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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   25769 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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Here's the transcript of the oral argument in the second (Texas) case for whoever's interested: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2023/22-555_0pm1.pdf

With absolute gems from Alito like this one:

JUSTICE ALITO: I mean, if your -- if -- let's say YouTube were a newspaper, how much would it weigh?

That would actually be a decent Google interview question. You'd need to identify units, make ballpark estimates, do a little bit of math.

For example, they say a picture is worth one thousand words. I estimate a typical newspaper contains 10,000 words and weighs one pound. So we have a rate of 10 pictures per pound. Let's ignore that newspapers also contain pictures.

A video contains roughly 30 frames per second, each frame a picture. YouTube has an absurd amount of video. They get about a million hours of uploads per day. Let's say that over their history they have 10 billion hours of video. That works out to 10 billion hours * 30 frames per second = 1,080,000,000,000,000 frames. Or, 108 trillion pounds.

In SotA multi-modal models, images are getting tokenized to 256 tokens, or ~196 words :)

As SerialStateLineXer implied, given any of the usual compressions, only a fraction of the frames in a video will actually be pictures as such. Interesting technicalities I'm happy to remember from my university days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_types

A video contains roughly 30 frames per second, each frame a picture.

A frame of video will, on average, differ only slightly from the previous frame, and be worth much less than the thousand words a single picture is worth. This is why videos can compressed at much higher ratios than still images with minimal perceivable loss of quality.

While looking for the source of these quotes I found a reddit thread where everyone dunked on Alito for being so stupid as to try to comprehend YouTube as a newspaper, even though he clearly is making a joke, even implying that YouTube is nothing like a newspaper.

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