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Comment Re:Safer? (Score 2) 66

You think LLMs would write "Slashdot doesn't have table support, so it's hard to do side-by-side well, but:"? You think LLMs like writing sentences that end in conjunctions that express incomplete thoughts? Do you think LLMs write "high frequences", "naively pairs", call H.265 X.265 (I was thinking of what you refer to it as in ffmpeg), imbalanced parens after "lacks motion vectors",etc?

Don't get me wrong, I am a LLM user, I absolutely do use it sometimes for search, fact checking things I'm writing, spelling/grammar checks (clearly not that time, lol), etc. But I write my own posts.

Comment Re:Day after midterms (Score 0, Troll) 95

Maybe the real end of the world, if Trump reacts badly enough.

Population growth is levelling off and we will end up somewhere between 10 and 12 billion by the end of the century. It's sustainable as long as we are careful... Which we tend not to be. Most of the growth is in Africa, which has a lot of scope for it.

In fact the main reason population is still growing is people are living longer. The global fertility rate has dipped below 2.1, the steady state level due to childhood deaths.

Comment Re:mostly mash-ups of existing techniques (Score 0) 113

LLMs, by definition, cannot usefully contribute to anything that requires more than rearranging existing data. Rearranging existing data is their only function.

....THIS is what gets upvoted on Slashdot these days? Woooooooooow.

Y'all are going to have to explain how they show more creativity than humans.

How they can solve problems that require reasoning. Go ahead and simply ask it one. Or make up a new puzzle and ask it that. To any level of depth you wish to make it.

Or how they can solve things where brute-forcing the solution would take longer than the heat death of the universe.

Do any of you have any evidence it "put puzzle pieces together" to find novel cancer treatments?

Seriously guys, obvious neo-luddite mindrot propaganda? From people of your caliber? Your ID length?

Comment Re:Safer? (Score 5, Informative) 66

Slashdot doesn't have table support, so it's hard to do side-by-side well, but:

JPEG XL advantages:

Licensing:

JPEG XL: Fully royalty-free (Open source / Apache 2.0)
HEIC: Proprietary patent minefield (MPEG LA, Advance, Velos; royalties apply)

Legacy JPEG Migration:

JPEG XL: Lossless, reversible bitstream transcoding (~20% smaller); fast enough for real-time web servers
HEIC: Lossy re-encode only (generational quality loss; cannot reconstruct original JPEG)

Fine Detail & Textures

JPEG XL: Retains sharp text, fine lines, subtle textures, and film grain
HEIC: Video-derived coding (HEVC / X.265). Tends to smooth out high frequences and smudge grain.

Software Encoding Speed

JPEG XL: Extremely fast; highly parallelized SIMD architecture
HEIC: Exceptionally slow and computationally expensive in software

Software Decoding Speed

JPEG XL: Fast, lightweight multi-threaded CPU decoding
HEIC: Heavy CPU overhead (without using hardware acceleration)

Progressive Rendering:

JPEG XL: True progressive decode; smart saliency algorithm to focus bandwidth on critical details first.
HEIC: None; full file must be received and decoded before display

Lossless Compression
JPEG XL: Dedicated modular mode; vastly outperforms PNG and WebP
HEIC: Ill-suited; you basically have to try to do lossless compression with an inherently-lossy format

Bit Depth & HDR

JPEG XL: Native HDR; up to 32-bit floating point per channel
HEIC: Typically capped at 10-bit or 12-bit integer

Max Dimensions & Scaling

JPEG XL: Up to 1B x 1B; efficient viewport/crop loading without full decoding
HEIC: v5.2, 4096x2160; v6.2: 8192x4320; a tiling hack allows up to 16384 x 16384

Channels & Color Spaces:

JPEG XL: Arbitrary color spaces (hyperspectral); unlimited extra channels (alpha, depth, thermal, masks, CMYK, etc)
HEIC: Rigid container; limited auxiliary channels and standard video color spaces

HEIC advantages:

Rollout / acceleration:

JPEG XL: no dedicated hardware acceleration (thankfully, it's not as important because it's so much more efficient). Software adoption still rolling out.
HEIC: Hardware silicon (ASICs). Default capture format on modern iOS/Android; native capture in Sony, Canon, and Nikon cameras

Video:

JPEG XL: Supports animations (GIF/APNG replacement), with some optimizations** (it's not just a series of stills), but lacks the full set of optimizations that a proper video codec has.
HEIC: Container naively pairs full HEVC video tracks and audio with video.

** - JPEG XL can store up to 4 reference frames in a buffer, with multiple blending modes from the references (add, replace, multiply, etc); has subframe bounding boxes ("dirty rectangles") for when only part of a frame changes; invisible frames; modular deltas (differences between frames); etc. However, it lacks motion vectors (e.g. detecting a feature drifting across a scene and simply having to encode "move it" (followed by any needed deltas). So it's great for "GIFs", but if you wanted to encode a full movie, it'd be significantly larger than e.g. HEVC.

Comment Congrats. They killed it (Score 0) 46

I understand the myopic that makes this happen. Amazon gets a marquee event, and supposedly boosts its stature and hopefully drives viewership. Everything a corporate vice president wants. The Emmy organization gets the most money, that they use for⦠whatever. Win-win right?

Well, no. Viewership will drop because now people have to get an Amazon prime subscription as opposed to simply having basic cable, or (gasp!) an antenna. They wonâ(TM)t even know when it happens because they wonâ(TM)t see the ads for it on a competing network. And so what used to be yearly appointment viewing cultural touchstone dies.

See also: Apple and the Charlie Brown specials.

Comment Re:Safer? (Score 5, Interesting) 66

Look, I use HEIC, but JPEG-XL is just better.

* Royalty-free
* Lossless transcoding of legacy JPEGs to immediately reduce their sizes by ~20% (fast enough that you can have webservers do it in realtime)
* Better fine detail / high frequency data representation for the same bitrate. HEIC was designed for video and simply is not as good at stills.
* Faster decoding
* MUCH faster compression
* True progressive decoding - and not old-school blocky progressive decoding, but using a smart algorithm that restores coarse detail (particularly focusing on parts of the image that the eyes immediately focus on) first, then progressively adding in finer detail that the eyes take more time to notice later.
* Vastly better lossless compression
* Better colour depth and native HDR (up to 32 bit per channel)
* Up to 1B x 1B pixel images (again, useful for scientific and engineering applications), with efficient loading (don't have to load and decode the whole 1B x 1B image at full resolution to view it)
* Arbitrary colour spaces - you can even use it for scientific hyperspectral imaging. You can include e.g. alpha, depth maps, thermal data, selection masks, etc etc.

It's just a better format for stills. It's annoying that it's taken this long to get support to take off (because it takes ages for most people to update their browsers), but I'm really glad that it's starting to.

Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1, Interesting) 199

We have known about this for decades. It's called internalized sexism. Back when women where trying to get the vote, some women opposed them. They made the same arguments against it that men did.

It's understood to be largely a product of systemic sexism in our culture. It's been getting better, but it's still there. An example is how ideals of feminity were portrayed in the 1950s. The housewife, the home maker, the mother. Obedient to her husband. That's why there was so much focus on representation, so that girls didn't grow up only seeing that as the natural and proper order of things.

In the 90s there was Girl Power, and for the last 25 years we have had many, many badass action women in movies. They aren't really what we need now though. Just more competent women doing "normal" jobs, or as normal as it gets in TV shows and movies.

Comment Especially since they curate the low relevance. (Score 1) 120

There has never been an explanation of the motive for enshittifying Slashdot. It would be far more profitable with quality moderation.

It's as if Slashdot's owners hate money. While I respect the desire to do less work, even AI would be an improvement. Nerds wanting news and stuff that matters are a very large market.

Comment Re:mostly mash-ups of existing techniques (Score 0, Troll) 113

That's not how LLMs work. While they are trained on existing data, they are also capable of reasoning. They can produce novel solutions to problems.

Just because they don't work the same way as a the human brain doesn't mean that they are not capable of this sort of thing.

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