A typical student's kitchen must be good hunting grounds for a microbiologist!

Reminds me of the real mechanical turk (not the Amazon crap), which was a 16th century contraption supposedly using advanced mechanical intelligence to play chess.

It was really just a guy in a box.

That status is slowly going down though. Still absolutely the largest reserve but... shit can happen.

I hated this bullshit from the first time I saw them popping up, and they've managed to insert themselves into so many retailers here.

"Larger customers like DuckDuckGo told Wired they won't be affected."

... for how long? While it is obviously a little ironic that DuckDuckGo routes the searches through Bing (and I was surprised the first time I read about it), it's still a sound idea and I'm glad DuckDuckGo can do it.

Or does DuckDuckGo pay dearly for the service, enough to compensate Microsoft's actual costs? Follow-up thought: If Microsoft no longer cares about Bing, will that cause DuckDuckGo to get worse over time?

A good start but it always helps to put this in perspective.

They made $350 billion in revenue 2024. Over $100 billion in income.

I assure you they make a profit breaking these laws. $1.4 isn't a small amount though, if it keeps happening.

My pet peeve is people uploading content with obviously incorrect aspect ratio to platforms such as YouTube, and the mass of people who watch it without realizing anything is wrong.

With that in mind, it doesn't surprise me at all that people think that "washed out" colors are normal, or just don't understand what they are looking at.

This is not as much of a problem, since the data recorder is local.

The problem is when they transmit data back to the company, who can be ordered to release it without you knowing about it.

There's always Conservapedia for those who want "A conservative, pro-American, pro-Christian wiki" https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservapedia.com%2F...

This is worse than scripted "clapter" comedy, which is just designed to further an agenda.

Last time I was in China it struck me that my secure VPN solutions, using my own tunnels and pre-installed keys etc, they never worked well. They are throttled to death after a very quick time, since the firewall does not recognize the traffic.

Meanwhile, the VPN solutions my Chinese colleagues use seem to work very well, and it's an open secret. Everyone uses them.

This makes me pretty certain that every VPN solution that works within China, they work simply because there is a known backdoor.

Wikipedia has the gory details, complete with citations. My opinion is that the Donkey Kong and Pac-Man scores from the eighties are likely genuine and that's why he held the world records, not hold them.

Everything from his "comeback" this millennium should be taken with a truckload of salt. Some of it has of course been formally debunked and retracted.

Imagine if this argument was used in drug policy discussions.

"Some people are addicted, they need drugs, it would be cruel to ban drugs"

Yeah, those in "need" of expensive credit are probably those who should not have access to it.

I'm explicitly not talking about storing this in JPEG - it's even mentioned as an example of other formats.

But every format that does compression - even lossless - performs a number of transforms in every dimension, spatial, spectral etc. It's to make it easier to locate redundant information. If the transform and compression is reversible (for example delta-encoding neighbouring pixels and run-length coding), it's lossless.

Transforming the channels with something like a principal component analysis would losslessly transform all the channels into something that could more easily be compressed without loss.

That's weird, why wasn't this already standard practice?

The idea of collecting the energy from multiple layers like DSP 101, I first read about it in graphics literature from the early nineties when I started, and multi-spectral images in astronomy is the standard example of where this is useful.

Of course JPEG and many other related formats already do this with the RGB layers but with a hardcoded transform designed as a decent compromise between image perception and being easy to calculate.