The party – which until now has largely been based in Mr Lowe’s constituency, Great Yarmouth – is further to the right than Reform on issues such as immigration and has enjoyed support from tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has publicly backed Restore Britain a number of times on his X platform.

You're telling me the platform run by Nazis, which endorses Nazis, also funds them? Color me surprised.

But seriously though, I'm surprised that they can make any money from this at all. Let alone these wild numbers. I had never even heard of this party.

The USPS acknowledged in the text of the final rule posted online Friday, which is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register next week, that two injunctions issued by federal courts in California and Massachusetts currently bar it from moving ahead with the changes to comply with a March executive order signed by Donald Trump.

The federal government has sued 30 states and Washington DC for refusing to hand over lists of eligible voters.

Nearly one in three Americans voted by mail in 2024, but Trump, who wants to restrict the number of voters by limiting ballots cast by mail, signed an executive order in March that prohibits the USPS from delivering ballots to any voters not on a federal list of citizens deemed eligible to vote in each state by the Department of Homeland Security.

The USPS proposal to implement this order seeks to require states to give the postal service the names and barcodes tied to mail-in ballots for federal elections. The service said it received more than 200,000 responses to its proposed rule change during a public comment period.

Liman had come to shoot his latest fictional political thriller. Its subject: the 2022 Nord Stream explosions, in which a team of Ukrainian divers allegedly blew up a pipeline supplying Russian natural gas to Germany. One of the chief suspects, Volodymyr Zhuravlev, had twice eluded the Germany authorities: once allegedly slipping out of Poland in the boot of a diplomatic car, and on another occasion freed by a court.

On Wednesday, however, Zhuravlev’s luck ran out. He was detained in the Croatian city of Pula – where, in an incredible meta-twist, German media said he had been acting as a consultant on Liman’s movie, Snake Island, which dramatically reconstructs Zhuravlev’s alleged act of watery sabotage.

Goes to the film set of a movie about a crime I did and am actively being pursued over

"Ummm, actually, it didn't go down like that"

Gets arrested for said crime

I hope he gets royalties.

But after having sent the letter to Kidsgrove Town Council, rather than Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, she changed her mind about quitting.

Electoral Commission rules stated a councillor cannot withdraw their resignation once it has been received by the authority.

“In this instance, a letter was hand-delivered to an incorrect address at Kidsgrove Town Council.

New research on public perception of crime found the public guessed foreign nationals make up twice the number of sexual offenders than official statistics show (30 per cent compared to 15 per cent). They also estimated foreign nationals make up 25 per cent of the prison population, when in reality they make up just 15 per cent.

Rates of mobile phone theft, domestic burglary, vehicle theft, and murder have all fallen, despite perceptions that all have risen, the study found. In fact, researchers at King’s College London found, the general public were wrong about crime on nearly every measure

Based on two surveys of 1,797 and 2,164 UK adults, the research suggested Reform UK supporters stand out as consistently the most wrong

Color me surprised!

Presumably I'd at least end up on a list from this post, or if I already am on there, they'd add an underline.

"Guys, we're going to save 50 billion buy cutting all support to disabled people"

For what purpose? If you remove all welfare, what is the purpose of the government? Who would those savings benefit? The answer is tax breaks for the rich.

The only people who would vote for Reform are the ultra rich, the ultra stupid, or the ultra racist. "Yes, I'd like the party that actively promises to make everything worse."

Interestingly, they don't ban the glasses outright. Just not recording with them. More difficult to enforce I think.

It might be difficult to ban someone from using something they might use to see, but I'd expect most people to not have only these glasses to see with, after all, what will you do while they charge?

It seems wildly racist for the conservatives to say "Not enough social housing? Just evict people we view as lesser".

It's nakedly an attempt to pit the poor against each other instead of actually fixing the issue.

It's victim blaming pure-and-simple. Not only that, but it's coming from the abuser. The Tories CAUSED this crisis, and now they're blaming those suffering from it.

This is not a full article, but the readers comments really dunk on this nonsense and I like it.

Guys, we really need to save on welfare costs. That's why we made a controversial cut of £5b to disability support.

Meanwhile, we think the army needs more money. £3b last year, and £8.4b here. It's really worth it, I promise.

In his first major interview since becoming prime minister, Andy Burnham admitted to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that the nation’s welfare bill has to be reduced.

And he made it clear that going forward certain benefits, including mental health support, will become “conditional” on people taking work and not staying at home.

Terrible. Seems like I will still be able to call Labour under Burnham "Forced Labour".

Anyone worth their salt will tell you that we need to make it easier to get benefits. Hell, the recent Timms Review found that disability benefits were degrading and dehumanizing to apply for. Making care conditional on work is insane, and Burnham needs to realize this was one of Starmer's biggest failures.

Stop trying to take money away from disabled people. Why don't you try taking money away from people that don't need it. The rich. The fact Labour leadership is not doing this shows they are either corrupt or cowards.

The work and pensions secretary has paved the way for another fight with MPs over Britain’s welfare bill, saying Labour must stop “simply writing a cheque” for benefits claimants and instead provide more job support.

Meanwhile, in late May, the first phase of the Milburn review called for a “whole system reset” involving welfare, schools, and employers to bring down a massive increase in the number of young people out of work or education after the figure topped one million.

Mr Milburn last week insisted that incoming prime minister Andy Burnham is up for overhauling the welfare system and knows it is “absolutely necessary”.

So what I'm hearing is "everybody hates the current system because they are not getting the support they need", and somehow the conclusion is "we should give them less financial support". If this is truly the stance (they are being deliberately vague about what this reform will actually entail) then it is a truly braindead take.

Cutting PIP and putting conditions on support would make the system even more soul destroying than it is.

If you want people back in work, give them good healthcare and a solid safety net. As for people who can't work, leave them to live a comfortable life and stop trying to make them destitute.

The home secretary has impressed many with her sure footed handling of the immigration crisis

You mean her rampant xenophobia? She's one of the most evil people in Labour's leadership.

I'm not sure if I'm more glad she's off immigration, or more afraid about what she'll do to the economy.

I love how Signal pretends we're using it for book clubs and not for fighting facism. I'm sure they know and this is just tongue-in-cheek.

Shabana Mahmood is a really horrible person whose policies are cruel. She's one of the worst people in the Labour administration and should be fired immediately.

Asylum seekers in the UK are generally not allowed to work while they are waiting on a decision on their claim. If they have been waiting for more than a year, then they can apply for permission to work.

As a result, they are reliant on the Home Office for housing and support as they cannot work to pay for accommodation.

Marley Morris, associate director at the IPPR, said there are “better ways of bring down” costs of asylum such as “speeding up asylum processing and appeals, reforming the existing asylum contracts”.

The fact it still was a crime is kind of ridiculous. In my opinion, it's the country and local council's duty to ensure everyone within it can live in dignity and comfort. Criminalizing someone for your incompetence is incredibly backwards.

Even if you don't believe what I do and think it's someones responsibility they don't become homeless, what does punishing them help with? If you fine them, then have that much less money to live with. If you inprison them, they now have a criminal record and will have a harder time getting a job, if they even could before.

I've heard these laws were used to create forced labour in the past. A good video by J Draper on the topic: https://youtu.be/2ec9Al5ezYs?is=IeSaElEcu0Z-U_-3

He's cute and playful. If everyone is playing cards at the table he'll jump up to get involved.

Always watching.

Majestic

Transcription:

COUNTRIES THAT BAN OR RESTRICT VPN SERVICES: Iran, Belarus, Iraq, North Korea, Turkmenistan, China, Russia, Egypt, India, Myanmar, Oman... United Kingdom?

This is probably referring to this: https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/vpn-ban-uk-b2939311.html

An older post from Mulvad about their issues advertising in the UK: https://mullvad.net/en/and-then/uk

I wanted to document an experiment I undertook trying out AV1 with Grain Synthesis on particularly grainy footage. I'll go over my thoughts and explore Plex compatibility with this feature.

This is going to be another one of my rare highly-detailed technical posts, so feel free to skip to the conclusion if you'd like.

What kicked this off?

I've been ripping Blu-rays and transcoding them for my Plex server for about 7 years now. In that time I have tweaked my settings a little, but I've broadly settled on h265 as my codec of choice. This is because it is effective at preserving fine details and film grain while still giving you a pretty good compression ratio.

Here's my typical configuration:

• Use handbrake as my encoding application (what can I say, I like GUIs)
• Use the x265 (CPU h265) encoder. Why not use NVENC? It's efficiency and detail preservation sucks for HQ movies.
• Play with the quality (RF) slider and do previews until I am happy I see no artifacting.
• Typically results in 8-12Mbps video.
• Typically that means low grain movies are 16-18 RF, very grainy movies at up to 22 RF.

If you know anything about film grain, it's that it is absolutely hell on compression algorithms. It's very hard to compress grainy footage without making it look bad. Sometimes, you come across a piece of media that is especially difficult, and that's how I found myself exploring grain synthesis this time.

What piece of media happened to kick this off? Columbo Season 9 Episode 2. No spoilers, I haven't sat down to watch it yet.

Why this in particular? I was making my way through encoding my collection of Columbo Blu-rays and noticed that Season 9 in particular was incredibly grainy. Combine that with the slight sharpening filter I tend to add to my encodes (like a bit of salt, to taste) and the final size of my encodes, instead of being around 30-50% of the original size on disc it was almost 90% at around 20Mbps!

So I set out to try this grain synthesis I had heard about.

What is Grain Synthesis?

Grain Synthesis is a novel approach introduced with the AV1 video codec, but which has only really started seeing limited use in the last few years. See this blog post by Netflix for a great explainer.

The TLDR; is that Grain Synthesis is where you:

• Analyze the characteristics of film grain in a particular piece of media
• Denoise the video
• Add the film grain characteristics as metadata in the video file / stream
• When the end user plays back the video, the grain is reapplied as a filter on top of the video

Why do this? To save bandwidth and storage space.

The theory is that by denoising, you make the video easier to compress, while still being able to evoke the feel of film grain convincingly.

Does this work in practice? Read on to find out. (Yes, saying that did make me cringe).

The experiment

The experiment was simple. Target my usual 8-10mbps with AV1 grain synthesis and see how that compares to just crushing the quality down with x265.

Application and encoder choice

After a bit of research, I decided to opt for StaxRip as the application to do my encoding. It supports a lot of AV1 encoders, including:

• rav1e - a Rust-based community-written encoder
• AOMEnc - The reference encoder.
• SVT-AV1 - Intel / Netflix's open source encoder (and it's variants).

Which encoder to use?

Well, when I tried AOMEnc and found it SUPER slow. I encode on a 12 core, 24 thread Ryzen CPU, and got 4fps. There are likely ways to get it to run faster, but I didn't play around too much. rav1e does not seem to support Grain Synthesis right now.

So really that left SVT-AV1. That's the one Handbrake includes, but in the past I found the vanilla SVT-AV1 found on there to give me really blotchy results in dark scenes, so I picked SVT-AV1-PSYEX.

Key settings

While it is technically possible to assemble the grain analysis, denoising and synthesis yourself, the easiest way to use it is actually to use the following two parameters:

--enable-dnl-denoising=1

This turns on denoising. Without this I think grain synthesis is simply added on top of your existing video.

--film-grain=<some integer value>

This sets the strength of the film grain added and, with enable-dnl-denoising=1, the strength of the denoising. Online, people recommend using values of 8-14 depending on the amount of grain.

How I dialled in the settings

I found that the best way to dial-in AV1 grain synthesis was to start with a very high quality setting, then gradually increase the noise reduction through the --film-grain value until I got most of the grain off. I could see this by using a video player that doesn't support / has grain synthesis turned off (more on this in Compatibility).

I would however avoid going too far with the noise reduction strength. No need to remove all the grain. Pushing it too far results in the video into a smeary mess. After all, no denoising algorithm is perfect, and the more you crank it, the more you lose real detail.

Then, once I was happy with the clarity, I'd dial down the quality until I either hit my size target or my acceptable lowest quality.

As for the h265 encode, I apply a Light sharpening filter in Handbrake, then reduce the quality until I hit my target.

Note here that the process with h265 has less levers to pull, so it takes less time to dial it in.

Results

See for yourself! Here's a MEGA link to the final encodes . I make no promise that I will keep that link up long-term, but I will personally hold onto the files so if the link dies in the future, try DMing me and hopefully I'll see it and send them to you.

There are 3 files:

• no denoise.mkv - a file encoded with no grain synthesis and very high quality setting to act as a baseline
• AV1 q25 denoise38.mkv - The grain synthesis file. Quality of 25 with film grain setting of 38.
• x265 crf22.5.mkv - The h265 file. Used a crf of 22.5. Picked to match the AV1 file size.

I highly recommend using a tool like video-compare to play them side by side. Grain behaviour is not easily comparable in screenshots and should be compared in motion. The command you want is:

video-compare "AV1 q25 denoise38.mkv" "x265 crf22.5.mkv"

Analysis

I call this section "Analysis", but it's quite subjective.

Grain

To me the AV1 file has cleaner grain. It's fairly convincing in motion, if a bit more regular than is realistic. Reminds me a little of some modern shows that probably have added grain in post-production.

By comparison, the h265 version has made the grain is kind of start-stop and affected by motion in the scene. It has necessarily been compressed and looks worst for it. It's not that bad though.

Quality retention

The better quality retention goes to h265 here. When you look at the details around the eyebrows of the male character here, there is perceivably a little more detail preserved. Good looking grain can give an increased perception of sharpness, which makes up some of the ground on the AV1 side.

Compatibility

Here's a very important point we've only touched on so far: What devices actually support AV1 and grain synthesis, and if they don't support it, what happens?

Well, the answer is that when AV1 is supported, but grain synthesis is not (or it's otherwise broken), the grain synthesis tends to just gets ignored and you play the weirdly smooth, denoised video instead.

Desktop players

Well, I hit my first roadblock directly after my first test encode. I use mpvnet as my player of choice. Turns out grain synthesis is broken for me with the default configuration. After like an hour of debugging, I found that I could fix it by adding vo=gpu instead of the default vo=gpu-next in my config file. This may or may not mean that the grain filter is rendered by the CPU instead of the GPU, affecting performance.

VLC worked out of the box for me. Not sure if that was because it was using CPU grain rendering or if it was because their drivers were less broken.

Neither play has a clear option to turn on or off grain synthesis. In theory, you could configure mpv with format:film-grain=no, but that didn't seem to work for me. It's possible that option only works when GPU grain rendering is in use.

For reference, I use a 3000-series Nvidia GPU. I expect GPU rendering support may depend on what GPU you have. Perhaps it works better with more recent GPUs.

Plex

I placed the AV1 file from the experiment on my fully updated Plex server, and tried to play back the episode from a variety of different devices.

• Desktop app - AV1 and grain synthesis both worked
• Mobile app (Pixel 9 Pro) - AV1 and grain synthesis both worked
• Firefox - AV1 not supported. Transcoded to h264.
• Chrome - AV1 not supported. Transcoded to h264.
• Chromecast (1st-gen) - AV1 not supported. Transcoded to h264.

When transcoding occurred, the grain-synthesis would be ignored. Meaning that you'd get a transcode of the post-denoise video into h264. No / little grain (depending on how strongly you denoised).

This is somewhat worse than transcoding h265 into h264 for compatibility reasons, but at a high bitrate where the grain is still present. That said, on-the-fly transcoding rarely results in a particularly good looking outcome.

Conclusion

Both encodes turned out very watchable on compatible devices. There was no clear winner over h265 but AV1 + grain synthesis looks decent when it works.

That said, if you or others watch your video on unsupported devices, like on the browser or on your smart tv / chromecast, you may want to opt for h265 instead. At least if that has to be transcoded, you will maintain your grain in the process.

Additionally, the effort you go through tuning AV1 encodes is somewhat higher than just chucking it through a h265 or h264 encoder. In my experience, without grain synthesis AV1 does less well with grainy content than h265 does. Not too surprising given that AV1 is primarily a web standard while h265 comes from a more disc media background.

It's warm and she's comfy on the pavement.