lukeschlather (u/lukeschlather)

lukeschlather commented on FFmpeg 8.0 ffmpeg.org/index.html#pr8... · Posted by u/gyan

conradev · 2 days ago

Yeah, you can give an LLM queries like “make this smaller with libx265 and add the hvc1 tag” or “concatenate these two videos” and it usually crushes it. They have a similar level of mastery over imagemagick, too!

lukeschlather · 13 hours ago

It's funny because GPU stuff like what this article is about is where the LLMs totally fall apart. I can make any LLM produce volumes hallucinations at the drop of a hat by asking it how to construct ffmpeg commands that use hardware acceleration.

lukeschlather commented on FFmpeg 8.0 ffmpeg.org/index.html#pr8... · Posted by u/gyan

mrandish · 2 days ago

I'd also include Regex in the list of dark arts incantations.

lukeschlather · 13 hours ago

Regex is only difficult because it's complicated, the primitives are all sensibly arranged and predictable. FFmpeg is layers of dark magic where the primitives are often inscrutable before you compose them.

lukeschlather commented on The US Department of Agriculture Bans Support for Renewables insideclimatenews.org/new... · Posted by u/mooreds

thelastgallon · a day ago

Next up: Ban all electric cars. Then ban all electricity. Standard Oil became the biggest company selling kerosene for lamps. We need to restore status quo!

lukeschlather · a day ago

The Trump administration has already sold many brand-new electric vehicles at a loss with the same sort of logic.

lukeschlather commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

TrackerFF · 3 days ago

I really do wonder if any of those rock star $100m++ hires managed to get a 9-figure sign-on bonus, or if the majority have year(s) long performance clauses.

Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.

lukeschlather · 3 days ago

I have never heard of anyone getting a sign on bonus that was unconditional. When I have had signing bonuses they were owed back prorated if my employment ended for any reason in the first year.

lukeschlather commented on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses technologyreview.com/2025... · Posted by u/jeffbee

gcr · 3 days ago

In 2011, Google claimed that each search query takes about 0.3Wh [1]. Earlier this year, Sam Altman also claimed about 0.3Wh avg use per query for OpenAI.

I'm honestly surprised that they're so similar. I've thought of LLM queries as being far more energy-intense than "just" a Google search, but maybe the takeaway is that ordinary Google searching is also quite energy-intense.

If I as a user just wanted an answer to a dumb question like, say, the meaning of some genZ slang, it seems about an order of magnitude to ask a small LLM running on my phone than to make a google search.

(Check my math: assuming the A16 CPU draws 5 watts peak for 20sec running Gemma or whatever on my iPhone, that’s 0.03Wh to answer a simple query, which is 10x cheaper)

Are training costs (esp. from failed runs) amortized in these estimates?

1: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-sear...

lukeschlather · 3 days ago

.3 Wh is 1080 joules. A liter of gasoline contains over 30 million joules. So this is like .034 milliliters of gasoline. But with grid power so even less than that since gasoline is very inefficient.

lukeschlather commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

bwfan123 · 3 days ago

Looks like the AWS CEO has changed religion. A year back, he was aboard the ai-train - saying AI will do all coding in 2 years [1]

Finally, the c-suite is getting it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41462545

lukeschlather · 3 days ago

He didn't actually say that. He said it's possible that within 2 years developers won't be writing much code, but he goes on to say:

"It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we're going to try to go build, because that's going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code...."

https://www.businessinsider.com/aws-ceo-developers-stop-codi...

If you read the full remarks they're consistent with what he says here. He says "writing code" may be a skill that's less useful, which is why it's important to hire junior devs and teach them how to learn so they learn the skills that are useful.

lukeschlather commented on GDPR meant nothing: chat control ends privacy for the EU [video] youtube.com/watch?v=3NyUg... · Posted by u/givemeethekeys

dlcarrier · 6 days ago

The term "anonymized data" is a bit jargony, but tracking everything a person does, but not storing the name or address of the person meets the definition most organizations use for "anonymized". It's very far from "anonymous".

lukeschlather · 6 days ago

Anonymization is a process which removes identifying information from data. Adding unique identifiers is the opposite of anonymizing data. A selection of the data stored in cookies might not contain any PII, but it still can't be said to be anonymized.

lukeschlather commented on GDPR meant nothing: chat control ends privacy for the EU [video] youtube.com/watch?v=3NyUg... · Posted by u/givemeethekeys

lukeschlather · 7 days ago

If this has the effect its proponents claim it will, it seems like substantially the larger outcome of this will be that government agents will be reviewing people's sexts. They say that false positives are rare, but how often is it okay for the government to be reviewing peoples' sexts? I found it a little hard to get concrete info on how exactly their image hashes work, but it sounds quite literally that if you've got a couple of young people (whether teens or twentysomethings) who are sexting, and their sexts look a bit like some piece of "known CSAM" if you squint, then a government agent will review it and possibly harass them.

Seems like eventually the law will get some poor girl killed when the authorities contact her parents about "CSAM," discover that it was the girl herself who took the picture and sent it to her boyfriend, her dad finds out she was having sex and does an honor killing.

But we're just supposed to trust that these image hashes have a small false positive rate, when there's no way to have transparent review without making it easy for adversaries to avoid the scan.

lukeschlather commented on GDPR meant nothing: chat control ends privacy for the EU [video] youtube.com/watch?v=3NyUg... · Posted by u/givemeethekeys

dlcarrier · 7 days ago

EU logic: Want to centrally track users with personally identifiably information? Great! Want to store anonymized data with local cookies, that the user can delete, disable, or doctor at any time? That should be heavily restricted with constant intrusive warnings.

lukeschlather · 7 days ago

The EU lets you store whatever you want in cookies as long as they are truly anonymous (do not contain unique identifiers.) What you call "anonymized data" is literally the opposite.

lukeschlather commented on A single lock of hair could rewrite what we know about Inca record-keeping science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/warrenm

WalterBright · 7 days ago

> Some researchers had speculated that literacy might have been widespread in Inca society, but Hyland’s discovery is the first physical evidence. Previously, “We had to rely on written documents by colonial era writers after the Spanish conquest,”

If literacy were widespread, why did only colonial writers write about them?

lukeschlather · 7 days ago

The conquistadors burned most native writings they could find, and didn't necessarily write down what they were burning. They also killed a lot of people, along with European disease, there were not many people left who were able to write, and writing carried risks.