Kostya's Boring Codec World

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…

A couple of days ago I remember seeing a post that BaidUTube has started sending ads inside the video stream instead of requesting them separately. I immediately thought that re-encoding full videos would be costly and they probably would pull the same trick as Tw!tch (another company which name shan’t be taken in vain) by inserting ad fragments into HLS or DASH playlist among the ones with (questionably) useful content.

Also a couple of days ago yt-dlp stopped downloading videos from BaidUTube in 720p for me, resorting to 360p. I don’t mind much but I got curious why. Apparently BaidUTube stopped providing full encoded videos except in format 18 (that’s H.264 in 360p) even for the old videos. The rest are audio- or video-only HLS or DASH streams.

Probably they’re just optimising the storage by getting rid of those unpopular formats and improving user experience while at it. In other words, see the post title.

P.S. I wonder if they’ll accidentally forget to mark ad segments in the playlist as such but I’ll probably see it when that happens.

P.P.S. I guess I should find another time wasting undemanding hobby. That reminds me I haven’t played OpenTTD for a long time…

Since the topic is no longer hot, I can rant on it as well.

Sometimes I get asked why I name the search company with the name starting with G (and part of Alphabet) Baidu consistently throughout my blog. There are several reasons for that, mostly it’s because since they use my work without acknowledging it I don’t see a reason to promote their name either, but more importantly, I feel the company would fit well into a totalitarian regime (on the top of course, they do not want to be mere servants). And recently they’ve proved that once again.

You should be aware of the theory of enshittification by now: at first company caters to the users, then it shifts its focus to the suppliers and finally it starts to serve its own interests. I believe it is just a natural manifestation of shifting power balance but not the intents: companies want to have all money (control, whatever) without doing much work, users prefer to have everything as cheap as possible instead; so in order to get a hold on the market a company needs needs to build a user-base first, then it still has to submit to the suppliers’ wishes (since it still depends on them) until it finally gets an effective monopoly so neither the users nor the suppliers have any other option. Of course in reality there are many factors that still limit companies (sometimes EU regulations can be useful!) so it’s not as bad as it could be otherwise. But who knows, maybe we’ll see the cyberpunk future with large corporations becoming de facto states.

Anyway, back to the Internet search. Previously there was such thing as Internet—a gathering of different web sites and personal pages—and there was a need to find a piece of information of a web site of certain interest. Thus search services came into existence. Some were merely a catalogue of links for certain topics submitted by people, other crawled the Web in order to find new information (IMO AltaVista was the best one).

And then Internet matured and companies discovered that money can be made there. And that’s when we started to get annoying ads—large Flash banners, pop-ups, pop-unders and so on (I vaguely remember time before ads became that annoying but I hardly can believe in that myself). But the process has not stopped there, ad revenue meant that now the sites have a reason to attract users not merely to increase the visitors counter (yes, many sites had such widgets back in the day). That’s how we got another pillar of modern Web—SEO spam. Also with the technological progress we got large sites dedicated to organising user content (previously there were such things as GeoCities or Tripod but they were rather disorganised hosting services for random user homepages), including the worst of them—social networks. Eventually those sites tried to replace the whole Web—and it worked fine for most users who get their daily dose of news, recreation and social interaction from one or two of those sites.

So we have these megasites full with ads and generated nonsense or plagiarised content and Baidu had a reasonable idea of cutting the middle man—if you stay on one site to browse mostly generated nonsense why can’t we provide it all instead of referring you to an ad revenue for a different site? And if you think this idea is bad, there’s not much you can do about it—the very limited competition acts the same. Starting your own search service would require an insane amount of bandwidth and storage to do it right (even the large companies had their search quality declining for years because the content has exponential growth while storage space for even indexing it is limited, so you have to sacrifice something less popular). Mind you, if you limit the scope severely it may work just fine, it’s scaling to all Web content and for general audience that is rather impossible.

Now where does freedom* (yes, with marketing asterisk) of choice come into this picture?

I remember reading back in the day how The Party solved the problem of lacking resources to fulfil needs of people. They declared that the needs of the people are determined by the party (so if you think you should have other food beside bread, mashed eggplants and tinned sprats—well, that’s your own delusion that has nothing to do with your real needs). It feels that Web N.0 companies decided the same—for now mostly in the form of recommendations/suggestions but considering the growing limitations (like avoiding seeing ads on Baidu hosting using Baidu browser—at least they have not introduced mandatory quiz after the ads like reportedly one russian video hosting does) it may soon be about as good as in China (i.e. when you try to deviate from the prescribed path you’ll be gently returned to it and if you persist you’ll be punished—banning your Baidu account seems to be as bad as losing social credit score already). That’s the real freedom of choice—they’re free to choose an option for you and you’re free to choose to accept it (also known as Soviet choice).

Good thing is that most people don’t care and I can manage without. Bad thing is that it spreads elsewhere.

I’m talking mostly about various freedesktop.org projects, especially systemd and GNOME. In both cases the projects offered a certain merit (otherwise they would not stand out of their competition and not get support of IBM) but with the time they became too large in their domain and force their choices on Linux users. For example, systemd may be a conceptually good init system but in reality it can work only with the components designed specifically for it (or do you have a better explanation for existence of things like systemd-timesyncd?). Similarly GNOME is very hostile to attempts to change GUI appearance, so when third-party developers failed to take a hint with plugins and themes breaking every minor release, GNOME developers had to explicitly introduce libadwaitha and forbid any deviations from the light and dark themes hardcoded there. At least finding an alternative there is still possible.

Well, there you have it. I’m not the first to highlight the problems and I’m not proposing a universal solution to them either. But if you ever wondered why I restrict myself on many modern technologies and NIH my own multimedia framework, here’s your answer.

It is hard to say something about russia that I haven’t said before, especially without resorting to expletives. Similarly it’s hard to say something new about the countries that care more about the terrorist state well-being more than about own reputation and safety. So here’s a random rant on a completely different topic which I’ve been wanting to write for a long time.

Those who know me are also aware of the fact that I prefer playing adventure games (and sometimes strategies) from 1990s but not something from 2000s or newer. That does not mean though that I’m not aware of more recent developments (my other hobby is knowing random information I have no use for, after all). So here I’d like to present my rather obvious views on the gaming industry and why Sturgeon’s law is too optimistic for this domain.
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I thought I’ve said all what I wanted to say about the current events but apparently life constantly gives new reasons to rant.

Unlike many other people, I don’t believe in some deity but rather in a concept of idiocy. More specifically I believe that (as St Wabuu said) most of the humans are so stupid (thinking is a very energy consuming effort after all), idiocy is a side effect of human imperfection and can be eradicated only with the humanity itself, and that if there’s a way to do some idiotic thing somebody will do it (the Darwin Awards and news from Florida keep proving this version of Murphy’s law). Overall, there’s an abundance of idiocy around us and in the last two years it really demonstrated how our lives can be turned to the worse.

2020 (all ~730 days of it) can be called The Year of Arrogant Idiots. The origin of the virus is not relevant for this case (even if it spawned a lot of bickering and misinformation campaigns), but how it grew into the pandemic and how it was handled afterwards is very relevant. Mostly it is remembered for the things like #hugachinese campaign initiated by some Italian mayor (after all, having a close bodily contact with a stranger not merely removes the stigma but also should decrease the chances of transmission for any disease) and the various things from “trust me, I’m a doctor” people.

By those I mean primarily WHO and various heads of local healthcare systems but others qualify as well. I doubt you can give a better explanation why it was so hard to accept that the virus is primarily transmitted by air (even if it does not fall into “airborne” classification for some purely theoretical reasons), that calling it “mild” did not help things, or that the virus gives a mildsevere damage to the immune system so betting on herd immunity and exposing children to it was a dubious idea at best. And that’s not counting all the people who think they know even better and thus can ignore the known facts for being inconvenient (I feel they resort to a circular reasoning “masks/vaccines do not work because we won’t allow those to be used on us”). Thanks guys, without you this year would not be as crappy or as long!

The following 1939 (all 700 days of it and counting) can be called The Year of Selfish Idiots (not that the other idiotic traits are in short supply, it’s just this particular one has been driving this year down). The year started when a certain group of people (if they deserve to be called people at all) decided to act on their beliefs that occupying and plundering another country would do them more good than developing their own country instead. I can understand the initial period of confusion when good decisions were hard to make, but it was followed mostly by the decisions that can be called short-sighted only if you’re a complete diplomat.

You may not like Ukraine or not care about it at all but you should realize that if the aggressor is not stopped it won’t be satisfied with that and will use the resources and people from captured territories to attack other countries (they’re not even hiding the plans of not merely expanding to former USSR borders but conquer Finland, Poland and maybe other bits of Europe). And if some selfish idiot thinks that USA will be left alone and does not need to help other countries at all—well, russians believe Alaska is rightfully theirs as well as a bit of California, and that’s not talking about the whole “USA is our greatest enemy and should be destroyed” rhetoric. Also that’s not counting empowering other terrorist states like Iran, DPRK and that part of Yemen (who also build their ideology on hating USA).

There’s a miniature version of all of this in Israel—it has a certain person who valued staying as a prime minister more than serving his country, whose efforts to grow terrorist threat finally came to fruition last year. And he’s still friends with russia because it’s friends with other terrorist states (at least that was his excuse).

So what other countries do? Follow their selfish interests that hurt them in the long run: here in Germany we had at least two chancellors who willingly traded German interests for cheap russian gas (some argue it’s been a tradition since 1980s when they decided that cheap gas from USSR is more important than supporting Polish struggle for independence), or, in more recent events, the previous minister of defence is remembered for not doing anything with the significantly increased defence budget except giving her son a ride on a helicopter. Or there’s a situation where Europe decided to help Ukraine with munition but because of some selfish idiots who wanted to sponsor domestic industry more than to fulfil the pledge the promised amount has not been delivered (resulting in a current stalemate on the front-line). Speaking of Europe, those countries that try to help russia for cheap resources forget that being a russian ally makes you their backstabbing target (so far I think only Germany in WWII period evaded that fate—by backstabbing first). And there’s USA where politicians decided that their local political ambitions are a good reason to hold foreign aid hostage.

As I mentioned earlier, such decisions may have bad consequences for the whole world and for their country as well (but if the politicians made sane reasonable decisions I’d not have a reason to name them selfish idiots). And if you say “it’s the will of the people” then those people are no different (at least they may have an excuse for not having an idea about things outside their backwater town). America got great not all by itself but rather by setting the rules by which other countries agreed to play, and thus not eliminating the threat to the system (and russia openly declares ruining this system as one of its goals) will only lead to the downfall of USA. The same can be said about Temporarily Occupied West Taiwan which started to prosper only after its involvement in the world trade—a position which a certain selfish idiot will likely sacrifice for small territorial gains.

I don’t know why it’s just last two years. There are no facts (known to me at least) that show any factors causing the recent sharp increase in idiocy in human population. So it looks more plausible to me that the overall idiocy kept accumulating until the already stressed supports of society finally gave way under overload and external crises.

Do I think the situation can be improved? Hardly. The majority of population will be against any kind of reforms (especially where people are expected to think and/or to learn) for the obvious reason that I don’t need to repeat. So even if the current issues will be resolved, what prevents it from repeating again? After all we still have not learned a lesson from the pandemic (IMO people just got tired and decided to pretend that the virus does not matter and those frequent disruptions due to many people still falling ill from it also do not matter) and a frank and unambiguous statement from Temporarily Occupied West Taiwan that it intends to occupy the rest of Taiwanese territory and why should we hope that this upcoming conflict will be handled in a better way?

It somewhat amuses me how people discover they can use deflate to estimate text complexity or similarity. The reason for that is that this compression algorithm was essentially a by-product of efforts to estimate the string complexity. The original paper states it outright that the compression algorithm is “an adaptation of a simple copying procedure discussed recently” (referring to A. Lempel and J. Ziv, “On the complexity of finite sequences,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. IT-22, pp. 75-81, Jan. 1976). Apparently it went the full circle, proving that their original approach to complexity was right and that the authors (who did more work in that field than if field of compression) should be celebrated for this subject as well.

There are several approaches to designing the architecture that may reasonable at a quick glance but prove to be rather bad in the long run. One of those is monolith design (where the software is an interconnected mess where you cannot isolate any part without breaking half of it) and its variation panelák, a monolith that looks like it has modular structure but in reality those modules are often connected by undocumented interfaces and removing one of those may break the rest—just look at systemd, a modern init system that for some reason has to reimplement various previously stand-alone services as its components in order to function properly (like network management).

But recently I’ve noticed another, rather opposite, design pattern that nevertheless leads to equally bad outcome: having a simple but rather useless core that anybody can implement but won’t be satisfied with, which leads to creating a lot of (often competing) extensions that rarely get supported by the majority, ending up with a mess that you can’t rely upon. I think the appropriate metaphor here would be amoebas: something with a small core, amorphous body, cloning itself and the resulting clones may end up very different from each other over time (and detrimental to your health).
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A year ago I wrote why I’d like to be excited by RISC-V but can’t. I viewed it (and still view) as slightly freshened up MIPS (with the same problems as MIPS had). But the real question is what does it offer me as a developer of multimedia framework?

Not that much, as it turns out. RISC-V is often lauded as a free ISA any vendor can edit but what does it give me as an end user? It’s not that I can build a powerful enough chip even if hardware specifications are available (flashing an FPGA is an option but see “powerful enough” above) so I’m still dependent on what various vendors can offer me and from that point of view almost all CPU architectures are the same. The notable exceptions are russian Elbrus-2000 where instruction set documentation is under NDA (because its primary application being for russian military systems) and some Chinese chips they refuse to sell abroad (was it Loongson family?).

Anyway, as a multimedia framework developer I care about SIMD capabilities offered by CPU—modern codecs are too complex to write them in assembly and with a medium- or high-level language compiler you don’t care about CPU details much—except for SIMD-accelerated blocks that make sense to write using assembly (or intrinsics for POWER). And that’s where RISC-V sucks.

In theory RISC-V supports V extension (for variable-length SIMD processing), in practice hardly any CPUs support it. Essentially there is only one core on the market that support RISC-V V extension (or RVV for short)—C920 from T-Head and it’s v0.7.1 only (here’s a link to Rémi’s report on what’s changed between RVVv0.7.1 and RVVv1.0). Of course there’s a newer revision of that core that features RVVv1.0 support but currently there’s only one (rather underpowered) board using it and it’s not possible to buy anyway. Also I heard about SiFive designing a CPU with RVVv1.0 support but I don’t remember seeing products built on it.

And before you offer to use an emulator—emulation is skewed and proper simulation is too slow for practical purposes. Here’s a real-world example: when Macs migrated from PowerPC to x86, developers discovered that the vector shuffle instruction that was fast on PowerPC was much slower on Rosetta emulation (unlike the rest of code). Similarly there’s a story about NEON optimisations not giving any speed-up—when tested in QEMU—but made a significant performance boost on real hardware. That’s why I’d rather have a small development board (something like the original BeagleBoard) to test the optimisations if I can’t get a proper box to develop stuff on it directly.

This also rises a question not only about when CPUs with RVV support should be more accessible but why they are so rare. I can understand the problems with designing a modern performant CPU in general let alone with vector extension and on rather short term but since some have accomplished it already, why is it not more common? Particularly SiFive, if you have one chip with RVV what prevents adding it to other chips which are supposedly desktop- and server-oriented? I have only one answer and I’d like to be proven wrong (as usual): while the chip designers can implement RVV, they were unable to make it performant without hurting the rest of CPUs (either too large transistor budget or power requirements; or maybe its design interferes with the rest of the core too much) so we have it mostly on underwhelming Chinese cores and some SiFive CPU not oriented for a general user. Hopefully in the future the problems will be solved and we’ll see more mainline RISC-V CPUs with RVV. Hopefully.

So far though it reminds me of a story about Nv*dia and its first Tegra SoCs. From what I heard, the company managed to convince various vendors to use it in their infotainment systems and those who used it discovered that its hardware H.264 decoder worked only for files with certain resolutions and they somehow used a CPU without SIMD (IIRC the first Tegra lacked even FPU) so you could not even attempt to decode stuff there with a software decoder. As the result those vendors were disappointed and made a pass on the following SoCs (resulting in a rather funny Tegra-powered microwave oven). I fear that RISC-V might lose interest of the multimedia developers with both the need to rewrite code from RVVv0.7.1 to RVVv1.0 and the lack of appealing hardware supporting RVVv1.0 anyway—so when it’s ready nobody will be interested any longer. And don’t repeat again the same words about open and royalty-free ISA. We have free Theora format that sucked and was kept alive because “it’s free”—when it was improved to be about as good as MPEG-4 ASP there was a much better open and free VP8 codec available. Maybe somebody will design a less fragmented ISA targeting more specific use cases than “anything from simple microcontrollers to server CPUS” and RISC-V will join OpenRISC and others (…and nothing of the value will be lost).

P.S. Of course multimedia is far from the most important use case but it involves a good deal of technologies used in other places. And remember, SSE was marketed as something that speeds-up working with Internet (I like to end posts on a baffling note).