Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.

AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.

Agreed - but that said, there are space elevator alternatives, like the Lofstrom Loop / Launch Loop, which at least theoretically can be built with modern materials (and have far better properties anyway - not latitude-constrained, provides dV, vastly higher throughput, far more efficient, stores energy / can add cheap energy at off-peak times, etc). One could always "waste" money on them trying something new :)

Wrongo, but funny story. I did get a debit card a couple of years ago and eventually got rid of all my credit cards. Last month I tried to buy something to discover that it is ONLY possible to buy it with a credit card. So far I've wasted a couple of weeks trying to find out why, but my top theory is that they insist on having an "active" credit rating for reasons still unclear. Or might be a PI abuse scam? Also spent some of that time researching the options for credit cards, but that's paradox-of-choice territory now. I remember one particular credit card company website with a list of 70 different credit cards... Talk about head games.

However I was mostly thinking about grocery stores. There are four local ones that I do business with, and each of them has wildly different loyalty card schemes with various kinds of points and bogus incentives. Lesser thinking was about Rakuten Mobile, which uses a bizarre mix of coupons and points and special offers to confuse the bejesus out of wannabe customers. (Or a former wannabe customer in my case, but one who can't yet find a better option...)

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Funny deserved, but I think the real problem is with human clones. I'm "pert' shure" some of those rich puppeteers have cloned themselves already. The first clone to take over will claim to be a son who just looks unusually like his father, but after he has a string of clones in the pipeline he'll just start swapping in a fresh one every year or two. The rest of them will be hiding on an island somewhere...

Quoted against censor trolls with mod points.

However my take on this stuff is that I'm sick and tired of playing games when I want to buy something. All of these points and bonus loyalty programs and time-limited coupons and kitchen sinks are just false economy. If you didn't actually want to buy it, then it's a waste of money at ANY price and it doesn't matter how you paid for it.

Small world syndrome? Just a few pages from finishing A City on Mars by the Weinersmiths. No, the name is not a joke, though he does do a rather funny webcomic. So any excuse for a short book review? Any Slashdotters still read books?

Summary is that they want space colonies with humans but are quite persuasive in arguing that it's a bad idea at this time. Basic premise is that anything we can do to live in space is much more likely to succeed on earth and we are still quite far away from space colonies that will be able to sustain themselves if earth is destroyed. But a desperate grab for outer space at this time might make things much worse on earth, possibly even destroying the earth. The book covers a lot of turf, and a lot of interesting history in particular, but there were two omissions that did bother me.

Minor one is that their power options didn't include steam turbines using solar power. Solving the water problem is a prerequisite for any space settlement and turbine technology is quite machine and much less expensive than the options they discussed.

Major omission involves the Fermi Paradox. Barely touched on in the book, but I think there probably are some civilizations that survived past our current crises. However I think they did that by becoming AIs, and if so, then they are already here and watching us. Curiosity and insurance against a paperclip crisis.

Not just the Web. But there are too many examples to pick from... However just recently I was meditating on how cosmetic and beauty product advertisements have harmed women in particular. Easy to create fake demand using comparisons against the extremes of beauty.

Yeah, I'm "pert' shure" you were focusing on the business model of advertising for "free" websites. TANSTAAFL, and businesses always wrap themselves around their revenue streams, but I just want a joke and I'm not seeing any good angles.

"Whatever you can do, AI can do better." Is that funny yet? Or still premature? The joke should wait for Elon to get his $1-trillion bonus for unleashing the robot hordes (controlled by AI, of course)?

People believe what they want to believe. He believe iPhones are super-sexy.

Unfortunately right now I believe we're about to get AI judges and AI cops. Good intentions under the old motto of "Justice delayed is justice denied." Instant "justice" for each of our crimes, and homo sapiens should be extinct within a week or two.

Me? I'll go down for aggravated littering with cold-blooded malice. Someone will hand me an ad for an iPhone and I'll throw it in the street.

NAK

I do recognize his name and would like to find a book he's written, but pretty sure I've searched a number of times.

I think I was about as explicit as I could be about going for funny. How about this attempted joke:

You couldn't pay me to fly when the ATCs aren't being paid to keep my plane in the air. (But I haven't flown since around 2005...)