Pirates are generally slow to transition formats, but AV1 is also not better than H.265 (in practice) at the high-bitrate encodes.

Scene rules say to start with --crf 17 at 1080p, which is a pretty low CRF (i.e. it results in high bitrates): https://scenerules.org/html/2020_X265.html

AV1 would most likely result in slower encodes that look worse.

AV1 is still worse in practice than H.265 for high-fidelity (high bitrate) encoding. It's being improved, but even at high bitrates it has a tendency to blur.

According to the RFC:

>The messages in classic UDP-based DNS [RFC1035] are inherently unordered and have low overhead. A competitive HTTP transport needs to support reordering, parallelism, priority, and header compression to achieve similar performance. Those features were introduced to HTTP in HTTP/2 [RFC7540]. Earlier versions of HTTP are capable of conveying the semantic requirements of DoH but may result in very poor performance.

I'd bet basically all their clients are using HTTP/2 and they don't see the point in maintaining a worse version just for compatibility with clients that barely exist.

you don't "appreciate" anything, you're just posting LLM comments

I started using Firefox with version 1.5, as did many of my friends, and we were doing it because it was flat out better. We did not care about 'stagnating' or standards.

You told an LLM to generate three possible responses to HN articles and then just started pasting all three?

it seems like a bot or LLM "user", all their other comments feature the same broken quotes and nonsense responses

> I'm not too worried about someone DDOSing my personal site. Yeah, they could do it. And then what? Who cares?

Your host, assuming you're hosting your site on a VPS. Many of them have a policy of terminating clients who get DDoSed.

and if you're hosting on your home network, a DDoS means connectivity problems for your home.

Not just your home, it means connectivity problems for your neighbors. In turn your ISP will shut you down if they figure out what is happening.

> As they say in security, "no one will burn a zero day on you!". For your small blog with one hundred visitors per month, it's probably the same: "no one will burn their DDoS capabilities on you!"

The last I saw you can hire DDoS as a service for like $5 for a short DDoS, and many hosts will terminate clients who get DDoSed.

And many hosting platforms will fight with you the DDoS. I'd rather choose wisely my hosting company.

I don't think there are any up-to-date leaderboards, but models absolutely degrade in performance the more context they're dealing with.

https://wandb.ai/byyoung3/ruler_eval/reports/How-to-evaluate...

>Gpt-5-mini records 0.87 overall judge accuracy at 4k [context] and falls to 0.59 at 128k.

And Llama 4 Scout claimed a 10 million token context window but in practice its performance on query tasks drops below 20% accuracy by 32k tokens.

That makes me wonder if we could simply test this by letting the LLM add or multiply a long list of numbers?

Here is an experiment:

https://www.gnod.com/search/#q=%23%20Calcuate%20the%20below%...

The correct answer:

    Correct:    20,192,642.460942328

Here is what I got from different models on the first try:

    ChatGPT:    20,384,918.24
    Perplexity: 20,000,000
    Google:     25,167,098.4
    Mistral:    200,000,000
    Grok:       Timed out after 300s of thinking

> Do not use a calculator. Do it in your head.

You wouldn't ask a human to do that, why would you ask an LLM to? I guess it's a way to test them, but it feels like the world record for backwards running: interesting, maybe, but not a good way to measure, like, anything about the individual involved.

I’m starting to find it unreasonably funny how people always want language models to multiply numbers for some reason. Every god damn time. In every single HN thread. I think my sanity might be giving out.

A model, no, but an agent with a calculator tool?

Then there's the question of why not just build the calculator tool into the model?

Isn't that LLMs are not designed to do calculations?

They are not LMMs, after all…

Neither are humans.

But humans can still do it.

The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free' ones use.

Or you could use an adblocker.

A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a combination of filter lists not being tested on them along with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).

Maybe I’m not using enough of them, because I’ve never had issues with uBo. Or it’s because I use 3rd party script blocking.

Use a good adblocker. I'd never do anything illegal, of course, but a friend of my friend has been successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for years, and swears he barely sees any ads.

Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.

At the time I'm quite certain I was using uBlock Origin pre-MV3. I don't think I also had my DNS-based adblocker yet, though.

Idk if I'm paying anyway, why not the legal way?

Because "legal" way is paved with obstacles.

Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.

In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.

Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.

Exactly.

Netflix is even starting to have problems with Apple's iCloud Private Relay with me, I already had to get in touch with their support.

We live in a world where paid services require us to deactivate security/privacy features to use them. Fuck them.

No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra privileges), one application for everything, runs everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which the first parties don't provide.

(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)

DRM issues are why I cancelled and won't renew Paramount+. Their damn Google TV app running on a completely stock/factory Chromecast w/ Google TV, plugged in via HDMI to an unmodified TV, frequently (always on the same shows, especially newer Star Trek series) refuses to recognize the validity of my setup and reverts to an incredibly annoying color tint rotation that cycles between extremes. It took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was happening.

I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports streaming websites, you often get a better user experience and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to jump between apps.

I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to legally watch every premier league game last season...

Sky Sports - £35/month

TNT Sports - £32/month

Amazon Prime - £9/month

And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.

v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games

Amazon Prime introduced ads. The ads will dissapear for some extra money. It made me instantly hate it.

Similarly, if you wanted to watch every single NFL game:

NFL Sunday Ticket ($150-204/season) - Out-of-market Sunday afternoon games

Amazon Prime Video ($9/month) - Thursday Night Football

Peacock Premium ($10.99/month) - Some exclusive games on NBC

ESPN Unlimited ($29.99/month) - Monday Night Football on ESPN/ABC

Fox One ($19.99/month) - Fox Sunday games

Paramount+ ($7.99/month) - CBS Sunday games

Netflix - Two Christmas Day games

I'm sure Sky is a lot more than £35, is that number just for the Sports package on top of the basic sub?

p.s. great username

Yes - that's for Sky Sports.

You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.

You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.

IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.

Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.

Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.

It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.

After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.

- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.

- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.

- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.

But yeah, sure it makes more money.

When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.

I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff that I paid for:

Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.

If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.

For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).

Much cheaper and no blackouts. HeheStreams was $100/year for NBA/NHL/NFL/MLB, the NBA's equivalent was $200/year in 2021.

I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play in high definition because they didn't like the device I was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.

Because netflix has decided my netflix 4k account shouldn't stream anything higher than 1080p in chrome.

The big draw here was bypassing geoblocking that you couldn’t otherwise buy your way out of legally.

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont have to deal with re-authentication just because you decided to watch it at a different location.

There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.

Can't play in HD because I don't use Windows or OSX. At the torrent store, I can play back any resolution I want.

Many pirate streaming sites don't work with adblockers.

The Admiral pop-up usually shows up on pirate sites.