Public transit in Stockholm has in the last ten years done two things that make for a godlike ride payment UX:
1. Removed the concept of zones - everything is now covered by one single ticket
2. Introduced tap-to-pay support for debit/credit cards
This means that you as a user can always just show up with the overwhelmingly most common way to pay for things in Sweden - by card - tap once, and then you're done. No more actions required. Need to transfer? No problem, the virtual ticket you bought by tapping your card is valid for 75 minutes, no more money will be charged if you tap again within this window.
No fumbling with an app, no awkward QR code scanning, just one tap and go. Peak UX.
Same with Edinburgh. Except that we also cap daily and weekly fees. So it's £2.20 for a single ticket to anywhere, maxing out at £5.00 per day, and £24.50 per week.
(And if you're regularly travelling more than that, then you can pay for a card that will give you unlimited bus/tram travel for £70/month.)
I'm a bit jealous of those prices, there are no caps on Stockholm transit if paid for on single tickets, and the price of a single ticket is 43 SEK (£3.45). The best deal available for period tickets is the unlimited monthly pass for 1060 SEK (£85).
Right and you simply break even there so there's not much upside in terms of variable costs unless your electricity is somehow cheaper and not mainstream California prices.
You'll be waiting for a long time then, probably. Making codecs is actually a hard problem, the type of thing that AI completely falls over when tasked with.
Compression is actually a very good use case for neural networks (i.e. don't have an LLM develop a codec, but rather train a neural network to do the compression itself).
Considering AI is good at predicting things and that’s largely what compression does, I could see machine learning techniques being useful as a part of a codec though (which is a completely different thing from asking ChatGPT to write you a codec)
Yeah in the future we might use some sort of learned spatial+temporal representation to compress video, same for audio. Its easier to imagine for audio: Instead of storing the audio samples, we store text + some feature vectors that uses some model to "render" the audio samples.
It’s not absurd to think that you could send a model of your voice to a receiving party and then have your audio call just essentially be encoded text that gets thrown through the voice generator on the local machine.
AI video could mean that essential elements are preserved (actors?) but other elements are generated locally. Hell, digital doubles for actors could also mean only their movements are transmitted. Essentially just sending the mo-cap data. The future is gonna be weird
Yeah, I brought that up here and got some interesting responses:
> It would be interesting to see how far you could get using deepfakes as a method for video call compression.
> Train a model locally ahead of time and upload it to a server, then whenever you have a call scheduled the model is downloaded in advance by the other participants.
> Now, instead of having to send video data, you only have to send a representation of the facial movements so that the recipients can render it on their end. When the tech is a little further along, it should be possible to get good quality video using only a fraction of the bandwidth.
In the future, our phone contacts will store name, address, phone number, voice model. (The messed up part will be that the user doesn’t necessarily send their model, but the model could be crafted from previous calls)
You could probably also transmit a low res grayscale version of the video to “map” any local reproduction to. Kinda like how a low resolution image could be reasonably reproduced if an artist knew who the subject was.
While funny, that's not really what I would call accurate. Users get reduced data consumption, potentially higher quality selection if the bandwidth now allows for a higher resolution to be streamed, and possibly lower disk usage should they decide to offline the videos.
Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.
I do because the quality of av1 on youtube is often significantly better than vp9 and especially h264, even though the filesize is usually lower than both. And the quality of the video at 1080p when only the worse formats are available is noticeably bad.
I can send you some of my DVDs that look like trash now. Of course, that's less of a codec problem and more of a bandwidth/encoder/mastering problem; plenty of DVDs look fine (if a little undetailed) on a larger screen.
I do wish ATSC1 would adopt a newer codec (and maybe they will), most of the broadcasters cram too many subchannels in their 20mbps and a better codec would help for a while. ATSC3 has a better video codec and more efficient physical encoding, but it also DRM and a new proprietary audio codec, so it's not helpful for me.
> power usage, lesser battery life, higher energy bills
I like how you padded this list by repeating the same thing thrice. Like, increased power usage is obviously going to lead to higher energy bills.
And it’s especially weird because it’s not true? The current SOTA codec AV1 is at a sweet spot for both compression and energy demand (https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09001v1). Consumers are not worse off!
Not to mention making your device obsolete. My 12 year old laptop already can't decode some of the videos on Pirate Bay in real time, because the codec is too demanding.
Of course, we’re living in the future where Moore’s law has seriously slowed down. But, as a product of the 90’s this is a kind wild thing to see. I can’t imagine in the year 2000 being disappointed content wouldn’t play on a 386 or something.
But, I mean, your expectation is not that unreasonable, computers were quite good by 2013. It is just an eye-opening framing.
It's not really a matter of just turning it on when it comes to the kind of scale that YouTube has on their catalogue. It's practically impossible to retranscode the whole catalogue, so you're more or less stuck with only doing it for newly ingested content, and even there the tradeoffs are quite large when it comes to actually having DRM.
I think we can safely assume that the only content under DRM at YouTube today is the content where it's absolutely legally necessary.
This doesn't really mean much on account of the iOS ecosystem only supporting the latest two OS versions in their apps as a general rule. Once you are behind 2 versions, your device becomes quite useless at that point
Quite useless?! I still use my iPhone SE (1 gen) from 8 years ago. It’s working perfectly fine for my daily business. Sure, some newer apps I cannot install, but so far I’m not missing anything important. Banking apps work, navigations works, obviously the browser still works, etc
I have the same phone but to be fair some websites stopped working (GitHub is among them) and some of my banking apps stopped getting updates as well.
No huge deal breakers _personally_ as I don’t need banking on my phone anyway (I have an iPad at home, and also checked that the banks offer authentication devices like TAN generators if I really need to get out of the iOS/Android ecosystem).
Apple Pay still works fine.
I hope that small phone has a long life ahead of it still :)
Same here. I've noticed that the minimum iOS version for a lot of apps is currently 15 so I'm expecting this to increase to 16 and make my phone redundant, but until then I'll run this phone into the ground!
I guess that depends on how you get that ARR-figure. If more than all of it goes to paying your AI bills, then you can't really afford that much engineering investment.
1. Removed the concept of zones - everything is now covered by one single ticket 2. Introduced tap-to-pay support for debit/credit cards
This means that you as a user can always just show up with the overwhelmingly most common way to pay for things in Sweden - by card - tap once, and then you're done. No more actions required. Need to transfer? No problem, the virtual ticket you bought by tapping your card is valid for 75 minutes, no more money will be charged if you tap again within this window.
No fumbling with an app, no awkward QR code scanning, just one tap and go. Peak UX.