Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

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) 90

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: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.

Submission + - Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon (science.org)

sciencehabit writes: In 1543, Portuguese merchants caught in stormy winds ran aground on Tanegashima, a verdant island enveloped by crystal-blue waters just south of the Japanese mainland. To those living there, these sailors—the first Europeans known to set foot in Japan—were nothing short of aliens from a distant land, bringing with them strange customs, an unfamiliar language, and new technology.

Nearly 5 centuries later, the island is once again serving as a bridge to an alien world. On 20 October, a rocket will blast off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) Tanegashima Space Center, flinging a spacecraft the size of a car to Mars. When it arrives, it’ll swoop around the planet before landing on a lumpy island floating above it. And that’s when the real drama begins.

We live in an age of space heists. In recent years, the United States and Japan have retrieved material from several asteroids with smash-and-grab spacecraft. After reaching an asteroid this summer, China is set to return samples from it next year, and it recently conducted the first sample return from the far side of the Moon.

But Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more audacious: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031. “Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.

Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact. But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself. “This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be Phobos and Mars.”

Submission + - The world will end next month, a 1960 paper in Science predicted (science.org)

sciencehabit writes: “A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday,” The New York Times wrote on 4 November 1960. “He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself.”

The newspaper was right—but the prediction was wrong. That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.”

The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors—all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020.

The researchers didn’t calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” they wrote. “They will be squeezed to death.”

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) 198

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 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.

Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 1, Interesting) 120

Seinfeld went to Israel and visited the IDF camps where they train people to participate in genocide. That's not a joke, that's becoming directly involved in a crime against humanity.

That's the fig leaf that is always used. "It's just a joke! I'm not hurting anyone!" Then they use the platform and money to hurt people. JK Rowling is another example. "It's just a children's book!" (never mind that she also writes shit adults novels under a male name). She funds hate groups and their lawsuits, which has recently resulted in an extremely damaging change in the law in the UK.

Speech does not happen in a vacuum.

Slashdot Top Deals

I use technology in order to hate it more properly. -- Nam June Paik

Working...