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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Off the commercial off the shelf “smart” TVs available, I started by looking at the OSes available. Choices were Roku, webOS, Tizen, and Google TV. I immediately ruled out Roku because of their recent changes to terms&conditions. webOS is pretty much limited to LG TVs, and I had bad experiences with LG warranties, so I ruled that out. Tizen (Samsung) was out for similar reasons, so that left me with Google TV. It’s… OK. Doesn’t require Internet connection to work, and doesn’t nag me about it. And it came with a hardware switch to turn off the microphone. Not sure if that’s a brand thing (Hisense) or applicable to all Google TV devices, but was reassuring.




  • Not a stupid question at all. Here’s the Wikipedia article for it. The significant part is this:

    The 5-dimensional discs [have] tiny patterns printed on 3 layers within the discs. Depending on the angle they are viewed from, these patterns can look completely different. This may sound like science fiction, but it’s basically a really fancy optical illusion. In this case, the 5 dimensions inside of the discs are the size and orientation in relation to the 3-dimensional position of the nanostructures. The concept of being 5-dimensional means that one disc has several different images depending on the angle that one views it from, and the magnification of the microscope used to view it. Basically, each disc has multiple layers of micro and macro level images.





  • That’s LLM AI, but the type I’m talking about is the machine learning kind. I can envision a system that takes e.g. a sample’s test data and provides a summary, which is not far from what doctors do anyway. If you ever get a blood test’s results explained to you it’s “this value is high, which would be concerning except that this other value is not high, so you’re probably fine regarding X. However, I notice that this other value is low, and this can be an indicator of Y. I’m going to request a follow-up test regarding that.” Yes, I would trust an AI to give me that explanation, because those are very strict parameters to work with, and the input comes from a trusted source (lab results and medical training data) and not “Bob’s shrimping and hoola hoop dancing blog”.







  • The article’s author mentioned that the problem is not limited to Samsung TVs - someone reported the issue on their phone.

    The article does not mention a root cause, but I have a theory that it’s likely a malformed subtitle track. I tend to watch with subtitles on so I run into related issues every once in a while. Most of the time it’s one of two things:

    • The subtitles are misaligned (eg wrong offset, addressed by adding a positive or negative delay to the track)
    • Bad formatting on the timing information.

    The latter can have multiple effects depending on what format the subs are in, but most of the time it’s a missing end time, meaning that the subtitle stays on. However, some formats also have cues as to who the speaker is, and that comes with a start and end tag like in HTML. I suspect that in this case the end tag is either missing or misaligned in the syntax tree, causing this one line of dialogue to be displayed over and over when the player reaches other lines matching the cue for it, but that don’t get shown because the user has turned subtitles off.

    As to why this is bleeding into other shows: I suspect it’s an issue with how the software clients are caching the subtitle files. This would also explain why going back into the episode that caused this fixes things, because it would reset the cached file. Which in turn brings me back to pointing the finger at Amazon, not Samsung, because Samsung would just be loading Amazon’s software client to play the video and subtitles.