MaxL93

You have to add keys under:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceInstall\Restrictions

The keys I have right now are all REG_SZ (strings), and in order of "1" through "5", are:

---

1. SWC\VEN_DELL&DEV_AWCC

2. SWC\VID_DELL&PID_AWCC

3. SWC\Alienware_Command_Center

4. SWC\AWCC

5. SWC\VID001&PID0001&AWCCWINUI3APP

---

Nothing short of this prevented "Alienware Command Center" (AWCC.exe) from pushing itself onto my machine because of my Alienware OLED monitor.

I should note it's possible to shoot yourself in the foot there; I had entries 6, 7, and 8 blocking SWC\Generic, SWD\GenericRaw, and SWD\Generic — and that prevented Audio Endpoints from being mounted...

It's maddening that they force you to tweak with the URLs just so you can feed people a link that works for them though

They are very demonstrably not making the same movement and I strongly feel like it would take someone trying to reason backwards from a predetermined conclusion to see this

You know what I'd love to have? This running on my Android smartphone. Google's speech services are garbage and they LOVE to cut me off mid-sentence for no reason, well over half the time. It's maddening.

The same thing is happening on the Android side.

If you've made a game, it doesn't matter how high quality it is, how many awards it has won, etc.

The only thing that matters is that it's live service, that it doesn't "have an end", that it can drive engagement and perpetual revenue.

Quite a few testimonies from game devs: according to them, Google representatives pretty much told them this.

See also: the requirements to constantly update your app/game even if it's a "finished product" that does not inherently require any updates.

Here's some other creators also talking about it happening in youtube shorts (...)

If you open the context of the comment, they are specifically talking about the bad, entire-image upscaling that gives the entire picture the oily smeary look. NOT face filters.

EDIT : same thing with the two other links you edited into your comment while I was typing my reply.

Again, I'm not defending YouTube for this. But I also don't think they should be accused of doing something they're not doing. Face filters without consent are a far, far worse offense than bad upscaling.

I would like to urge you to be more cautious, and to actually read what you brandish as proof.

Sure, but that's not YouTube. That's Instagram. He says so at 1:30.

YouTube is not applying any "face filters" or anything of the sort. They did however experiment with AI upscaling the entire image which is giving the classic "bad upscale" smeary look.

Like I said, I think that's still bad and they should have never done it without the clear explicit consent of the creator. But that is, IMO, very different and considerably less bad than changing someone's face specifically.

"Making AI edits to videos" strikes me as as bit of an exaggeration; it might lead you to think they're actually editing videos rather than simply... post-processing them[1].

That being said, I don't believe they should be doing anything like this without the creator's explicit consent. I do personally think there's probably a good use case for machine learning / neural network tech applied to the clean up of low-quality sources (for better transcoding that doesn't accumulate errors & therefore wastes bitrate), in the same way that RTX Video Super Resolution can do some impressive deblocking & upscaling magic[2] on Windows. But clearly they are completely missing the mark with whatever experiment they were running there.

[1] https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/bj1qbwcklg

[2] compare https://i.imgur.com/U6vzssS.png & https://i.imgur.com/x63o8WQ.jpeg (upscaled 360p)

AV1 is the king of ultra-low bitrates, but as you go higher — and not even that much higher — HEVC becomes just as good, if not more. Publicly-available AV1 encoders (still) have a tendency to over-flatten anything that is low-contrast enough, while x265 is much better at preserving visual energy.

This problem is only just now starting to get solved in SVT-AV1 with the addition of community-created psychovisual optimizations... features that x264 had over 15 years ago!

I'd love to watch Netflix AV1 streams but they just straight up don't serve it to my smart TV or my Windows computers despite hardware acceleration support.

The only way I can get them to serve me an AV1 stream is if I block "protected content IDs" through browser site settings. Otherwise they're giving me an H.264 stream... It's really silly, to say the least

I can't say I understand why HEVC support being disabled would "prevent background blurring", especially because 1) the blur has nothing to do with HW decode (not even in weird unknown parts of the MPEG-4 specs like video object planes in part 2, or better yet: part 6 and part 16) — and 2), AVC HW encode is still there and is a completely acceptable fallback, so...?

It seems very US centric in its thinking

I'm not surprised. I'm French and one thing I've consistently seen with Gemini is that it loves to use Title Case (Everything is Capitalized Except the Prepositions) even in French or other languages where there is no such thing. A 100% american thing getting applied to other languages by the sheer power of statistical correlation (and probably being overtrained on USA-centric data). At the very least it makes it easy to tell when someone is just copypasting LLM output into some other website.

If they realize the value of "sandboxing" something so insecure they should also be making it really easy for you to do the same with any app, or set of apps...

Technically not lying if this is NSA (non-standalone) 5G. The 5G band just comes on as an additional aggregated band. The icon just shows up because the tower is capable of supplying the band.

Really the bigger problem is that there's not enough distinction between SA and NSA

-140 dBm is far beyond no coverage, yeah. -120 dBm is pretty much when LTE stops working (sometimes it can painfully stretch to -123 to -125 but usually not because of noise etc)

It should be noted that most of EDF's massive losses are due to the ARENH.

The European Union insists that EDF must sell energy at very discounted prices, so that third-party "providers" can make an entry on the energy market. The idea was that they would eventually sell their own energy supply, but most just pocketed the difference between the dirt-cheap energy & what they charged customers, then ran away the moment there was any hint of change on the horizon.

Or, to put it in simpler, blunter terms: in the name of "competition", EDF was forced to heavily subsidize companies that turned out to be nothing more than rent-seekers that only sought to, effectively, grab free subsidy money.

Here are some articles about it:

2022: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/10/edf-sues-fr... 2023: https://www.ft.com/content/e2fc3abf-4803-4561-8ef2-0c77fd2d0... 2024: https://www.bruegel.org/policy-brief/europes-under-radar-ind...

I'm sure the court could have gotten him on other charges, but they went with the absolutely 100% safe one rather than the other 99% safe ones.

Sarkozy and all of his billionaire media allies are already trying their hardest to undermine the credibility of the justice system at every turn with extremely dangerous rhetoric; I dread to imagine what this would have been like had they gone with ever-so-slightly-less-safe charges

Well, it's a bit off-topic, but yes, Google is demonstrably killing the fabric of the Internet. Ever since they introduced the info box & knowledge graph, pretty much every change they've introduced is geared towards one goal: they don't want to just be a guide, they want to be the journey AND the destination. All the latest AI efforts are the apotheosis, the extreme logical conclusion of that. Surely I don't need to explain how this makes them extremely similar to a parasite killing its host, how this degrades the very ecosystem their foundations are built on?

It's a fundamental part of many tech companies at this point, really

I would love for my phone keyboard (Swiftkey) to use a locally-running Voxtral for speech-to-text (bonus points if it can use the NPU of the Snapdragon SoC).

The voice recognition capabilities of Google Speech Services, which is what the mic button hooks into, suck. Meanwhile, Voxtral (and Whisper) understand what I'm trying to say far better, they automatically "edit out" any stuttering or stammering that I might have, and they properly capitalize and include punctuation. And they handle being bilingual exceedingly well, including, for example, using English words in the middle of French sentences.

The best solution I could find so far is this F-Droid app that uses Whisper : https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.woheller69.whisperplus/

But it has some downsides. First, I have to manually switch to that different keyboard; thankfully my Samsung phone offers an easy switch shortcut any time a keyboard is on screen, so it only requires 3 taps... and thankfully it's smart enough to send me back to Swiftkey once it's done. Second, only 30 seconds... sometimes I ramble on for longer. Third, the way it's designed kind of sucks: you either have to hold a button (even though the point of speech-to-text is that I don't have to hold anything down) or let automatic detection end the recording and start processing, in which case it often cuts me off if I take more than 1 second thinking about my next words.

This is arguably one of the biggest use cases of modern AI technology and the least controversial one; phones have the hardware necessary to do it all locally, too! And yet... I couldn't find a better offering than this.

(Bonus points for anyone working on speech-to-text: give me a quick shortcut to add the string "[(microphone emoji)]" in my messages just to let the other party know that this was transcribed, so that they know to overlook possible mistakes.)