h. Play

Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make · Jacques Mattheij

“It certainly is worrisome, a lot of very powerful people use Twitter and I generally assume that what is written under their accounts really is written by them. Time to revisit that assumption, apparently.”

There’s just something about social media and smartphones hacking that is very worrisome: we do not know anything. Even very tech savvy folks don’t understand what’s going on.

I repeat: even programmers who know a computer far better than the average person, can’t control what apps are doing.

Pegasus is probably a lot bigger than what they try to tell us. There’s probably a Pegasus lite for “only” tracking and not having access to the whole phone. I can’t even imagine what Airtags and bluetooth hacks can bring up today. People share absolutely everything through everything (source: I do helpdesk in a public library).

Same with social media. We know social media companies are entirely ruthless when it comes to their users, stealing your account if they need to, for instance. And once again, those apps are on smartphones, have access to all kinds of personal stuff that they sell and make money off of.

Use laptops, get shit done and close all that. Yes, close your eyes too.

Older Customer: “thank you so much! Can I buy you some lunch?”

Me: “I’d appreciate that, thank you!”

*hands me $5*

Me:

“The exaggerated gratitude that came with immigration insecurity.”

“And she had the sudden sensation of fogginess, of a milky web through which she tried to claw. Her autumn of half blindness had begun, the autumn of puzzlements, of experiences she had knowing there were slippery layers of meaning that eluded her.”

“It seemed to me that in America blacks and whites work together but don’t play together, and here (UK) blacks and white play together but don’t work together,”

I enjoyed Americanah from Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. Immigration stories, iykyk.

A bit long, though.

“The world’s first digital network made its debut in September of 1940, at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society that was held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.” (source)

82 years ago, bro.

And now our digital network is absolutely everywhere. Even in the air. Wild.

“HEVC has a long and complicated history.

With H.264, it was easy – one patent pool. Any questions? Contact MPEG LA. How much did it cost? About $2 or so per device, no problem. Did you spend more than (IIRC) $14 million on licensing each year? It’s free past that point. As for open-source software like Firefox, Cisco actually struck a deal to pay all the royalties if you used their OpenH264 decoder (they needed H.264 to be widely supported for WebRTC), so Firefox and other software was able to use the binary of that and have Cisco covering the royalties for them.

With H.265, everything splintered. There are three patent pools: MPEG LA, Access Advance (formerly known as HEVC Advance), and Velos Media. Between them, you have to pay royalties on the hardware, the software, and a royalty per-item created past a certain point. Some had royalty caps, others did not and would rack up royalties indefinitely and unpredictably high. Some patent pools had you licensing patents available in other pools, so you were paying twice for the same patents. And some major patent holders (such as Technicolor) weren’t in any pools, so you needed to approach them manually and hash out a deal on your own which could have as favorable or unfavorable terms as they pleased. Also, Cisco (not surprisingly) said they weren’t paying the royalties for an OpenH265, as it was only a ~30% improvement for a exponential increase in royalties, easily several times or more as much as H264. Bloody hell.

So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Windows decided, screw it, you’re paying $0.99 if you want HEVC, but we’re not supporting it with every Windows license because that could easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars because of the lack of caps. Apple used their sheer market power to get HEVC on all their devices mainly for HEIC (HEVC for images), which reduces storage space needed for photos and iCloud costs, and once you have it on every iPhone, adding macOS is cheap. Presumably this is because Apple struck a deal with the patent holders individually and didn’t need to accept the ludicrous patent pool terms. Did I mention that Access Advance alone operates their patent pool at an absurd 40% margin for its directors? (Yes, 40% of Access Advance’s pool royalty, which is already the highest of any pool by far, is pure profit for the pool itself rather than going to patent holders. It’s asinine!)

You might wonder why in the world H.265 licensing fell apart so badly. The answer is, well, streaming. H.264 got its first release in 2003, before YouTube or internet video was really a thing. HEVC was released in 2013 and patent holders were eager to extract rent from Netflix (distribution royalties), PC Makers (hardware royalties), Microsoft and Apple (software royalties), content producers (per-title royalties), basically everyone involved had a royalty somewhere because they thought HEVC was going to be the best thing ever for reducing streaming costs and people would pay for it. They didn’t.”

It’s always interesting to read some TL;DR of something immensely complicated that we don’t care about yet, that is central in our digital lives. Video codecs in today’s case.

Patent greed is hilarious and sad though. Guys, leave it!

Note to normal people who don’t know anything about tech: H.264 is good enough, we could stop there. Or probably before.

It’s called burning out. He burned out before being 25. He sure was everywhere online.

Fame is quite unhealthy, no matter what you get from it. Incredibly fast fame is probably way worse.

Keep skating, bro. Open books, don’t unlock your phone. Be good. And b r e a t h e.

New World, an Amazon game that came out last year in September, had very quickly 700,000 players; that’s huge. We only hear about Elden Ring these days.

A new Matrix movie came out, no gifs, no memes, no conversations. It’s already dusty and old.

Kendrick just dropped a video after years of silence! It’s already a vague memory two days later.

Atlanta had an interesting episode last week. There’s no conversations anywhere.

I’ve never seen entertainment being as insignificant as it is now. And yet we drown in it.

“is it today? I never put that date in my calendar”  My mom, twenty minutes ago on camera.

My parents never cared one second about mother’s or father’s day.

Happy mother’s day, mom. Even though you don’t care, even though you are one of the three mothers I’ve had.

The email:

My face:

*deletes*

Yup. Gotta focus on important things like credit union emails these days to make it through the week.

1987 German movie Bagdad Café.

Nothing is looking like what you expect with this movie. The title calls for Iraq but then we’re in the desert in the US. There’s this white woman but the movie is a lot about a black woman. It’s a drama, could be a thriller yet it is a romantic comedy. A soft, bitter situation in the middle of physical emptiness.

It is also the story of someone dropped out of nowhere, trying to fit in and make things work. I feel that. I felt that too when I watched it the first time as a kid.

The soundtrack is one song and there’s no need for more. Very few songs move me the way Calling You does. It’s so majestic and tense and gorgeous. Jevetta Steele eats it completely. That bridge, so perfect (is that Toots on the harmonica?). Those chords are the best musical expression of being slightly afraid of the future. Her voice soaring for help. It’s haunting me like nothing else.

A gem.