> "why not just run the checks at the backend's discretion?"

Because the other side may not be listening when the compute is done, and you don't want to cache the result of the computation because of privacy.

The sequence of events is:

1. Phone fires off a request to the backend. 2. Phone waits for response from backend.

The gap between 1 and 2 cannot be long because the phone is burning battery the entire time while it's waiting, so there are limits to how long you can reasonably expect the device to wait before it hangs up.

In a less privacy-sensitive architecture you could:

1. Phone fires off request to the backend. Gets a token for response lookup later. 2. Phone checks for a response later with the token.

But that requires the backend to hold onto the response, which for privacy-sensitive applications you don't want!

You can draw out a sort of performance hierachy, from fastest to slowest:

    * Optimized GPU code
    * CPU vectorized code
    * Static CPU unvectorized code
    * Dynamic CPU code

where the last one refers to the fact that a language like Python, in order to add two numbers together in its native, pure-Python mode, does a lot of boxing, unboxing, resolving of class types and checking for overrides, etc.

Each of those is at least an order of magnitude slower than the next one up the hierarchy, and most of them appreciably more than one. You're probably closer to think of them as more like 1.5 orders of magnitude as a sort of back-of-the-envelope understanding.

Using NumPy incorrectly can accidentally take you from the top one, all the way to the bottom one, in one fell swoop. That can be a big deal, real quick. Or real slow, as the case may be.

In more complicated scenarios, it matters how much computation is going how far down that hierarchy. If by "processing a video frame by frame" you mean something like "I wrote a for loop on the frames but all the math is still in NumPy", you've taken "iterating on frames" from the top to the bottom, but who cares, Python can iterate on even a million things plenty quickly, especially with everything else that is going on. If, by constrast, you mean that at some point you're iterating over each pixel in pure Python, you just fell all the way down that hierarchy for each pixel and you're in bigger trouble.

In my opinionated opinion, the trouble isn't so much that it's possible to fall down that stack. That is arguably a feature, after all; surely we should have the capability of doing that sort of thing if we want. The problem is how easy it is to do without realizing it, just by using Python in what looks like perfectly sensible ways. If you aren't a systems engineer it can be hard to tell you've fallen, and even if you are honestly the docs don't make it particularly easy to figure out.

If you want to checkout duckdb try QStudio. It's a free sql client with duckdb integrated: https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/help/duckdb-sql-editor. Disclaimer: I'm the main author.

You COMPLETELY missed the elephant in the room : 8K TVs have really, really massive CPUs that waste a TON of power (150-200w for the CPU, 300-400w for the TV, often!) Think 8 cores of the fastest arm 64-bit processors available plus extra hardware accelerators! They need this extra processing power to handle the 8K television load, such as upscaling and color transforms - which never happen when you are using them as a monitor!

So, 8K TVs are a big energy-suck! There's a reason why European regulations banned 100% of 8K TVs until the manufacturers undoubtedly paid for a loophole, and now 8K TVs in Europe are shipped in a super-power-saver mode where they consume just barely below the maximum standard amount of power (90w) ... but nobody leaves them in this mode because they look horrible and dim!

If everybody were to upgrade to an 8K TV tomorrow, then I think it would throw away all the progress we've made on Global Warming for the past 20 years ...

This is unfortunate, and perhaps more pernicious than obvious deep fakes, is a video filter that lies to the recipients.

Several years ago during the pandemic, I enlisted a job coach to get me hired. One of her paramount concerns was my eye-contact with the camera. She said it's so important. Am I paying attention? Am I an honorable man who maintains eye contact when I'm in a conversation? If I look away, am I collecting my thoughts, or prevaricating?

Many supervisors, managers, and teachers will judge their employees by whether they can pay attention during meetings, or if they're distracted, in their phone's screen, looking at keyboard, glancing off at children or spouse. Even more important, if you're meeting your wife and she can't even maintain your attention, what kind of husband are you?

If you employ a gadget to lie about this, then I hope they fire you and find someone who'll be honest. I hope your wife sends you to sleep on the sofa.