Conservatives are still using it now. They are allergic to personal growth.
It's true that they are anti-rights organisations though. It's a shame that telling truth to power is such a dangerous thing in the UK.
With EU customers, not reporting a breach within 72 hours of learning about it is actually illegal under GDPR.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-33-gdpr/
Not sure how much trouble that can get you into though.
Yeah, it is effectively subsidized by VC right now.
I expect what will happen after the bubble bursts is that the only affordable models will be quite small ones, not the energy chugging behemoths we have now.
They've already started cranking up prices in enterprise.
This seems to be his view:
In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.
He doesn't seem to subscribe to the idea that everything you use MUST be open source, as some more radical open source advocates do, but instead that more software SHOULD be open source.
I would definitely prefer if AI was open source and self-hosted (or at least E2EE if cloud hosted). Sometimes though the best tool for the job as things stand is closed source.
Aa for the legally dubious output, while AI can exactly replicate training data, it rarely does nowadays. It's usually an amalgam of stuff.
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
I think broadly speaking what he says is reasonable. If you don't want to use AI, then don't, but I think it can be used somewhat responsibly.
I have all sorts of issues with AI tooling:
That said, it's a tool, and can be used to amplify good work too.
I've heard it's full of old conservatives, so probably Farage will win. I'd love to be wrong though.
If it's close, it's still a humiliation so it's a win in my book.
I used to be pretty excited about phones coming out between 2012-2018. I used to switch phones every year or every two years. Back then, things would really improve every year or two.
When I switched from my Pixel 6 Pro to a 9 Pro, I didn't notice much of a difference. The only interesting changes happening in phones nowadays are foldables imo, but the price is still too high and I haven't got a real usecase for them.
Many of the more experimental brands have died off, like Razer, LG, HTC etc. That had their own funky gimmicks. Nothing is the only remaining brand that's making fun stuff.
It's also harder and less interesting to install custom ROMs than it used to be. Most companies lock down their phones, and Android is a mature platform now with most of the features you'd want on most devices.
If I had to summarize, phones have become reliable but boring. I might also just be getting older and more blasé.
I was curious as to why they didn't mention his party, turns out he doesn't have one, but is an ex-Conservative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Spencer_(politician)
Elected as a Conservative, he had the whip withdrawn in May 2025, and now sits as an independent.
On 13 May 2025, he was charged by the Metropolitan Police with two counts of sexual assault that allegedly took place at London's Groucho Club in August 2023. As a consequence, he had the Conservative Party whip withdrawn.
Sounds like it was the incident mentioned in the article that made the Conservatives abandon him.
Sometimes I hear "someone was murdered", then I find out about how they have been a horrible person their whole lives, actively causing harm to people in society around them and I think "You know what, maybe the world is better off without you".
That doesn't mean I condone murder. Nor that I would ever do it myself. I just can't bring myself to feel bad about it.
This is one of those times.
Short answer: call me whatever you want as long as it's not rude or confusing.
Long answer: gender is a very strange concept to me that seems almost entirely social in nature. If it were up to me there would be no gender binary and everyone would just have their own vibe with no judgement. Because we live in society we're laden with expectations, and perhaps some of those expectations align better with your identity, so you'd rather live as one gender identity or another.
If I'm at home, unperceived by others I'm just going to be a genderless slob gremlin, otherwise it's whatever I can wear that is comfortable and will allow me to avoid judgement because I don't like attention.
If that is a gender then that is me.
I love how Signal pretends we're using it for book clubs and not for fighting facism. I'm sure they know and this is just tongue-in-cheek.
He's cute and playful. If everyone is playing cards at the table he'll jump up to get involved.
Always watching.
Majestic
Transcription:
COUNTRIES THAT BAN OR RESTRICT VPN SERVICES: Iran, Belarus, Iraq, North Korea, Turkmenistan, China, Russia, Egypt, India, Myanmar, Oman... United Kingdom?
This is probably referring to this: https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/vpn-ban-uk-b2939311.html
An older post from Mulvad about their issues advertising in the UK: https://mullvad.net/en/and-then/uk
I wanted to document an experiment I undertook trying out AV1 with Grain Synthesis on particularly grainy footage. I'll go over my thoughts and explore Plex compatibility with this feature.
This is going to be another one of my rare highly-detailed technical posts, so feel free to skip to the conclusion if you'd like.
I've been ripping Blu-rays and transcoding them for my Plex server for about 7 years now. In that time I have tweaked my settings a little, but I've broadly settled on h265 as my codec of choice. This is because it is effective at preserving fine details and film grain while still giving you a pretty good compression ratio.
Here's my typical configuration:
If you know anything about film grain, it's that it is absolutely hell on compression algorithms. It's very hard to compress grainy footage without making it look bad. Sometimes, you come across a piece of media that is especially difficult, and that's how I found myself exploring grain synthesis this time.
What piece of media happened to kick this off? Columbo Season 9 Episode 2. No spoilers, I haven't sat down to watch it yet.
Why this in particular? I was making my way through encoding my collection of Columbo Blu-rays and noticed that Season 9 in particular was incredibly grainy. Combine that with the slight sharpening filter I tend to add to my encodes (like a bit of salt, to taste) and the final size of my encodes, instead of being around 30-50% of the original size on disc it was almost 90% at around 20Mbps!
So I set out to try this grain synthesis I had heard about.
Grain Synthesis is a novel approach introduced with the AV1 video codec, but which has only really started seeing limited use in the last few years. See this blog post by Netflix for a great explainer.
The TLDR; is that Grain Synthesis is where you:
Why do this? To save bandwidth and storage space.
The theory is that by denoising, you make the video easier to compress, while still being able to evoke the feel of film grain convincingly.
Does this work in practice? Read on to find out. (Yes, saying that did make me cringe).
The experiment was simple. Target my usual 8-10mbps with AV1 grain synthesis and see how that compares to just crushing the quality down with x265.
After a bit of research, I decided to opt for StaxRip as the application to do my encoding. It supports a lot of AV1 encoders, including:
Which encoder to use?
Well, when I tried AOMEnc and found it SUPER slow. I encode on a 12 core, 24 thread Ryzen CPU, and got 4fps. There are likely ways to get it to run faster, but I didn't play around too much. rav1e does not seem to support Grain Synthesis right now.
So really that left SVT-AV1. That's the one Handbrake includes, but in the past I found the vanilla SVT-AV1 found on there to give me really blotchy results in dark scenes, so I picked SVT-AV1-PSYEX.
While it is technically possible to assemble the grain analysis, denoising and synthesis yourself, the easiest way to use it is actually to use the following two parameters:
--enable-dnl-denoising=1
This turns on denoising. Without this I think grain synthesis is simply added on top of your existing video.
--film-grain=<some integer value>
This sets the strength of the film grain added and, with enable-dnl-denoising=1, the strength of the denoising. Online, people recommend using values of 8-14 depending on the amount of grain.
I found that the best way to dial-in AV1 grain synthesis was to start with a very high quality setting, then gradually increase the noise reduction through the --film-grain value until I got most of the grain off. I could see this by using a video player that doesn't support / has grain synthesis turned off (more on this in Compatibility).
I would however avoid going too far with the noise reduction strength. No need to remove all the grain. Pushing it too far results in the video into a smeary mess. After all, no denoising algorithm is perfect, and the more you crank it, the more you lose real detail.
Then, once I was happy with the clarity, I'd dial down the quality until I either hit my size target or my acceptable lowest quality.
As for the h265 encode, I apply a Light sharpening filter in Handbrake, then reduce the quality until I hit my target.
Note here that the process with h265 has less levers to pull, so it takes less time to dial it in.
See for yourself! Here's a MEGA link to the final encodes . I make no promise that I will keep that link up long-term, but I will personally hold onto the files so if the link dies in the future, try DMing me and hopefully I'll see it and send them to you.
There are 3 files:
no denoise.mkv - a file encoded with no grain synthesis and very high quality setting to act as a baselineAV1 q25 denoise38.mkv - The grain synthesis file. Quality of 25 with film grain setting of 38.x265 crf22.5.mkv - The h265 file. Used a crf of 22.5. Picked to match the AV1 file size.I highly recommend using a tool like video-compare to play them side by side. Grain behaviour is not easily comparable in screenshots and should be compared in motion. The command you want is:
video-compare "AV1 q25 denoise38.mkv" "x265 crf22.5.mkv"
I call this section "Analysis", but it's quite subjective.
To me the AV1 file has cleaner grain. It's fairly convincing in motion, if a bit more regular than is realistic. Reminds me a little of some modern shows that probably have added grain in post-production.
By comparison, the h265 version has made the grain is kind of start-stop and affected by motion in the scene. It has necessarily been compressed and looks worst for it. It's not that bad though.
The better quality retention goes to h265 here. When you look at the details around the eyebrows of the male character here, there is perceivably a little more detail preserved. Good looking grain can give an increased perception of sharpness, which makes up some of the ground on the AV1 side.
Here's a very important point we've only touched on so far: What devices actually support AV1 and grain synthesis, and if they don't support it, what happens?
Well, the answer is that when AV1 is supported, but grain synthesis is not (or it's otherwise broken), the grain synthesis tends to just gets ignored and you play the weirdly smooth, denoised video instead.
Well, I hit my first roadblock directly after my first test encode. I use mpvnet as my player of choice. Turns out grain synthesis is broken for me with the default configuration. After like an hour of debugging, I found that I could fix it by adding vo=gpu instead of the default vo=gpu-next in my config file. This may or may not mean that the grain filter is rendered by the CPU instead of the GPU, affecting performance.
VLC worked out of the box for me. Not sure if that was because it was using CPU grain rendering or if it was because their drivers were less broken.
Neither play has a clear option to turn on or off grain synthesis. In theory, you could configure mpv with format:film-grain=no, but that didn't seem to work for me. It's possible that option only works when GPU grain rendering is in use.
For reference, I use a 3000-series Nvidia GPU. I expect GPU rendering support may depend on what GPU you have. Perhaps it works better with more recent GPUs.
I placed the AV1 file from the experiment on my fully updated Plex server, and tried to play back the episode from a variety of different devices.
When transcoding occurred, the grain-synthesis would be ignored. Meaning that you'd get a transcode of the post-denoise video into h264. No / little grain (depending on how strongly you denoised).
This is somewhat worse than transcoding h265 into h264 for compatibility reasons, but at a high bitrate where the grain is still present. That said, on-the-fly transcoding rarely results in a particularly good looking outcome.
Both encodes turned out very watchable on compatible devices. There was no clear winner over h265 but AV1 + grain synthesis looks decent when it works.
That said, if you or others watch your video on unsupported devices, like on the browser or on your smart tv / chromecast, you may want to opt for h265 instead. At least if that has to be transcoded, you will maintain your grain in the process.
Additionally, the effort you go through tuning AV1 encodes is somewhat higher than just chucking it through a h265 or h264 encoder. In my experience, without grain synthesis AV1 does less well with grainy content than h265 does. Not too surprising given that AV1 is primarily a web standard while h265 comes from a more disc media background.
In this day and age, why are we still using these horrible packing peanuts? These aren't even the dissolvable ones.
The cherry on the cake? This is the side of the box.
I assume the rest of their councillors are just smart enough to keep their mouths shut.
The post as screenshots if you dont want to go to YouTube. Appologies to any blind users as I don't have time to OCR these right now:
When being "gender critical" is brought to legal action, it is not typically not about your internally held beliefs, it's about harassing others and discrimination.
If a white supremacist had a firmly held belief black people were inferior and they held a role in HR or talent acquisition, they would be unfit for the role and should be fired. Similarly if they were found to harass black people in the workplace.
One thing the gender criticals, like white supremacists and religious fundamentalists don't understand is this:
Your political views do not outweigh the rights of others