Kostya's Boring Codec World

I’m going to publish this after the elections are over so no idiot can call me interfering in the elections, even if I don’t argue in favour of either candidate or political system reform. This post is simply summing up the frustrations about the mismatch of how the country views and positions itself against what it really is.

First of all, the title is about USA slipping out of relevance and not e.g. about me emigrating from the country (I’ve never been to it and it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever go there) nor about USA stopping to exist in the near future. My point of view is that while USA has done to undermine its own position, it has built enough inertia to keep going for a while—like large baobabs that can’t physically fall down and simply rot away standing.

The upcoming downfall does not make me happy as I realise how bad it will be for the whole civilised world (remember 2008? ever heard of Black Tuesday?). So consider it as an extremely late (a decade or two late) and useless warning. In theory some things still can be done to rectify the situation but does anybody believe anything substantial will be done?

Below I’ll try to present my thoughts in a logical form: what made USA great in the first place, what it did wrong in last decades (and why it hurts USA), and how it will likely to end.

What made USA a global superpower?

Let’s start with the foundation on which USian power was built. Without defining it it’s impossible to argue what actions undermine that foundation.

My short list would look like this:

• having one of the largest pieces of land stolen from others (rivalled only by China and russia); and if you wonder why I haven’t included Canada to the list—with those countries land was not merely something seized from uncivilised tribes (which may be unthinkable now but was though more as a God-given right back then) but from other countries as well (ever heard of internationally recognised Hawaiian Kingdom and how it ended being a state of USA? do you want to visit United States (of Mexico) and tell them how Texas and California have always been a part of USA?);
• that land being suitable for agriculture and being rich in natural resources (russia has been always complaining about the quality of its lands—even after large oil reserves were discovered; from what I heard China also complains about its territory being mostly mountains);
• people willing to work and the state not hindering them (you won’t believe how many russian proverbs are there about the futility of working; also back in the day russia and Austro-Hungary were two empires stifling technical progress in fear of losing power—you can guess how it helped them during World War I);
• being isolated by oceans from most other countries and not experiencing a full-scale war at its own territory in XX century—sure, USA was involved in wars but it was mostly sending troops overseas instead of, say, Japanese troops occupying half of Oregon or German bombers levelling down Bridgeport, Philadelphia and Jacksonville. If you manage to have your civil population safe, industry and economics mostly intact and working, not needing money for post-war reconstruction—that definitely gives you an edge against the countries devastated by war;
• even more, you can help other countries in time of need tying them to you economically;
• as the result you can play Switzerland and organise things to go by your rules that will benefit all the players involved (like free trade, technological co-operation, unified defence and so on);
• and finally, you can build large and good equipped military force that helps keeping the rules.

And thus, by the end of XX century USA had:

• a powerful economy;
• the standard currency for international trade (surviving even de-pegging from the gold standard in 1971);
• well-developed industry and financial sector;
• being a leader in scientific research and hi-tech developments;
• leading the most powerful military alliance, with its main antagonist temporarily withdrawing from the playing-field.

In theory every thing on that list should only ensure that other things keep getting better, so what went wrong?

Losing advantages

In one word—idiocy. In more words—greed, short-sightedness and idiocy. Almost every advantage USA had was lost either via uncontrollable greed, decisions that prioritised short-term gains over long-term consequences, and refusal to see something that does not fit your comfortable image of the world. Let’s see how each and every strong point got undermined.

A powerful economy. I’d point at 2008 financial crisis as the best demonstration of what went wrong. The financial market became so strong and successful that it managed to shatter the bonds of reality and as the result it could build something imaginary—a derivative paper on derivative paper that tries to hide a risk of suspicious credit (or mortgage of dubious value). And the total amount of CDSes issued was comparable to the whole world economy of the day (Wikipedia quotes the number of over $62 trillion of CDS amount by the end of 2007 and about $109 trillion for estimated size of world economy in 2024). You should be able to guess what reasons were at play here. I’d also add that dealing with it demonstrated short-sightedness as it seems nobody serious was punished (because they all are Too Big To Fail) which incentivises others to keeps such dangerous games—after all, you get your bonus now and the government will bail you out later if needed. And such hiccup in the economy lowered the trust in its robustness abroad.

The standard currency. While US dollar is still the main international trade currency, both the behaviour of US government and the way it imposed sanctions made other countries search a way to avoid relying on it too much. Terrorist states (like russia) do it to ensure they can function even under sanctions cutting off access to the international banking and payment processing, states supporting terrorism (like China) take preventive measures against possible sanctions, and even the EU wants to ensure it’ll manage to function no matter what ham-fisted decisions US government will make (in recent news there was a bit about EU startup backed by a lot of large European banks trying to provide an independent payment system).

Well-developed industry. (no reason to discuss financial sector again) Guess what is losing its reputation rather fast. For example, I still remember the days when Boeing was a company producing quality air planes, Intel making cutting-edge CPUs and Google search returning relevant results. Nowadays Boeing is known for its faulty planes, Intel for failing to keep with the progress and the overall state of Internet search has degraded. Why? I’d blame two main things: having duopoly (or monopoly) which makes you care less about the innovations (after all, what alternatives do your customers have?) and the usual prioritisation of showing current growth over long-term improvements (Intel is the most apparent case of not trying to invest money into semiconductor fabrication research and losing, in other cases it’s more like small cuts that result in a company not caring about the quality of its products). I’d argue this is also a consequence of companies becoming too large and divorced from reality (especially when managed by those with MBS degree instead of people who at least have an idea what the company should make and how). After all, investors mostly care about the current price of their stocks. And offloading production to China also lowers perception of USian goods being high-quality—after all, most of them are not made in the USA (and quite often, not even designed there either).

Scientific research and hi-tech developments. Those seem to have suffered in two ways: first, from the companies spending less on the research (because not all companies do production themselves anymore and thus don’t care about improving e.g. production processes—they can simply move to the lowest bidder in China instead); second, the unhealthy atmosphere in academia. I’m not going to claim knowledge what exactly is wrong with it, but from an outsider point of view there are two main problems: degree inflation (so that everybody and their dog tries to get a degree even if it’s mostly good for whining about a student debt later let alone the pressure succinctly put in formula “publish or perish” resulting in a large amount of low-quality papers) and abusing ethical and moral principles in the best Soviet traditions (I’m not going to discuss if there’s anything wrong with those principles, I would simply like to point out that there are people abusing those principles either to get rid of successful competition or merely secure a place for themselves so you can’t kick them out as it would be treated as an offence even if there’s no merit to keep them at that position in the first place). And in both those aspects you can’t compete with China which has larger population and thus can engage more students producing ideologically correct papers.

Leading the most powerful military alliance. The recent events demonstrated the lack of leadership there. In the first days of 24 February there was a joke that if russia would invade Poland, Poland would be kicked out from NATO. Now it seems more like Poland would be kept in NATO but it would be forbidden for it to retaliate—after all russian invasion would pose no threat to the alliance and retaliating means escalation of the conflict. The current war (essentially resulting from the Budapest Memorandum that USA pressured Ukraine to sign—with no guarantees in return) demonstrated that USA is unreliable partner. Even worse, recent events show that USA has OSCE-grade of blindness. I need to elaborate this a bit.

There was a joke in Ukrainian emigrant magazine of 1948—”USA will send $100 million relief funds to European countries, one half immediately, for the second half they’ll have to wait too.” This applies to the way USA provided its military help as well. And it not only delayed its own help, it sabotaged attempts of other countries by e.g. not giving a permission to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 planes in other countries. And of course that help was so limited that it reminds me somebody taking an antibiotic to combat the disease in such half-hearted way that it mostly helps breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria than actually curing a patient. If you don’t see a similarity—thanks to the weapons being limited in at least two senses (range and amount) russia has learned how to deal with them (same with economic sanctions). And as a cherry on top, you should remember USian officials asking Ukraine not to hit russian refineries—because they value oil prices as a more important thing than safety. And unless you’re a USian official you should know that at least one common feature among China, Iran, North Korea and russia is that they all regard USA as their number one enemy and would gladly hit it if the occasion presents itself. Another fun fact: while Ukraine managed to damage or destroy several russian strategic objects used in their nuclear defence without any retaliation (despite russian doctrine claiming that such actions would cause an immediate nuclear strike on the offender), USA is still afraid of that paper bear.

Speaking of which, you might’ve wondered what “OSCE-grade blindness” expression means. You can read more about the organisation in Wikipedia but suffice to say that after the russian invasion in Ukraine in 2014 it proved itself to be worse than useless—it completely ignored russian war crimes and, as Ukrainian soldiers wrote, after OSCE inspector visits they had to relocate the forces because russian shells would start hitting the place they visited. And now we have USA reacting to the reality of one terrorist state sending military help to the other terrorist state:

1. Those are just the rumours.
2. Okay, maybe not the rumours but still there’s no reason to do anything yet.
3. We’ll consider our actions when it comes to the direct engagement.
4. Ukraine has the right to defend itself against Koreans (why, thank you very much!).
5. We’ll go as far as not forbidding Ukraine to use our weapons against them.
6. …

I believe this post was not far from the truth (translated for those who don’t understand Ukrainian):

Bloomberg writes that potential NATO answers to the DPRK actions are limited, yet they may include:

• concern
• deep concern
• playing dumb
• making a busy appearance
• shaking head in disbelief
• saying “tsk-tsk” with a sad expression
• giving russians some Patriot systems to protect their oil refineries

And while various experts and “experts” say it’s a desperate step for russia, they forget to mention that desperate buyer pays any price—and Iran and DPRK both would gladly wrestle some technologies from it so they can nuke USA (or at least Israel) later. Of course USA sees no threat in that.

As the result, other NATO members (as well as other countries currently depending on USian help) see this inaction and finally prepare to be able to defend themselves even without USA. The claims of one candidate about leaving NATO (as well as hindering the trade with other countries) if he wins—which he may or may not follow—do not help with trusting USA either.

Overall, it seems like the advantages USA had were so successful that they went out of control and started to hurt themselves. To give an example, in ancient times stock prices were determined a lot by dividends they paid, nowadays dividends are treated as something archaic and it’s presumed that stock owners should get wealth from the increase of stock prices—which are determined by a metric “how much a lot of suckers would agree to pay” (and not some silly things as assets and profits). Similarly the companies are run by professional managers that care mostly about their bonuses—which usually means implementing short-term measures like sacking fifth of staff right before the financial report, so savings can be shown as profits, growth (and bonus for the successful manager). And if somebody is not like this—where to find enough people with a similar mindset to run a large corporation? Hubris and monopoly may make you think that it’ll last forever—but then the conditions change and your position is not so sure anymore (you might’ve heard about gas guzzlers and Detroit being the industrial heart of USA—before oil prices soared and USians started to buy Japanese cars instead).

There were many attempts to undermine Pax Americana but this time it seems USA is helping in doing that itself.

What’s next?

Nobody knows. IMO the most realistic scenario is that USA will wither while pretending that everything is nice and Enron-y—and it may work for them until the reality hits.

There are countries that attempted to concentrate on ideological issues instead of more practical ones, usually building communism (socialism, or Islam revolution). This ended badly for the population of those countries even if they must feel happy living in such moral place (or face consequences of wanting more bread instead of high moral ground).

There are two countries known for going into isolation and having extremely limited trade with the outside world—China and Japan. In case of Japan most countries politely avoided interacting with it until some rude USians came uninvited on their black warships and said “let’s trade!” In case of China it ended with a period they proudly call “century of humiliation”. You know, when the country that was proud to have most population and the most advanced industry (for some time) lost couple of wars to small groups of foreign barbarians, having to open trade, paying tribute and ceding territories. I guess that’s the future some want for USA.

If somebody thinks that voting for a right candidate will solve everything, I advise you to watch South Park episode about choosing a school mascot. I’d compare the current alternatives as Boeing and The-Company-Formerly-Known-as-Twitter: in one case you have a respectable outlook that hides degradation of the things—until the planes start to crash or self-disassemble in the air; in another case you have a company managed by a chaotic personality that manages to lose half of the users and advertisers while severing ties with the other half itself. IMO the main problem comes from most people being functionally idiots i.e. having a working brain but refusing to use it (thinking is hard after all—and there are too many helpful people around offering to think for you).

I don’t have much hope in other countries either—many things I’ve written above apply to the EU as well (but I’d argue it’s more about bureaucracy and having too many parties to come to unanimous decisions). Even China while being effectively a dictatorship (and thus lacking several of the problems) seems to experience problems (because dictators don’t always make good decisions and there’s nobody to stop them) and it is not clear if it will survive the downfall of USA (though it would welcome such event regardless).

Welcome to the shitty world, finding new ways to get worse since 2020. Enjoy it while there’s still something left to enjoy.

There’s this old but annoying (and sometimes infuriating) thing called self-fulfilling excuses. Essentially it’s when somebody uses a deferred reasoning “this thing will not work, because I’ll be stonewalling it until it fails, and then I can proudly claim that I was right”. Here I’ll give three examples of it.

First, there’s the tired “masks won’t work against spreading COVID-19”. From the facts I know even WHO finally admitted that the virus is airborne, so using a mask to protect yourself against it by filtering it out of the air you breathe sounds like a reasonable precaution (especially since virus size and masks filtering capabilities are known). And yet indeed masks were not an effective measure because of so many opinionated idiots who refused to not wear them. Just this year alone two random people shouted at me because they saw me wearing a mask (I don’t know who loves wearing them but I keep doing that in public confined places like shops or public transport because my health is not good enough as it is already).

Second, there’s this recent drama about Rust in Linux kernel. I can’t tell whether Rust really belongs there or if it was a mistake admitting it there in the first place—let the technical points be discussed by the experts—but the recent resignation of one of the maintainers demonstrated that the main reason why Rust code can’t work in Linux kernel because certain maintainers are against it. And you know what, if the rest of Rust kernel writers would leave and create their own kernel it may be for the best—I always supported having an alternative (this would be a good place to insert an advertisement for librempeg but Paul hasn’t provided one).

Third, there’s the situation with American help for Ukraine. Just yesterday russian plane sent bombs to my home city, killing civilians and destroying living houses. The most reasonable action would be to allow Ukraine use the provided missiles to strike those planes right at their airbases, eliminating or reducing the threat both directly and indirectly (as russians would have to operate the remaining planes from farther airbases, making their further strikes less effective). Instead USA forbids using its missiles for that purpose. Among the reasons quoted were that there are too few missiles USA can give anyway (right, nobody knows how to allocate scarce resources) and that there’s no strategic advantage to that (link provided as a proof that I’m not the one making it up). And considering that russians are taking such threat into account and have started building plane shelters on the airbases closer to Ukrainian borders, that will turn out true.

Apropos, this is an appropriate place to spotlight this saying:

This will probably keep being true for a long time.

If you’re looking for any solutions, you won’t find them here. This is an innate thing to many humans so I don’t believe it can be eliminated without cardinal changes to human nature (and we don’t know what and how to change), and while theoretically the consequences can be mitigated by the reasonable discussions and rational decisions, those are not common things either (and what I said above the human nature applies here as well). In other words, this world is imperfect and sucks a lot. I have more trite things to say but that’s enough for now.

One of my hobbies is travelling around and during my travels I see names that I find amusing like Geilhausen which can be translated as “Gay/kewl housing” or Waldfischbach (which translates to “forest fish brook” and it makes me think about what special kinds of fishes live in the forest). But today I want to talk about more IT-related town names.

Travelling from here to Switzerland first you encounter Vimbuch (“das Buch” is “book” in German and the town is named after St. Find. Really!). The only problem is that they had to wait over seven centuries in order for people to understand that it’s not named after an editor manual.

In twenty kilometres from it you can find Urloffen (“offen” is “open” in German). One can only wonder what its inhabitants did for over eight centuries before hyperlinks were invented.

Another thirty kilometres to the south you can find Rust.

And if you continue following the road you may end in Switzerland and see Speicherstraße in canton St. Gallen (“der Speicher” is “storage” e.g. HDD in German; the road is not impressive at all even compared to the old PATA buses). But let’s not go there, it’s a neutral place. After all, there’s Speicher near Bitburg and you know it’s a very safe storage if they build a castle for a single bit.

But speaking of the programming languages, there’s a place called Perl in the remotest rural place of Saarland (a federal land often regarded to be exactly the remotest rural piece of Germany in the eyes of people not living there). The fun thing is not only the fact that it borders Schengen Area (yes, that town is right across the river) but also that the rail line continues to Apache in France (since French famously suck at spelling, they forgot a letter in the web server’s name).

And that’s all names I can remember immediately not counting the mountain range Eifel but who remembers a programming language named after it anyway?

On August 14th 2004 Mike Melanson committed to FFmpeg a decoder for TSCC codec that I sent to him. So on that day my official story of contributing to open-source multimedia has started.

A lot has changed since then and not always to the best. Back then there were a plenty of formats to reverse engineer (with quite a demand for them as well), nowadays it feels like there’s one standard video codec (or two, if you see AV1 as different enough) and Fraunh*fer Alternative-to-Opus Audio Codec (or ***-AAC for short). And the complexity increased so that it’s increasingly harder to implement a codec alone.

From the software side things have changed as well, I’ve ranted about it enough. To put it simply, I’ve not been participating in FFmpeg (or libav) development for the last decade and I don’t regret it at all.

And yet I still have the curiosity about various multimedia formats so I keep investigating them and sharing the results with the public. I’m not sure I’ll find enough material to last for another twenty years but there are still enough obscure games out there. Occasionally my work comes in handy for somebody else and it makes me happy (not as happy as with my first contribution, that happiness lasted for a week—but I was much younger and very inexperienced back then). That’s both the curse and the blessing of being an expert on a very narrow topic: hardly anybody needs you but when they do they have no other option. So I’ll keep providing what I can as long as possible and let’s see how it ends…

I’d rather write about the current state of the world in general, how russians proved once again they don’t deserve to be called humans, how only an idiot would trust their word or believe they’re going to keep any agreement, how the general attitude of dealing with russia looks like somebody attempting to cure a disease so that the treatment does not cause any discomfort even if allows that disease to progress until it’s too late to cure it… But I’ve written all about it previously so I’ll write on a related but less crucial topic.

I ranted about the state of Firefox less than two weeks ago. And what do you know, version 128 proved out to be even worse with its attitude to the users. One could wonder how it can get worse but apparently Firefox CTO decided to give a public justification of their decision. So their answer to the war with the annoying advertisements is making sacrifices of the users’ liberties in hope that the aggressor will be satisfied with that (it always worked fine in the real world as can be seen by World War II and the ongoing World War III).

The sad thing is that the advertising is responsible for the current web of bullshit, here’s a short review.

John Wanamaker allegedly said “I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.” It’s hard to disagree with it (except that the share of effective advertising feels much lower these days) and that’s the root of the current problems.

Considering that a lot of the first domains in the Web were belonging to the large companies no wonder ads were present there from the very beginning (a small example: one of the oldest pages on The Wayback Machine is for http://www.ads.digital.com). But the real boom of advertising started when lots of ordinary people started to frequent it and various companies felt that there are money to be made off that. Add rather unscrupulous website designers and you get the (first) dark ages of Internet: annoying Flash banners, pop-ups and pop-unders, blinking text and so on. There’s the first bullshit tendency for you—putting as many ads on a page as the browser can render. And coming with it the second bullshit tendency—inflating content for accommodating more ads. Well, if you give people a way to profit off advertisement placement somebody is going to abuse it to death.

And then somebody came with the main bullshit idea: advertising can be targeted! Theoretically if you know enough about the person (or at least its actions and habits) you can offer that person only the relevant ads thus making the success rate close to 100%. In practice it does not work because people do not work like this at all (banner blindness exists, people usually get too scared when their “smart” device starts recommending them something they talked about in its presence, many people really want different things from what they believe they want and so on; and that’s not counting how the common pattern for recommendations is “you bought an electric stove recently, that means you want to buy another electric stove”). And this bullshit stimulated the growth of privacy violations and social networks. But I repeat myself.

So that’s all fine for the ad networks who can feed this bullshit to the entities placing those ads (as well as another one that those ads will be shown only to the target groups selected by them). Now it was time for people trying to earn money from displaying those ads (voluntarily or not) to learn that earning much from those ads is bullshit. Advertising on streaming platforms gets more and more aggressive but looks like for the content creators the main revenue source is subscriptions and donations but never the share from the ads provided by the platform (partner deals to place specific ads directly in the video may be a different case, you should know those MMOs and VPN services by heart now). Small blogs also seem to live off subscriptions and donations with an occasional native advertisement.

But of course there must be people who decide to automate the process as much as possible to get those vanishingly small amounts of money per ad click for millions of clicks. That’s how we get bullshit generated just to lure people to click on the ads (still talking about the Web and not, say, mobile games BTW) and even bot networks to click ads on bot-generated pages that were placed by the ad-bots. Some call it the Dead Internet Theory, I called it right in the title.

But it’s not all that bad, sometimes things get better: browsers learned to block pop-ups even without a separate plug-in, Flash was killed (maybe because a certain guy could not control it on his phones, or it made them look under-performing—in either case they both are dead now), there are certain legal restrictions for advertising in the Internet even in the USA let alone EU and there are ad-blockers. The main disadvantage is that major browsers are controlled by the companies depending on ad revenue (and A**le, where ads are merely a part of iExperience), Mozilla joining them recently. So it’s natural for them to try offering more data to the advertisers and restrict ad-blockers as much as possible (does anybody believe that things like Manifest V3 have any different intent?). We see the first step done by Mozilla already, crippling uBlock Origin looks like a matter of time. At least it should help Ladybird, Servo and maybe some Firefox forks to develop faster.

Firefox has finally upgraded for me to the localhost version and apparently the developers (or rather some other “creative” people, I suspect) decided to make it more secure by being unusable.

The first thing I noticed is that the last tab refused to close and now you need to close the window—that’s annoying. Then I noticed that bookmarks have disappeared from the toolbar and no matter what you do you can only get an additional blank space shown—at least they’re still accessible through the menu. Then I noticed that downloads may run but they’re not reported—now that’s extremely annoying. And cherry on the top is that closed tabs cannot be restored and recent history remains blank—now that’s borderline unusable.

And apparently the reason is that I’m using the browser wrong. From what I read, they decided to “protect” user data by introducing a session password which you apparently need to enter at the each session start. And considering that I power off (most of) my computers at night and usually launch browser for a quick private session (usually to check news or search for something and not clutter my history with URLs from the search pages and bad results) that means unwanted annoyance many times a day. And of course since I had no reason to launch the browser in non-private mode for many months, the change went completely unnoticed (and when they got rid of XUL even I knew that in advance despite not following the news that much).

Unrequested changes (like changing GUI layout, adding Pocket and so on) build up annoyance and breaking things like this make me consider using another browser. For now I see no real alternative (maybe one of its forks is good without me knowing it, or Servo or Ladybird will become usable for my needs), so I simply downgraded to version 126 for time being and switched off auto-updating but I should use dillo and elinks more.

P.S. One of the reasons why I switched to my own video player was that the previous one I used also decided to “improve” user experience in suspiciously similar ways (by not doing what it did because you apparently don’t know what you’re doing and by interpreting things differently). I definitely don’t want to get into browser development (and I lack hardware for that too) but I need to consider that option…