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What's wrong with VLC?

Making such a bold, unsubstantiated claim is a curious item in an otherwise detailed document. I went looking for other explanations and found this gem: https://www.reddit.com/r/mpv/comments/m1sxjo/it_is_better_mp...

I think it might be one of those classic “everyone should just get good like me” style opinions you find polluting some subject matter communities.


Yes, absolutely. The top answer on that Reddit link starts with: "MPV is the ultimate video player on planet earth, all the others are junk in comparison" and doesn't mention VLC at all. That's not a helpful answer, it's just signalling that they're a huge fan of MPV, with nothing to suggest they've ever even tried anything else.

In the olden times of not working/playing movies (00's) and being a clueless tech support for ppl even more clueless about them computers,

The vlc was how you could get any movie to work (instead of messing with all these codecs, which apparently, in lieu to another comment in this thread, aren't really codecs).


my biggest pet peeve was that VLC was always considered a streamer and treated local files as streams as well. for the longest time, stepping within the video was not possible. reverse play was also a bane as well, even with i-frame only content. i have long found players that are better for me, but still find myself using VLC frequently because it still has features these other players do not.

This matches with my observation, VLC tends to be more tolerant of slightly broken files or random issues that you encounter when streaming. Especially for hls streams, vlc often works when ffplay refuses to play it, I believe because vlc uses their own demuxer (instead of relying on libavformat).

Lmao this will not work


You're absolutely right!


Ehhh just calling a raw LLM is not going to replace anyone and be prone to hallucination, sure. But lawyers are increasingly using LLM systems, and there's law-specific products that are heavily grounded (ie. they can only respond from source material).


I don't know if that's so much a mistake as it is ambiguity though? To me, using the viewer's perspective in this case seems totally reasonable.

Does it still use the viewer's perspective if the prompt specifies "Put a strawberry in the _patient's left eye_"? If it does, then you're onto something. Otherwise I completely disagree with this.


“Eye on the left” is different from “the left eye”. First can be ambiguous, second really isn’t.


I think "the left eye" in this particular case (a photo of a skull made of pancake batter) is still very slightly ambiguous. "The skull's left eye" would not be.


Interesting, because I would say the opposite. "On the left" suggests left of image, "the left eye" could be any version of left.


I guess there's some ambiguity regarding whether or not this can be ambiguous. Because it seems like it can to me.


“The right socket” can only be implied one way when talking about a body just like you only have one right hand despite the fact that it is on my left when looking at you.


I think the fact that anyone in this thread thinks it's ambiguous is proof by definition that it's ambiguous.


"Plug into right power socket"

Same language, opposite meaning because of a particular noun + context.

I think the only thing obvious here is that there is no obvious solution other than adding lots of clarification to your prompt.


I think you missed the entire point?


No, they just disagree with you.


How do you disagree with having a right and a left hand?


GP is using right as in “correct”, not directionality.


No, I don't think they are.

If you are facing a wall-plate with two power sockets on it side by side and you are telling someone to plug something in, which one would be "the right socket", and which would be "the left socket"?

If above the wall-plate is a photo of a person and you are someone to draw a tattoo on the photo, which is "the right arm" and which is "the left arm"?

Same wording, different expectation.


Power plugs are not people.

ETA: and if I were telling someone which socket to plug something into, it would absolutely be from the prospective of the person doing the plugging, not from inside the wall.


Neither are sculptures of skulls made of pancake batter.


> Power plugs are not people.

Agreed. So the "obvious" meaning of left and right differ depend on context, which is what pphysch was pointing out.


"Right hand" is practically a bigram that has more meaning, since handedness is such a common topic.

Also context matters, if you're talking to someone you would say "right shoulder" for _their_ right since you know it's an observer with different vantage point. Talking about a scene in a photo "the right shoulder" to me would more often mean right portion of the photo even if it was the person's left shoulder.


Having one person in the frame isn't enough to unambiguously put us into the "talking about a body" context.


Yes casual racism is very amusing


And anyway, we Italians have done some good things in the past. Not that this can't be a new EmDrive.


More sites should be like this


Why? There’s a huge amount of JavaScript bloat, but I’ve never really had an issue with css on any site. If anything, I wish more sites supported a dark mode.


CSS bloat is there also, perhaps not as big a deal. I think that complexity is the main enemy (both JS and CSS and React and npm …) or over on the WordPress plugin morass. I like that the OP is aiming for a simpler world, kind of like the HTMX and Pico CSS ideas that I currently prefer.


> perhaps not as big a deal

If I load CNN.com right now and scroll to the bottom, I receive 26.9 MB over the wire.

Of that, 52.2 kB are CSS.

5,547 kB are JS.

CSS bloat is not as big a deal.


52K of CSS should be an opportunity for optimization but you're right, we're so far gone on javascript we should really focus on the mountains before the molehills.


I'm curious how much of that JS is functional and how much is adware.

The adware is typically injected onto the page by 3rd parties so it's nothing the web devs can do anything about.


> how much of that JS is functional

Lots of sites become more functional with JS disabled.


I'm more curious how much of that js is intended to load more js that has been blocked (by the browser, adblocker, hosts file/DNS, etc).

CNN specifically isn't a site I visit much, but most news sites load a ton of third-party stuff (being on mobile makes it hard to check)


It is the web devs' responsibility to say no to bs. However, very few do, and some even welcome the bloat as a job guarantee.


This is not how the web works.

That's like asking any other software dev to "say no" to letting other programs run concurrent with their own. It's just not within scope and any attempts to have your program behave this way will be impossible to maintain.

If you're a business that wants to inject ads without anyone getting in the way, all you have to do is host the pages somewhere the dev can't touch. This would likely be a CDN or similar for a multitude of other good reasons. So the content security policy is now only configurable by the admin who really doesn't give a shit and doesn't even know what's being hosted on there.


Use lite.cnn.com instead.


Tailwind v4 tree shakes too so even thats not technically bloated anymore


Tree shaking and bloat are different concerns. And, technically, is tailwind tree shaking? I thought they only built styles that the compiler could find being used rather than removing styles the compiler couldn't find being used.


Tailwind v4 tree shakes automatically on imports is what I understand.

I don't think it's identical to package tree shaking but the outcome is the same.

I don't think it was doing it before v4, or if it was, not as efficiently


Tree shaking is actually a sign of bloat. It is a tool on top of a bloated mess, to fix that mess. It would be better not to make a mess in the first place.


Tree-shaking really only works for languages that are designed to be tree-shakable, which no web language is.


Type/JavaScript are extremely tree shakable if using esm.. what makes you think it's not?


Only at the most crude level. Ever heard of "virtual functions"?


Runtime polymorphism is great but I wouldn't consider that to be tree shaking.


But even a small bit of css can slow down page rendering. https://www.granola.ai/blog/dont-animate-height


That article refers to literally one line of css. Cutting down the volume of css does not have value, cutting down on animations and other expensive directives does.


If a small amount of CSS can, then so can a similarly small amount of JS, since JS can set styles.


I think that’s moot. Everyone agrees there’s a pretty big bloat problem in JS, not so much because of single costly lines (though, they exist) and more the entire ecosystem of includes


Why not? Code is liability. Less code to maintain also enhance engineer's ability to reason the code and implement better website.


Code is a liability lends well to tech debt, wasting time refactoring css to reduce the size by tens of kilobytes has no real world return on investment in most cases.


No one’s saying anything about it being a cause though … association is not cause


Several comments already seem to assume that already though


What makes you think it’s a deferrable workload? Companies don’t buy all that expensive hardware to just have it sit there inactive.


You're conflating two things that shouldn't be:

(1) the utilization factor over the obsolescence-limited "useful" life of the hardware; (2) the short-term (sub-month) training job scheduling onto a physical cluster.

For (1) it's acceptable to, on average, not operate one month per year as long as that makes the electricity opex low enough.

For (2) yeah, large-scale pre-training jobs that spend millions of compute on what's overall "one single" job, those are often ok to wait a few days to a very few weeks as would be from just dropping HPC cluster system operation to standby power/deep sleep on the p10 worst days each year as far as renewable yield in the grid-capacity-limited surroundings of the datacenter goes. And if you can further run systems a little power-tuned rather than performance-tuned when power is less plentiful, to where you may average only 90% theoretical compute throughput during cluster operating hours (this is in addition to turning it off for about a month worth of time), you could reduce power production and storage capacity a good chunk further.


Interplanetary colonization is a much dumber idea than manned spaceflight


Yeah, I agree with the idea that planetary colonization is not the best idea.

I'm more of a massive spinning space station made from asteroid/lunar mined materials kind of guy myself.

But if harebrained ideas to colonize a body with substantially lower gravity that may no idea if the human body is even compatible with that lower gravity get us the infrastructure needed to get lots of stuff into space then so be it.


I think anyone expecting space to yield exploitable resources at a feasible cost isn't really thinking this through and/or isn't being real about how big and empty it is.


Can you elaborate?


There is no substance that can be practically transported to earth from space at a cost that would justify the transport costs.


Are you talking about the current transport costs or theoretical optimal transport costs?

What do you think is the biggest part of the transport costs and why in your opinion can it not be reduced?


It's dumb because it's not practical yet?


Because it has no conceivable benefits and staggeringly huge risks and costs


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