MaxL93

It's been a feature of the phones for years too.

While caution is definitely warranted after LG, I am definitely getting the impression that people are far too quick to jump to conclusions because an A.I. service told them something without them factually checking it first

You could compare it to Windows vs. Linux in a sense. 3ds Max has decades of legacy plugin/SDK compatibility baggage, lots of commercial and contractual obligations with business/enterprise customers... and Blender has none of those things weighing it down.

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.

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.