Low Bit Rate HDMI cables

If you're using a gaming laptop for a trial presentation, or simply tasked with setting up a monitor capable of 4K or 8K resolution (ultra high definition using 4,000 or 8,000 pixels) you want to keep in mind that an older or even 'high speed' HDMI cable may not be able to support the video at such an elevated resolution.

Standard HDMI cables are no longer widely available at Best Buy or other online stores where you're likely to go to pick one up, but there's no doubt that you may be handed one by a law firm's IT staff, or find one as the cable provided for a courtroom's a/v system. These cables have a bandwidth of 4.95 Gbps and won't be able to support 4K or higher. They are designed for 1080 pixel devices. They will be designated as version 1.0 or 1.2.

You might think that a 'high speed' cable [versions 1.3 to 1.4] would be what you need, but it also won't work with 4K video at higher frames per second. They support 10.2 Gbps but won't support 4K video higher than 30 frames per second.

A Premium High Speed version 2.0 HDMI cable has a bandwidth of 18 Gbps and will work with any 4K video, and some 8K videos at lower frame rates.

If you want to play it safe and be ready for any 8K video at all, secure an Ultra High Speed HDMI version 2.1 cable (48 Gbps).

The Ultra High Speed cable will work fine with lower res videos.

If you are using an HDMI cable that won't support the resolution of the video, you may simply get a lower res video, a video that flickers, or worse yet no signal at all.

AI's Token Limit

Those of us trying to keep up with the increasing use of AI systems for legal work, have probably heard at some point that the Large Language Models which are the basis for ChatGPT and other AI tools, will give poorer results as more and more text is used to train the model. A 2024 article posted by the Databricks data analysis company, which is valued at $62 billion, (Quinn Leng, et al., Long Context RAG Performance of LLMs (Aug. 12, 2024), https://www.databricks.com/blog/long-context-rag-performance-llms ) found OpenAI's "GPT-4-0125-preview starts to decrease after 64k tokens, and only a few models can maintain consistent long context RAG performance on all datasets." RAG stands for retrieval augmented generation - it's basically the use of external documents for AI LLM systems.

This chart from the article shows how likely different AI models are to generate a correct answer when they use somewhere between 2K to 125K tokens.

But what's a token? In the context of AI a token is a string of characters that an AI system will use to detect relationships with other text strings broken into tokens. There can be more tokens than words in a block of text. Open AI's online Tokenizer will calculate the number of tokens in any text block you enter:

The token count can add up rapidly. The site, https://token-calculator.net/ generates 288185 tokens for the full text of Moby Dick.

As this example shows, not all words are classified as one token:

So if a study indicates there will be a performance decline after 64,000 tokens, keep in mind the poor performance that may result when working with document productions of several million documents.

soft hyphens

Soft hyphens are a devilish little problem that can come up when you're parsing out data in Excel.

They are displayed as hyphens at the end of a cell, but don't show up in the formula bar.

If you click inside the cell, the hyphen disappears. Deleting doesn't get rid of it.

These invisible characters are used to mark hyphenation in connection with a line break for a word.

Soft hyphens can be entered with the alt code 0173. Simply enter this code in Find and Replace in Excel and replace it with a blank to remove it from your worksheet.