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.
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...
You only need (5) (see the AWCCWINUI3APP thing there?). There is also a group policy equivalent to this:
Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Device Installation\Device Installation Restrictions
Prevent installation of devices that match any of these device IDs
Set to Enabled
Enable Also apply to matching devices that are already installed
Add the following two IDs:
MONITOR\DELA246
SWC\VID001&PID0001&AWCCWINUI3APP
IMO this is especially heinous as Dell have registered the AWCC.exe software component as a hardware 'device' within the device tree that needs its own 'driver'. Methinks Microsoft need to tighten the noose on these annoying OEMs.
And people say linux is too complicated for normal people because of terminal commands*
*which in reality no user is really forced to use, it just happens to be easier to share and copy/paste a set of commands than hundreds of clicks on a screen.
Even that isn't sufficient - I've been using this for years and every so often AWCC still manages to get through. The only 100% protection from it is to use Image File Execution Options to match on the installer name to prevent it from ever running.
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.
I see a parallel to how Google search created incentives for SEO and social network feeds created incentive for attention grabbing slop. Platforms optimizing for their own interest at the expense of both upstream and downstream.
Is there any platform that does not use these dark patterns? I hope the agent era will allow users to bypass the crappy search responses and slop on feeds. But by the looks of it OpenAI is moving in the same conflict of interest direction to its users.
Of course they are. It was obvious from day one that ads were going to be shoved in. At first they’ll be obvious and clearly separated, then they’ll influence the responses you get without you even knowing. I can’t fathom why anyone ever believed that wouldn’t be the case.
"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.
Please allow me "post-process" your comment a bit. Let me know if I'm doing this right.
> "Making AI edits to videos" strikes me as something particularly egregious; it leads a viewer to see a reality that never existed, and that the creator never intended.
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.
His followers also added screenshots of youtube shorts doing it. He says he reached out to both platforms and says he will be reporting back with an update from their customer service and is doing some compare an contrast testing for his audience.
> 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.
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 doesn’t. Disabling hardware acceleration does which they needed to do in order to play content.
“ needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems / feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs”
The blur happens on the GPU. HEVC encode also happens on the GPU (or at least a GPU-adjacent device; it's rarely a full-shader affair). If you were to use HEVC software encode with GPU blur, you'd need to send the camera data to the GPU, pull it back to the CPU, and then software encode. Performant GPU readback is often cumbersome enough that developers won't bother.
But it is still more performant to do so in general. There are more image corrections of great quality happening than just background removal nowadays, like lighting improvements or sometimes upscaling, and you wouldn't want to do all that on the CPU.
But also, HW encoding of some codecs is not always of great quality and doesn't support the advanced features required for RTC, so the CPU encoding code-path is sometimes even forced! While it doesn't necessarily apply to HEVC as you'd need a license for it (and almost all apps rely on the system having one), it's happening for VP9 or AV1 occasionally more frequently.
