In advance, I promise I'm not promoting any conspiracy theories here, this is a sincere question...

There's an old, largely ridiculed idea of the "nuclear hand-grenade", with most references talking about using a particular isomer of Halfnium. The primary objection I've seen to the idea is we have no practical way to "excite" nucleons in any meaningful sense - at least not without gear the size of a particle accelerator. But... This clock appears to be making use of exactly such an effect, just at sub-fissile energy levels.

Is this effectively a disproof of the most common disproof of the "Halfnium grenade"?

Sure, the rest of the market is barely keeping pace (4%) with inflation (3.4%) YTD; but but but, NVidia is shiny and AI is going to save us all! Pay no attention to the billionaires promising us a post-scarcity world while building massive survival bunkers in the background.

In server-grade hardware, sure. And you paid $$$$$ for it.

The earliest "consumer" grade RAID cards, by contrast, were basically just softRAIDs with a built-in IDE controller - And that's still true to a large degree; the "RAID-mode" in your gaming PC's BIOS is still merely offloading the hard work to the CPU.

I'm not claiming Linux' softRAID implementation was or wasn't faster than cheap RAID hardware, but I have no problem believing it could at least be comparable.

You're thinking of what amount to ultra-SFF PCs. In the truly embedded space, having a fixed (and usually tiny) amount of RAM on-die is the norm rather than the exception.

That said, Meta clearly isn't targeting 68HC05s here, so the distinction is largely meaningless.

Yes, pedant, I left out the word "qualified". I took it as a given the very people just laid off are qualified to do their own jobs. If that's my greatest sin today, I'll call it a pretty damned good day.

"Anyone I disagree with must be an rsilvergun sockpuppet". That's so broken I'm not even sure what kind of logical fallacy to label it as. Poisoning the well? A variant of Reductio ad Hitlerum? Genetic fallacy by proxy?

It's funny - Thanks to your efforts, I suspect virtually every /.'er knows who rsilvergun is at this point. And I can promise you, the vast majority of us find him far less obnoxious than his stalkers.

It's explicitly fraud, because in sponsoring H1-Bs, a company needs to attest that it's unable to fill open positions with available domestic talent. If they just fired 6000 domestic workers, there are clearly 6000 domestic workers available for those roles.

Granted, it's almost never enforced, which is what most of us in IT have been screaming about for decades.

And I may just need to buy a lottery ticket tonight while dodging flying pigs, because the current administration has managed to hit "stopped o'clock" for the second time!

That's kind of the point of most Malthusian scenarios. No, the population won't really grow exponentially forever - But it will grow exponentially within the availability of any constraining sub-exponential resources (e.g. food or physical space).

What happens when we hit that limit varies, but a common natural pattern is exponential growth followed by population collapse, rinse wash repeat. That's all well and good when we're talking about squirrels or deer; not so pleasant when we're talking about 4B humans starving.

We need companies with some balls to put technophobic politicians in their place. Don't appeal, just maliciously comply: "Okay, we've blocked all of France. Welcome back to the dark ages."

I'm pleasantly surprised to see a rare sane decision from courts who think their word is physical reality, but this shouldn't even have come up in the first place.

And those corrections require atomic clocks.

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.

"The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the television industry."(Emphasis mine).

Wow. Nothing screams confidence quite like platform-X needing to play its own awards show on platform-Y just to get enough eyes to make it worth the effort. So cooked the smoke detector battery already went dead.

"None of y'all watch any of what we're going to talk about tonight, but hey, we have a second-rate comedian hosting, and maybe a band or two if they can get rides from the nursing home! And, uh, one of the regu... uh... recurring Seinfeld cast is in the audience tonight! Your parents couldn't get enough of it!"

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.

NGL, I'm definitely liberal-leaning, yet I sincerely believed the "pay gap" was 99% explained by reproductive status and a general willingness to negotiate more aggressively for better pay (or similarly, willingness to apply for more aspirational jobs beyond the applicant's qualifications and experience level)>

The former is clearly protected under Title VII, but that doesn't change the physical reality of someone who left the workforce for five years having five years' less experience than their peers. The latter is a much harder social indoctrination (or maybe just a testosterone) problem.

This new study though... Holy shit, that's pretty black-and-white! Barring some non-obvious methodological issues, there's nothing here to argue with. We now have concrete data that even the label "male" or "female" applied to a genderless construct adversely affects perceived value.

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.