let's not end up with a TV motion smoothing situation, please for the love of god—but if someone actively decides "I want to watch this without the grain for my own viewing experience"... okay? You do you.
...and I will further acknowledge that I would in fact be that person! I hate grain. I modded Cuphead to remove the grain and I can't buy the Switch version because I know it will have grain. I respect the artistic decision but I don't like it and I'm not hurting anyone.
> Why? If you're spending a significant chunk of your bits just transmitting data that could be effectively recreated on the client for free, isn't that wasteful? Sure, maybe the grains wouldn't be at the exact same coordinates, but it's not like the director purposefully placed each grain in the first place.
I'm sorry your tech isn't good enough to recreate the original. That does not mean you get to change the original because your tech isn't up to the task. Update your task to better handle the original. That's like saying an image of the Starry Night doesn't retain the details, so we're going to smear the original to fit the tech better. No. Go fix the tech. And no, this is not fixing the tech. It is a band-aid to cover the flaws in the tech.
> I'm sorry your tech isn't good enough to recreate the original. That does not mean you get to change the original because your tech isn't up to the task.
The market has spoken and it says that people want to watch movies even when they don't have access to a 35mm projector or a projector than can handle digital cinema packages, so nobody is seeing the original outside a theater.
Many viewers are bandwidth limited, so there's tradeoffs ... if this film grain stuff improves available picture quality at a given bandwidth, that's a win. IMHO, Netflix blogs about codec things seem to focus on bandwidth reduction, so I'm never sure if users with ample bandwidth end up getting less quality or not; that's a valid question to ask.
The differences are actual film grain vs some atrocious RGB noise artificially added by the streamer. How is that unclear? What else could we be talking about?
In theory though, I don't see any reason why client-side grain that looks identical to the real thing shouldn't be achievable, with massive bandwidth savings in the process.
It won't be, like, pixel-for-pixel identical, but that was why I said no director is placing individual grain specks anyway.
Let's be clear. The alternative isn't "higher bandwidth" it's "aggressive denoising during stream encode". If the studio is adding grain in post then describing that as a set of parameters will result in a higher quality experience for the vast majority of those viewing it in this day and age.
If the original is an actual production shot on film, the film grain is naturally part of it. Removing it never looks good. If it is something shot on a digital camera and had grain added in post, then you can go back to before the grain was added and then do it client side without degradation. But you can never have identical when it originated on film. That's like saying you can take someone's freckles away and put them back in post just rearranged and call it the same.
> once we've established that client-side grain makes sense, what are you going to do about people having preferences?
I already normalize audio (modern US produced media is often atrocious), modify gamma and brightness, and probably some other stuff. Oh and it's not as though I'm viewing on a color calibrated monitor in the first place.
The purists can purchase lossless physical copies. The rest of us would benefit from such improvements.
Netflix has their own in-house studio, right? The encoding and lossy compression is going to happen anyway. It seems like an easy win, for their directors to provide a description of the grain they want, so it can be replicated on the user side.
what does having an in-house studio have to do with it? they stream more content than just their own, and so they would not have creative license to alter content. they would only have some type of distribution license to stream the content as provided
Because they previously did not do commercials their original TV shows were not written with pauses every few minutes. They have approved cameras. They spend heavily on movie star salaries and skimp on set production.
And yet here we are: DNR -> fancy grain -> DNR -> basic, approximated grain. Because noise doesn’t compress. And you get compression artifacts even in Blu-ray releases. What’s the point of applying fancy grain when what a lot viewers end up seeing is an ugly smudge?
Because it looks amazing in the editing studio. Just like the sound mix is incredible on the Atmos monitors in the sound mixing room, even though the home viewers have a soundbar at best and tiny stereo speakers in a flat panel typically. The dynamics and dialog channel will be fucked. But that’s user error.
What, cramped into a room with tons of other people who can't help themselves from making noise or moving in front of you while you only have limited and overpriced snack options. As nice as a big screen and professional sound equipment is the downsides make the experience strictly worse than a big OLED + half decent soundbar.
You must live alone. Even at home, you have people called family or friends that do not necessarily sit idle while watching TV. Watching with kids at home is worse than at the movies because they are at home and don't have the same social rules to follow. People at home are also not under the social rules of not using their devices, and second screening has become the norm.
Yes, a theater probably holds more people than your typical viewing experience at home. Unless you go to the movies during the week and avoid crowds. The last movie I saw at the theater was on a Tuesday after opening weekend as 4pm. There might have been 2 other people in the entire theater. It was amazing.
Yeah I always roll my eyes when people get so mad about compressed (as in reduced dynamic range) audio. I just want to watch / listen to stuff without annoying my neighbors and don't particularly care whether or not the volume of gunshots is realistic.
Theatrical release qualifies for certain awards and shiny statues. That's their concern. If a streaming platform wants to give them enough cash to beat out projected box office earnings, then they'll take it if they don't have any grandiose visions of golden statues.
At some point, it would not surprise me for Netflix to require this to be provided. While not negating what you concluded, I just think the impetus for the result is important to distinguish.
Currently, in order to deal with noisy masters, Netflix has to either:
1. Denoise the master, then add AV1 FGS metadata to tell players how to reconstruct the noise in the master (which is what the blog post is about) to get back the original image the director saw and approved
2. Do nothing (which is what they were doing), and let some of the noise get blurred or erased by the quantization step of the encoding process, or worse, burn shittons of coding bits trying to describe the exact noise in the frame, which hurts visual quality of the things people actually look at
All of these imply changes to the image that the director decided on to get around the underlying fact that deliberately adding noise to an image is, from a signal processing perspective, really stupid. But if we are going to do it, we can at least ensure it happens as far down the chain as possible so that Netflix's encoding doesn't destroy the noise. That's the idea you responded to: have the production company deliver a master with FGS metadata instead of baked-in film grain.
That some other country gets over 55% of its budget from the West and almost all its materiel. Total direct “aid” over 320 billion so far. Total costs to the West much higher still.
And the result for Ukraine is more territory lost, more destruction, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. No one would and could stop them from continuing the war on their own but imagine what that would look like.
And the result for the West is a stronger, hostile Russia with deepening ties to China, North Korea etc. Strategic failure.
>Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal
No. What we saw was a noisy attempt by the US to salvage its strategic failure in Ukraine/Russia. Russians weren’t fooled. It failed.
Hundreds of thousands of casualties for Russia too. Haven't they considered just stopping?
Ukraine as client police state is not a casualty free environment either. Really the war started when pro-Russian security services killed over a hundred protesters at Euromaidan, back in 2014.
Someone who genuinely cared about Russian lives, rather than just the regime or contrarianism, would want the Russians to pull out immediately like the Americans out of Afghanistan.
We don’t have to speculate. They’ve just presented to Ukraine and published their conditions for ceasefire or settlement.
The reaction suggests Ukraine/the West would rather continue. Of course, demands will only increase.
> Really the war started with Euromaidan
Sure it wasn’t when Ukrainian nationalists burned 42 people to death in Odessa?
>regime, pull out
Ah, but Ukraine/the West were given so many opportunities to settle this peacefully. Even the March 2023 settlement (which has been published) was dangerously generous, for said regime. But peace was not on Western leaders’ mind. They wanted something else.
(Preposterous to compare Ukraine/Russia with Afghanistan/US.)
I'm not talking about whether you guys should give him money.
But it's totally normal for a country to try to defend itself.
I honestly don't understand why people seem to ignore this angle and just keep talking about budget and money and foreign interests and nato and what not.
Ok, you don't want to give Ukraine money for their defence, FINE, do not give them money!
But why do you have to frame it as zelenski is corrupt, traitor, murderer, boogyman or whatever.
No normal leader of a country being invaded would be expected to surrender their country. They would have been hanged by their own people.
What I find infuriating about this discourse is the double standard. At the same time the american right is absolutely going bezerk over "immigrant invasion" and when some other people suffer an invasion "nah, I don't see the problem, they will just get along fine if they surrender".
You're free to spend your money as you wish, but it's the total lack of empathy (about this and other causes) that rubs me the wrong way.
You've been continuing to use HN primarily for political/nationalistic battle, despite our having asked you more than once to stop. You've also been breaking the site guidelines badly in other ways too (such as with personal attacks, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524157).
Thanks, mopsi, I'm flattered. Have to say, though, I don’t think your valiant and steadfast defense of Ukraine’s e-turf makes as much of a difference as you think it does. Therefore I’d like you to consider putting your feet where your fingertips are: https://www.ildu.com.ua Every warm body makes a difference!
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've been breaking the site guidelines very badly for a long time, and we ban accounts that do that.
Since it doesn't look like we've warned you before, I'm not going to ban your account right now, but if you keep doing this, we're going to have to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
This means, among other things, not posting flamewar comments (including nationalistic flamewar), not attacking other users, and not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle.
I personally don't care about ukraine nor ukrainians; I have no stake in the game.
But I think all humans are fundamentally the same and when I see a bunch of humans fighting for their freedom I can understand them. I understand their motivations.
I also understand the imperialistic motivations. I understand russian need for status and pride and their relationship with their grandiose past. I understand all these emotions. All these emotions are exploited by various interests, sure, but nevertheless without those emotions of the masses war couldn't happen.
What irks me is when people do not want to put themselves in the clothes of somebody else at all, an d just conclude that one group of people is not entitled to have a given emotion. So Ukraine is not entitled to defend themselves because <insert_some_rational_reason> but russia is entitled to defend their separatists because <insert_some_rational_reason>.
It's the double standard that irks me.
I think we can agree that war is shit and everybody would be better off without it.
But, no, that's not the proposed alternative. The proposed alternative is that a group of people, in this case the Ukrainians, effectively surrender and become diminished. Future generations of russians will look at them and say "we're justified in treating you ask shit because after all we won and you lost". This happened over and over in history. Hell, this is why most white supremacists think they are the chosen ones, because whites conquered.
So how should I judge the people who want to defend themselves? I honestly cannot blame them from trying their best.
No, you’re still not getting it. This “double standard” is a figment of your imagination, it doesn’t exist. Roughly every country on Earth acknowledges Ukraine’s right to self-defense. A large number of them is materially supporting Ukraine.
They are free to defend themselves till the bitter end. No one is stopping them. And, theatrics aside, support isn’t ceasing either.
But they’re not winning. There’s no right to that.
If you cared about Russian and Ukrainian lives then you would be arguing for Russia to leave immediately. Only Russia can end this war, by retreating back to the internationally recognised borders.
Russia has "vital interests" that the whole world is, according to Russian imperialists such as yourself, obliged to bend over backwards to accommodate.
Well, guess what, we Europeans have vital interests too. Our vital interest is a free and independent Ukraine. Russia is not the only country with interests, you know!
If you think the cost for supporting Ukraine is too high, wait until you see the cost of Ukraine falling and Russian tanks crossing into NATO territory :^)
Not even the ability to pepper Ukraine with Kalibrs was hobbled.
You raise a good point, though. Why is the West, via its proxy, attacking (not for the first time, it must be said) a part of what it recognizes as Russia’s nuclear strategic assets? Sounds highly reckless and dangerous! What happened to winning?
And already—for the n-th time—escalation has made things worse for Ukrainians. More bombs and missiles are flying, restrictions were lifted.
Because good PR prolongs this war but doesn’t win it. Because ultimately, the interests of the nation, the regime, and its Western supporters are not aligned.
Being usable both strategically (with nukes) and operationally (with conventional weapons), they were essentially a sort of "dual-use". Fair game for Ukraine eh.
Spooks in general like to project a veneer of competence, downright invincibility. Entertainment media, journalists, experts play a big role in this. And by and large it works.
It’s especially true for spooks of a certain entity. Also, it’s easy to confuse brazenness, being protected from consequences, and usually downplayed or secret Western complicity with competence.
Yes, even in still limited numbers they have been highly effective. Hundreds of Ukrainian assets destroyed, and they have no real answer. Played a big part in Kursk becoming such a debacle. And Ukrainians cannot hope to match these numbers. All of this is why they are so obsessed with that one Russian fibre optics plant that’s in attack range. Which, however, is at most a minor source of drone fibre.
Now, even the USA invades foreign countries!
(https://x.com/EventsUkraine/status/2007431899107758263)
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