And one damn thing I wanted AI to do for me was to make lovely documents for me so I didn't have to try doing it. So far it can't really do it. If I really screw around with it I can get it to do it but then I could have just done it myself.

And that's been my experience with AI so far. If I really screw around with it I can get it to do what I wanted to do but I could have just done it myself in the first place. And since I have to check all the work it's doing it's just not worth the effort.

I've been told if you put a bunch of effort into getting it to work it will work but what the hell is the point of that? Meanwhile eventually it's not going to be cheap and unless I want to spend 3 Grand on video card that can run one of the models I'm stuck paying through the nose...

I'm not sure I get what Torvalds is saying here either. Did I misread it? He said he gave AI The prompt and it did it but it was horrendous. Implying that it was worse than the work he did himself. What's the point then? If it can't solve the part I don't want to do and it's incredibly expensive doing that badly I just don't see the point... I guess it takes people who can't do a thing and makes them feel like they could do the thing. And I guess if you're a business man that's a good thing because you can theoretically expand the number of people you can hire to do a thing or just get rid of them all together plummeting wages.

But again, I don't see how that's a good thing either. Especially in a world where if you don't work you don't eat and people tend to start wars when they can't eat...

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.

Even before AI they cranked out nothing but slop for fortnite. Skin after skin after skin and they only started making anything else when fortnite skin sales started to drop and like every publicly traded company on Earth they have to grow endlessly and at the exact same or better rates than they did last cycle.

Our entire economic system is built on endless highly rapid growth to keep the Epstein class fed. Basically we're all running from the dragon hoping it eats The Hobbit before it eats us. And it's looking like it's done with all the hobbits and we're next on the menu...

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)

The ruling class has decided AI is going to replace us. One of them just casually spent close to $300 million on the midterm elections without so much as a second thought. Your individual purchases are completely irrelevant to the face of that.

This isn't something the free market can solve. It is a fundamental shift in human society and culture. Rugged individualism can only take you so far. And it turns out you can't actually pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. That used to be a joke but we took it way too fucking seriously...

Great news! In the very near future there will be no human generated earnings. Everything will be owned by a handful of the Epstein class members and the rest of us will fall over ourselves to see if we can get just a tiny piece of their glorious wealth.

At least that's the goal anyway. Remember the problem AI is designed to solve as you. Your wages. That is the problem AI is designed to solve.

No matter how little you have it's still too much for Elon Musk and other members of the Epstein class. And yes even though he was too creepy to get an island invite he is still part of the Epstein class.

Although I got to say Jesus fucking Christ just how creepy do you have to be to get turned down for Epstein island?

Not just the elections. Russia spreads vaccine misinformation and does tons of posts to make people angry and upset so that they will cause problems in society in general. It is absolutely insane that we allow them to operate in our country uncontested just because it's useful for the Republican party but here we are...

Russia heavily influences US elections via social media and since it benefits the Republican party they're allowed to do it.

Ukraine is taking them offline for the election, which is brilliant. Several close races will probably go blue now

Remember, Putin was in charge of information warfare at the KGB. And we all know he's sitting on unredacted Epstein files.

My kid is 14 and he does all his gaming (roblox, minecraft, CS2, Rainbow Six Siege, etc...) on a desktop computer. Most of his friends have desktops or consoles that they use. A few use phones, but use desktops or consoles when possible.

Gaming on a phone is an awful experience. I much prefer actual controls versus the onscreen stuff.

Come up to Wisconsin sometime and check out the shitty road paint they use. If it's dark and rainy out good luck trying to see the lines. Real fun on a hilly and windy rural road you've never driven on before.

Mostly I just wanted the excuse for the attempted Subjective joke, but...

Considering the secondary effects seemed to be the most interesting of the early comments, though it mostly made me wonder about Xi's take on the situation. On the one hand, Xi wants to keep the invasion option open just in case Taiwan tries to declare independence... On the second hand, kinetic military strikes on data centers is a bigger threat to countries with lots of data centers, which mostly means the US and China...

So back to the effects on spammers? I would think the big spammers would prefer to run independently rather than rely on any data center?

Well now I think you're claiming that advertising doesn't work to create demand, but I think that is the main function of most advertising these years. Especially in cases where the underlying good or service has little intrinsic value.

So from that perspective, I wonder how you decided the movie wasn't of interest to you. If you watch lots of movies, then it becomes interesting that you decided against seeing this one, whereas if you almost never watch movies (which is my situation) then it's a completely different thing.

A related question is whether you use Facebook, and if so, how much. I actually think it is probable that Zuck would consider it a bad thing if this movie was popular and that Facebook is a great tool to make that happen. In a worst case scenario, maybe you were manipulated to have a negative opinion without ever noticing how your strings were getting pulled.

What publicity I saw about the movie was mostly limited to an interview with Sorkin and some snippets. I thought what I saw was quite unpersuasive, and as much as I dislike all things Meta, I did not notice any developing interest in watching the movie.

It's what NASDAQ will allow. You don't have a choice, unless you're going to completely take over managing your retirement portfolio yourself. And there's a good reason most people don't do that