This is not a real bug in FFmpeg. This is a demonstration that if you control a custom AVIO module it is possible to crash FFmpeg by giving it bad data.
Not custom. It's an existing module for a format called VPK. It's a quite trivial bug though, not exploitable apart from DOS and won't ever happen in a real file.
I even question if it is a DOS vector. So the thread crashes and then the system that controls the threads cleans it up and opens a new thread. Seems to be a trivial impact, unless it locks up the thread somehow.
And the parent will spawn a new process. Unless the server is terribly poorly misconfigured.
Edit; for what it’s worth I’ve run a server processing video with FFMPEG for 10 years now, and there’s just so many things that can make FFMPEG crash. All sorts of corrupted videos people upload. If your server doesn’t recovery gracefully from a crashed FFMPEG thread, that’s on you, not FFMPEG.
I don't agree? By the time you get to the specific policy sections (3.x.x) there are concrete changes outlined in bold, several of which are requests for the institute to invest large amounts of resources changing the current teaching process. Even the non-bolded text occasionally contains real insights, like this gem from the end of 3.1.9:
> Students should not feel policed. Durable change will require instructors to be as clear as possible about their expectations and students to understand AI misuse as an unacceptable deviation from shared peer norms and community values rather than a violation of an arbitrary bureaucratic rule.
I immediately forwarded 3.3 to a colleague (AD of Research). We have a blanket policy document at the institutional level to establish a framework for baselines, but it's absent of any practicable guidance outside of a general approval process and expectations for academic honesty.
> Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point
What is the point then? The best games have all of their elements working together in service of their intended experience.
> someone who uses AI for internationalization
Do you think this would be an ok use of AI for a game? Did you not see the outrage over Hollow Knight: Silksong's translation last year? How every time a game is discovered to have used AI for translation there is an immediate backlash?
The point is that some parts of games truly don't impact the experience.
Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played. What exactly am I missing out on by having a resolution dropdown that was hand coded? Does a bespoke "ultra" graphics slider bring the characters to life in a way that AI just can't? Besides, using AI isn't mutually exclusive with all of the elements working together. My point is that AI, wielded properly, makes that easier to achieve. If you don't have to spend a month hand coding sliders for a settings screen, you can get on with making the actual game. Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?
I do think that using AI to help with internationalization is fine, as long as you QA it just like any code or content that is created by man or machine. It's a tool, and you have to know how and when to use any tool. You can get plenty of good translation out of an AI if you are using it properly.
Also worth noting that Silksong was verified to have a human translation team, and they never clarified if AI was used. It's entirely possible that today's SOTA AI would have done a much better job. The problem with your argument about translation is you and I have no idea how many games have been machine translated well, and never saw an issue. Because of the way gamers are (frequently unhinged about minor things. Prone to groupthink. Extremely vocal. Absolute in opinions like "There is no acceptable use for AI in gaming"), you just can't stick your neck out and say, "We used AI for our localizations, then had native speakers QA it, and not one had issues." You risk becoming a lightning rod for puritans because you wanted to give Romanians a chance to play a game in their own language.
Even if you disagree on using AI for these things, I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better. That's why I told you not to argue against specific examples. Maybe a game designer told an AI to review the code and find performance improvement opportunities. Would you be upset if the game was half the size, and could run higher frame-rates with the exact same content? Is that still an unacceptable us of AI, or would you rather that the man hours that could otherwise go to things that humans are better at get spent on optimizations. I personally would rather have a game with better performance from an AI and more human created side quests, than a game with better performance and fewer side quests because they ran out of budget hiring people to dig into compiler settings.
So yeah, I think it is completely reasonable to use AI in gaming or any domain of programming. I've been around long enough to remember human teams turning out absolute steaming piles of garbage. The issue isn't AI, the issue is people turning out steaming piles of garbage. AI just makes that easier, but by no means does it make it inherent to use.
> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way
Most of these are going to be smaller indie games that already don't have many settings to set. Off the top of my head, I'd probably say Ultrakill takes the cake with its opening screen. Based on the description of the expectations, my guess is you're mostly basing your expectations off of large AAA games with multiple pages of settings? Fair enough that they should mostly be implementing "standards" correctly, and theming and character take a back seat.
It sounds like your overall point mostly relates not to settings screens, but things that "don't meaningfully affect gameplay". I think that's a much better argument than the one your example point led me to understand.
As a final note, it's worth reiterating that Steam does not require disclosure for AI-gen code. That settings menu example you were mentioning would be fine, as long as it used art assets generated by a human.
> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played.
This mentality is exactly why most modern AAA games are so generic and uninteresting. Great games are more than just their gameplay; they're complete, coherent experiences assembled by people who care about every part of them, not just the parts they deem to be "the important ones". Someone who doesn't care at all what their game's settings menu looks like probably doesn't truly care about any other part of the game, either - it suggests their primary concern is not the quality of the game, but how quickly and cheaply it can be made.
Games having menus and HUD interfaces that fit the rest of their aesthetic was once the standard, before the current trend of minimalism took over. Why do you think that is? Was it just because the developers of yesteryear were all idiots wasting time and budget on things that didn't matter instead of maximizing shareholder value? Or was it because they were focused on making a high quality, coherent game first, and making it "efficiently" second?
> Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?
Yes, every other game being made in Unreal Engine nowadays is one of the biggest contributing factors to them all feeling so samey (and running badly). Developers who don't care about the quality of the game and just want to get it out the door with the minimum effort possible gravitate towards Unreal Engine, because it's made for them, and this is reflected in the end product.
> I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better.
No, you can come up with ways that AI can make the game easier and cheaper to make at the cost of craftsmanship. It's not the same thing. Adding more side quests won't make the game better if they're not made by people who care about the game as a whole and all its little details. Whatever improvements or optimizations your AI can come up with, a skilled human developer could come up with, too, the difference being that the human demands a living wage in exchange for his work, and that's just awful, isn't it? It's simply not possible for the entirety of the game to be crafted with care without going over budget (let's ignore all the past examples of games that did exactly this, with much smaller budgets, before unappealing ultra realistic graphics became the standard).
In my experience it's a pretty clear warning, but I might not be the best person to judge. The thing to remember is "buying" a revocable license is pretty different from "renting" a temporary license, and those words have pretty different connotations.
It's worth noting that TFA addresses this in the context of the scam: When the scam depends on the emotional reaction in response to a loved one's distress, it doesn't matter if the number the scam is coming from is unfamiliar. This means that the scam can use "technically correct" numbers that pass SHAKEN/STIR with no loss in conversion.
TFA also mentions that by routing calls through older non-IP networks you lose the accurate information, although it sounds like the FCC is slowly cracking down on this.
Some people keep classic flames alive to deploy in times of need. Theo's good, but he can't hold a candle to the late Marc Cripsin railing about emacs line-mode-visual. Grr.
>What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make
line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23?
I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst possible
way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software update had just
installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".
>People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop software.
This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over 30 years of
history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.
>Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn defaults
alone.
>If you want to have your own playpen where you twiddle defaults to your
hearts content, have at it. But don't pretend that you produce software
for a production environment, and stop telling the Linux distributions
that they should "upgrade" to your "improved" versions. People doing real
work depend upon those distributions.
>It does no good to say "read the release notes" when the affected users
don't get the release notes and don't even know that a new release
happened. It is also unreasonable to expect users to subscribe to every
obscure newsgroup, forum, and wiki to hear about changes that will turn
their expectations upside down.
>Yes, I fixed my .emacs file. And I'm putting in the same change to all
the .emacs files on all the dozens of other machines I use, even though
they still have emacs 22, because otherwise this unpleasant surprise will
repeat itself over and over again.
>Grr.
>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs
>They made the wrong decision. Changes to default behavior are a bad idea.
Changes to default behavior of the most basic functionality are an
extremely bad idea.
>I don't care if M-X fart-noisily-with-spray changes its default scent from
skunk to lemon. But I damn well do care about the most basic operations:
all CTRL single letter and ESC single letter. After 33+ years of using
emacs, I expect these to be reliable and not suddenly change.
>I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my file,
or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the problem
went away on a different system added further confusion. It was only when
I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number of lines,
but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed. And that's
when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about line-mode-visual,
although it did not mention that this was now the default.
I mean it literally starts with "What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea", and later calls them a "bagbiter". If you were responsible for the change, you would feel insulted. His basic point seems valid, but this is not a great way to present it.
Marc was an old school hacker, so bagbiter is a term of endearment, completely sanitized. "Chomp chomp!"
bagbiter /bag'bi:t-*r/ n.
1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: loser, cretin, chomper. 3. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag."
The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as a taunt at MIT 1970-1976, and we have another report that "Bite the bag!" was in common use at least as early as 1965), but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized.
ITS's lexiphage program was the first and to date only known example of a program intended to be a bagbiter.
chomp: vi.
1. To lose; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth.
2. To bite the bag; See bagbiter.
A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means ‘chomp chomp’ (see Verb Doubling in the Jargon Construction section of the Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is equivalent to saying “You chomper!” If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it.
Marc also wrote RFC #748 documenting the Telnet Randomly-Lose Option on April 1, 1978:
IAC WILL RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REQUESTS permission to, or confirms
that it will, randomly lose.
IAC WON'T RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REFUSES to randomly lose.
IAC DO RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REQUESTS that the receiver, or grants
the receiver permission to, randomly lose.
IAC DON'T RANDOMLY-LOSE
The command sender DEMANDS that the receiver not randomly lose.
ESR's free to make ridiculous laws about eyeballs that aren't true and nobody follows while never actually reviewing any code himself (except for the climate scientists' code which he totally misunderstood and dishonestly misrepresented), but blaming it on Linus was a dick mode.
>During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)
porridgeraisin: Speaking of ICCCM (aka I39L) and X11 selections, have you seen David Rosenthal's glorious rant about the Sun Desktop that somebody leaked to the unix-haters mailing list (who, moi?), which comes straight from the author of the ICCCM and co-developer of Andrew, X10, X11, and NeWS. The Roy Lichtenstein line is classic. What he's touching on by "Why can't they just shut up and do their job efficiently and inconspicuously?" is Mark Weiser's "Ubiquitous/Calm Computing". He's married to Mark's widow Victoria Reich, and they both work on LOCKSS ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe").
PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out
that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM
doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind
of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show -
they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of
screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do
their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have
to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time?
They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with
fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient,
elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may
look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools
screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like
having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.
Check out his blog, recently he's been writing about his introduction to computer graphics, hacking late at night in the basement of the lab on the PDP-7 connected to the Titan at Cambridge University, and how Coprophagia Is Bad For You! He was employee #4 at NVIDIA.
You might want to answer two questions before we start this discussion:
1. "Censored" by whom, and for whom?
2. "Censored" for which "right of center" views?
P.S. I should also mention that I can see the posts on that account, even if they all have flags for intolerance by the default moderation service (a service you can opt out of by the way).
"Censored" I mean "flagged", sure. In practice, they're all hidden from the casual user. But really, I'm interested on why ATProto was touted as revolutionary while in practice it powers a standalone heavily politically biased social network where moderators are extremely active flagging everything that's on the right. In that respect, Mastodon is more "revolutionary" - you handle your instance, you provide your moderation, you optionally integrate with other instances. Mastodon itself is used, in practice, to moderate a highly diverse ecosystem of social networks, from the gay-friendly ones to Gab. Nostr, although it's not so widely used, is even more tailored against sectarism by default.
From what I see, Bsky is a single instance of one of the most politically aligned social media in existence; in practice, you can achieve that with any proprietary implementation, you don't need ATProto. I honestly thought that the protocol was engineered to prevent an echo chamber, but in reality it powers an enormous standalone echo chamber that is not moving anywhere, so I was wondering what's the difference.
The protocol has a notion of moderation accounts, sometimes called "labelers" because they can apply labels to your account. Users generally [1] subscribe to the moderation that they want to see. They can then set those labels to make the application to "show", "warn" (collapse by default, click to expand), or "hide" based on the labels.
1: People using the bluesky app cannot unsubscribe from the bluesky moderation service, but that is a policy choice of the bluesky app, not a protocol level choice, other clients can do as they choose.
I'm no expert in atproto but it seems to be far worse than that. Apparently, Bluesky applies country-specific labellers automatically based on your IP address.
If you register a Bluesky account from Germany, your account is assigned the German moderation labeler with no option to opt out. As soon as I noticed, I created a new account using a US IP address. This fixed it.
While signing up for moderation sounds very attractive to me, Bluesky's whole layered moderation approach seems designed to maximize algorithmic censorship.
Compare that to, for example, a mastodon instance (or a forum like HN) where you participate because you align with the general moderation approach cultivated by and within the community.
Yes, it is specific to Bluesky. It is not dependent on the official app, though: Both the app and the website are subject to this kind of censorship.
There seem to be loopholes [1] through some third-party apps, but that does not change much about the overall problem. Defaults matter a lot.
I have a hard time understanding why the Bluesky authors came up with an idea like that in the first place. Not to mention actually creating it. The internet (or social media) probably does not benefit from even more granular censorship tools for governments all over the world.
I'm not sure if this is some kind of tactic, but both of these claims seem trivially wrong.
Bluesky is available in both main app stores and on the web. There is no merit in denying this. There are often differences in content restrictions between what app stores enforce and what service providers enable, but one cannot really say, "Just don't use the app," if by "app" they mean every common way of accessing the service.
Also, I think the protocol does not matter much if the user experience of almost every user is entirely controlled by a single provider. In such a case, the protocol might as well be entirely absent.
It is difficult to tell whether there is some substance here, since you do not explain (or source) anything.
@phillipcarter: of course it's users (and mods) doing that, but in the end, if you open bsky today you see a single, huge, left-biased social media. If you look at Mastodon, you see at a lot left-leaning trans-and-furry-friendly instances, true, but you also see a bunch of right wing instances plus Gab. What happens with bsky today (single instance, echo chambered) is simply something I don't expect from a "distributed" social network. Why is that?
Gab doesn’t federate, so isn’t really part of the fediverse. They’re just using the software; they’re their own thing, not part of a distributed social network. One could make an atproto island that didn’t federate, I suppose, but it would be a lot of work for no obvious reason.
(There are a few other far-right mastodon instances, but then there are pockets of the far-right on bsky, too)
Isn't the answer kind of obvious - much more weight of the developers in comparison to the random people from open source community. Also timing: Mastodon and ActivityPub appeared in the tail end/transitional period when there was still some common public square mindset (at least among random people not radicalized in any way), and tech inclined people had protocols vs. centrally managed platforms in relatively fresh memory. So in the mid-2010s you'd get all sorts of people flocking to the promise of free internet.
When Bluesky was taking traction, the cultural expectation among its audience was already for the platform to heavily shape the narrative. Paradoxically, AFAIK the Bluesky devs themselves are pretty serious about it being an open standard, though I'm basing this on what I heard. So I mostly believe people that the echo chambering you mention is structured in a way that it's technically not centralized. Though in practice, it's way easier to amplify left wing messages on closed websites like YouTube, Facebook, X (I'm basing this on algorithmic recommendations I'm getting and experience of people I know) than the other way around on Bluesky. But this is just the weight distribution of the audience.
Even then non-left supervised Mastodon ecosystem is something of a deep cut. I mean you're right it exists and now I recall hearing about some drama years ago, but not a part of the front and center info about them, for any common person. So I'm not fully buying the contrast you're trying to build here.
Elon Musk took over Twitter and made it rabidly right-wing. As a result, a lot of left-wing people went to Blue Sky.
Social networks are just groups of people: if such a network starts with a core group that leans heavily on a particular end of the political spectrum, the network will also (even with zero bias from the network itself) lean that way.
What you are describing is, bluntly, not happening.
Bluesky moderators take down abusive and harmful posts. There is a daily uproar on the left about how they do this to "kiwifarms but leftishly" behavior under the guise of being "anti-trans". If right-wing centered posts are getting taken down, it is because they are abusive and harmful.
Bluesky popularized subscriber lists, like blocklists. A large portion of the network mass-mutes or mass-blocks anyone on the big right-wing block lists. This is user behavior, not the platform censoring right wing people.
