I can, however, tell you that you don't understand what science is, or how it functions.

It has not. In fact, the criticism against string theory is *precisely that it is pretty much impossible to debunk* because you've got so may parameters to mess with that you can make just about anything work with string theory. It's a bit like overfitting: if you want to find an equation that perfectly fits your 10,000 data points, you can certainly give a polynomial of order 9,999. Is that going to accurately model the mechanism that caused the data points you gathered, or be a good predictor for additional sampling? Not necessarily. You've overfitted the crap out of your model, it behaves weirdly between the points, it treats random noise or outliers as deterministic and valid, etc.

Is this what's going on with string theory? Maybe. It could also be that it's right. It's *really hard* to come up with an experiment that could falsify it with the technology we currently have. Does that by itself mean it's wrong and we should give up on it? No. Does that mean we should also be looking at other avenues? Yes. And we are, there are plenty of physicists who work with alternative theories and are vocal critics of string theory.

There is no person that holds that belief that isn't a moron. You included, thank you for outing yourself. I won't respond to any more of your responses, because I do know that debating idiots like you is like playing chess with a pigeon: You knock the pieces down, shit on the board, and strut around like you've won. I'll continue answering your post for anyone else who cares to read so they can understand WHY you're an idiot, but I don't really care about your opinion.

1. 1. Anything that is rigorous is real science. It's not defined as useful to you right now. Anything we discover, whether the path we're going down ends up being correct or not, is valuable.
2. 2. I'll let Angela Collier, who, btw, *also* does not like String Theory and happens to agree with you that it was a waste of time, tell you about many of the exciting discoveries made in physics over the past 70 years. I'm not even going to address the point you said "scientists" in general, as in, making the claim that ALL science has apparently been a standstill for decades, where the world I live in today is barely fucking recognizable compared to the world I lived in 20 years ago. I don't mean just in technology, I mean in terms of what we know. My god, we have NEVER been in a time that is more prolific than the time we live in right now, whatever you're learning in school will be outdated by the time you leave college, will be outdated by the time you get a graduate degree. If you're not learning while you work, you're a dinosaur and your job is at risk. The world of science today moves FAST.

Maths masturbation is *great* and we need more of it. This is one of the problems with Sabine: she likes to go, "it's just math." Buddy, If it's not rigorous math, it's not worth anything, if it is rigorous math, and it doesn't match reality, the paper it was written on is still worth its weight in gold. Do you like the world you live in with online baking and secure encryption? Thank all the mathematicians of old doing number theory for the sake of it, finding properties of prime numbers and elliptical curves. Einstein didn't like Minkowski's use of a four-dimensional spacetime to frame his special theory of relativity and then he learned it turned out to be super useful, and embraced geometry when developing his general theory of relativity, and embraced something else that essentially had no use outside of pure mathematics at that time: tensors.

If (and I do mean if, because like I said, it hasn't been 'debunked' as you claim) String Theory turns out to be COMPLETELY wrong, all the work done in it will be useful to advance what we discover is right.

You and Weinstein need to engage in a little bit more of "Maths Masturbation". Especially considering his "geometric unity" theory doesn't have enough math in it to be a rigors theory. He should get on that.

Roger Penrose is a brilliant man whom I highly respect, who happens to disagree with String Theory and actually most of the direction that any quantum theory of gravity tends to go towards. Most physicists want to quantize gravity, he thinks they should instead be trying to explain quantum physics in relativistic terms. Now, he's in the minority with that claim, but he could be right, and I appreciate that someone is making strides toward that. Although he often uses strong language to disagree with, I *seriously* doubt he would say the people working with it have "wasted their time" or aren't doing "real science."

I also want to point out Sabine is pretty critical of CCC, Penrose's theory he hopes will replace the inflationary model. Because Sabine, isn't trying to propose alternatives. She pretty much goes, "I think string theory has go nowhere, oh well. Let's just not study it or any alternatives anymore, lest we do any math masturbation." That's not science. Creating hypothesis, making the theory rigorous, and testing predictions is the job.

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.

Well it is the day after the US midterm elections, so for some it will be the end of the world in a metaphorical sense.

There's something kind of ironic about an awards show (the Emmys) that is primarily for a particular medium (broadcast TV) leaveing their own medium to get more viewers.

Yes the Emmys recognize some programming on cable and streaming services, but it was originally for, and primarily for now, broadcast TV programming.

"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!"

The real killer app for AI will be when someone creates an AI that grovels over all the millions of low-effort AI slop games out there and flags just the interesting/fun/novel ones for your attention. Otherwise you'll never find the gems amongst all the dross.

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.

I felt that Duke Nukem 3D was a journey of ripping people's heads off and shitting down their throats ;-)

It's worse. OpenAI train on user conversations and monitor them for keywords, looking to scoop people's private ideas. This has been documented in individual instances, it is also implied in the terms of service, and it is common sense in a world where the primary training materials (books and web conversations) have been exhausted while the system shows no sign of improving on its own.

Luckily their financial ponzi scheme isn't going to last too much longer. Neither will Anthropic's.