brigade (u/brigade) - Readit News

brigade commented on Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law wired.com/story/bluesky-g... · Posted by u/BallsInIt

shadowgovt · a day ago

Meanwhile, nothing has changed on Mastodon.

(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).

brigade · 18 hours ago

Mississippi can’t unless they can establish personal jurisdiction over a specific Mastodon operator. Which if that instance’s owner/operators don’t live in Mississippi, probably requires a novel application of the Zippo test [1] that’s a bit questionable for how noncommercial Mastodon tries to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...

brigade commented on Popular Japanese smartphone games have introduced external payment systems english.kyodonews.net/art... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

numpad0 · 21 hours ago

Apple did this to itself. Reportedly it was Jobs' opinion turned policy that Apple don't do games or pornography.

Exactly this policy and their interference to app developers created a selection pressure and a cutout hole in shape of "only slightly gamelike && technically not pornographic && in high demand", and the category of apps more accurately represented as "strip clubs with casinos with no cash-out" filled the vacuum like a Ghibli film blob monster.

Early iOS games were more game-like. Apps like SNES remakes, flappy birds and music games, were more common, but they all converged down and down into porn territory.

It doesn't happen naturally; not even pornographic game markets, let alone Steam or Itch, aren't as badly infested with gambling as App Store. It only happened artificially by how Apple ran it over the past ~15 years.

brigade · 19 hours ago

Microtransaction infested games were inevitable even if mobile gaming didn’t exist. Like, of the top 10 highest lifetime grossing games, 3 are arcade pay-per-play (the original microtransaction), 6 are f2p that got their start on PC, and only one is mobile-first / only.

Last year, 58% of PC gaming revenue was from microtransactions, and that percentage is only growing.

brigade commented on USB-C for Lightning iPhones obsoless.com/products/iph... · Posted by u/colinprince

colejohnson66 · 25 days ago

Lightning only ever supported USB 2.0. Theoretically, the free serial pins could’ve been used for the SuperSpeed 3.0 pins, but Apple never did.

brigade · 25 days ago

They supported superspeed for the lightning iPad pros by doubling the number of pins (top and bottom rows)

Only the lightning to usb3 camera adapter used them

brigade commented on Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over censorship polygon.com/news/616835/v... · Posted by u/mrzool

x0x0 · a month ago

I read a long interview about porn regulation and the star-chamber-esque process whereby visa and mastercard determine what porn is allowed.

Fundamentally, it's a failure of government. The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules. But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.

brigade · a month ago

Governments have made a variety of rules on what acceptable for their individual country. The issue is that some groups don't like that governments (often, governments other than their own) aren't as restrictive as they want.

Like here, the driving group is Australian. Similar groups have been quite successful in getting the Australian government to ban the sale of video games with content they find objectionable, but is very arguably non-pornographic, like Hunter × Hunter: Nen × Impact. To the point that they're far more restrictive than Nintendo.

brigade commented on FFmpeg devs boast of another 100x leap thanks to handwritten assembly code tomshardware.com/software... · Posted by u/harambae

saati · a month ago

The AVX2 version was still 64x faster than the C one, so AVX-512 is just 50% improvement over that. Hand vectorized assembly is very much the key to the gains.

brigade · a month ago

The only material difference AVX2 makes is that it can't saturate L1 bandwidth. Which would imply that 100x for AVX-512 is only for frames that fit within L1.

And... yep, the benchmark on 256x16 frames. [1]

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-July/346729.h...

brigade commented on FFmpeg devs boast of another 100x leap thanks to handwritten assembly code tomshardware.com/software... · Posted by u/harambae

cpncrunch · a month ago

It's still unclear from your explanation how it's actually used in practice. I run thousands of ffmpeg conversions every day, so it would be useful to know how/if this is likely to help me.

Are you saying that it's run once during a conversion as part of the process? Or that it's a specific flag that you give, it then runs this function, and returns output on the console?

(Either of those would be a one-time affair, so would likely result in close to zero speed improvement in the real world).

brigade · a month ago

This is a new filter that hasn’t even been committed yet, it only runs if explicitly specified, and would only ever be specified by someone that already knows that they don’t know the characteristics of their video.

So you wouldn’t ever run this.

brigade commented on FFmpeg devs boast of another 100x leap thanks to handwritten assembly code tomshardware.com/software... · Posted by u/harambae

cpncrunch · a month ago

Article is unclear what will actually be affected. It mentions "rangedetect8_avx512" and calls it an obscure function. So, what situations is it actually used for, and what is the real-time improvement in performance for the entire conversion process?

brigade · a month ago

It's not conversion. Rather, this filter is used for video where you don't know whether the pixels are video or full range, or whether the alpha is premultiplied, and determining that information. Usually so you can tag it correctly in metadata.

And the function in question is specifically for the color range part.

brigade commented on FFmpeg devs boast of another 100x leap thanks to handwritten assembly code tomshardware.com/software... · Posted by u/harambae

tombert · a month ago

Actually a bit surprised to hear that assembly is faster than optimized C. I figured that compilers are so good nowadays that any gains from hand-written assembly would be infinitesimal.

Clearly I'm wrong on this; I should probably properly learn assembly at some point...

brigade · a month ago

It's AVX512 that makes the gains, not assembly. This kernel is simple enough that it wouldn't be measurably faster than C with AVX512 intrinsics.

And it's 100x because a) min/max have single instructions in SIMD vs cmp+cmov in scalar and b) it's operating in u8 precision so each AVX512 instruction does 64x min/max. So unlike the unoptimized scalar that has a throughput under 1 byte per cycle, the AVX512 version can saturate L1 and L2 bandwidth. (128B and 64B per cycle on Zen 5.)

But, this kernel is operating on an entire frame; if you have to go to L3 because it's more than a megapixel then the gain should halve (depending on CPU, but assuming Zen 5), and the gain decreases even more if the frame isn't resident in L3.