Here's a little sticker for knowing what Firefox is tho. You must be good at computers.

I haven't looked up the history, but I would imagine that the "XL" is for the fact that it can handle images up to 1B x 1B pixels (1 exapixel).

Both lossy and lossless, and so much more.

It's this.

And on the compression side, there's a lot of really cool stuff that lets it happen. For example, it dynamically resizes the blocks from 2x2 to 256x256, and they don't even have to be square. It may apply DCT in one, AFAS in another, etc - whatever is most efficient. It uses edge preserving filters to keep the edges of features clean. It can draw in splines and clone regions from one part of an image to another. Where it has to throw away high frequency noise (film grain, noisy textures, etc), it statistically samples the properties of the noise and saves that, and then regenerates equivalent noise. In "busy" areas, like say tree bark or whatnot (where the human eye isn't good at discerning changes), it throws away more precision there, and instead allocates it to details located in fragile flat areas, such as skin and shadows, that the eye is attracted to. It works in default in XYB colour space, based on the actual interactions of the cones in the eye, so it can aggressively quantize things which the brain cannot detect. And in the choice between fast but not-great Huffman coding vs. better but slow and patent-encumbered arithmetic coding, they instead use rANS, which is nearly as fast as Huffman but as efficient as arithmetic coding, and faces no patent challenges. Which is also why you can take a legacy JPEG and rapidly losslessly reincode as JPEG-XL and get a file that's ~20% smaller - you're swapping Huffman for rANS.

(That's the lossy mode - there's also a dedicated lossless mode)

You certainly wouldn't want to hire a scientist to do a critical engineering task.

You'll get a disaster calculated from first principles, but containing a small error.

The jobs in question would be the among the boringest possible jobs for a scientist.

There have been numerous articles about it recently. You have the internet. No need to stop the class just because you're the only lazy ignoramus around here.

There is no reason to suspect that that mindset would exist in nuclear operations companies. These are the stodgiest, most rigid, persnickety mindsets in the entire industrial world.

In a regular company, that makes sense, but in a nuclear plant that "bureaucratic material" is not optional, it's not there because the company decided to do it, and it can't be done by anybody; it has to be done by the right people that have accountability. Even if their accountability is mostly that their employer would be fined.

But beyond that, if they're committing gross negligence by having a computer program write it then they risk being placed into receivership and losing their investment. Nuclear power is not a "break things and apologize" industry.

The only sort of thing that it could be used for would be as a redundant alarm that notifies a human to check something even when the sensors say it is ok, for example to identify problems at an earlier stage than the older methods can achieve. And that adds costs and provides no benefit, since the existing methods have decades of 100% performance. More recent nuclear accidents have involved out-dated designs and natural disasters. The companies operating them have implicit 100% bailout guarantee from the government, assuming they do everything by the book. If they put some AI in charge of actual work that a qualified person was supposed to be doing, and just say, "Well there was a guy in an office with a hat that said Overseer," then they're gonna become a scapegoat instead of receiving a bailout.

I understand the companies making the software get a big benefit from pushing this, even though they know it isn't going to be used. It's good PR to sell their products to regular factories. But you gotta be stupid to think the companies actually running the plants are going to be interested in this.

They're legally required to do the work using qualified personnel, it's can't have done actual work.

Anything it did was redundant.

And... I mean, look, I've been reading your comments for decades, I already know you're an idiot. But this is excessive even for you. Do you not understand the stakes in nuclear plant operations? No new process would ever be used for anything without having first been tested redundantly as a simulation where it wasn't actually being used.

Their servers go down because they DDOS themselves demanding more cert renewals than they can support. The blog certificates expire and browsers refuse to load your cat memes.

Similar thing in Japan. The food isn't expensive either.

I wouldn't want them to be relying on AI to do reviews though. Maybe two AI, looking only for issues and reporting them back, like you can have AI look for security issues with computer code. And a proper review done by a human.

I have a feeling that if they did that, the AI would flag up loads of critical, may lead to meltdown issues that are uneconomical to fix and deemed to unlikely to be worth spending money on. Which incidentally lead to both Chernobyl and Fukushima being far, far worse than they might have been. Both cheaped out on the containment building. Fukushima's were inadequate, Chernobyl didn't even have any because the risk of an explosion was deemed so low.

Firstly Starfleet Academy is set centuries after TNG and DS9, at a time when the Federation is trying to rebuild after the devastation of The Burn. The Academy has only just re-opened and started taking new recruits, and with the galaxy still recovering the feed of already accomplished cadets just isn't there.

That said, the TNG version in particular was ridiculous. They apparently traumatized cadets as much as possible to see if they were worthy of joining. Aside from not every cadet having the same traumatic experiences to draw on, that's just cruel and ignores the fact that the whole point of the academy is to prepare students for that kind of thing.

In SA the cadets are expected to be at the top of their game... Once they have been taught how to do that. We see them improving throughout the first season, until they are finally able to work well as a crew (under the leadership and supervision of Reno and other officers). Of course there is also an emotional and coming of age journey there, because that's what happens to young adults. Most Western militaries are aware of this and cater for it, as do universities.

Ake left Starfleet because she saw what it had become because of The Burn, and didn't like it. She accepts that was a mistake, and she should have tried harder to put it right instead of walking away. That's a great story and the reason she was chosen to lead the Academy - she both remembers Starfleet before The Burn from her long lifespan, and is strongly motivated to make sure the next generation of officers learn from her mistakes. That's also why she wants to recruit Caleb.

The rest is just because it's a TV show. We aren't there to watch lectures, and most of what they teach is made up pseudo-science anyway. Learning how to operate an imaginary starship that works however the writers say it does isn't very interesting for the audience. It's the same with the cadets getting into so much danger (and they do use the holodeck extensively when possible) - it's like how for some reason the various Enterprises we have seen over three seasons get into highly improbable situations literally every other week. On TNG they have families aboard, but regularly end up with the ship and everyone's lives on the line.

That's how TV works. Real life is repetitive and boring, so TV doesn't try to be realistic.

Na, I think there is probably just a stark difference in enforcement goals between WA and IN.
Throwing a first-time offender in jail for a crime that caused no damages is abnormal- or at least is back in the late 90s, here. But then again, didn't they toss people into jail for decades there for having a dime on them in IN? Or is ultra-strict drug enforcement in the midwest a myth?

I explained why you can't apply them directly- they require intent.
An escaped program is not intent. It's negligence or recklessness.

If, for example, some jackass runs a .sh file they found online, and it runs metasploit, and it's pointed at someone who then reports them to the police- mens rea is not satisfied. However, negligence or recklessness may be warranted.
I suppose you can try to argue that "they should have expected the agent to get past their safeguards", but that's not a slam dunk case by any means, because they're going to pull in experts that simply said they underestimated its capabilities.

Ignorance of the law isn't defense, indeed- but mens rea- intent- is a foundation of our criminal system.
"Officer, I did not know you cannot drive after drinking" is not analogous to "Officer, I had no idea this AI program could do things I did not tell it."
There would need to be a prohibition on running AI programs, period- then, and only then, could you satisfy mens rea for the charge.

It may seem that I'm nitpicking, but this is how our legal system works, and for good reason. I'm with you on bringing the law down on these people, but the crime of "underestimating your AI" is literally negligence or recklessness, depending on the potential consequences and your degree of disregard.

Ahem