The_Decryptor

Procedural generation is just an earlier form of AI that’s been demystified and commercialized as a positive thing.

That is such a broad generalisation that it makes the term useless.

Is Minesweeper AI then? It uses procedural generation to generate the play area. Is Minecraft chunk generation AI?

Is perlin noise AI?

Would syntax highlighting?

It’s not really Ext4 doing that, it’s a bunch of tricks in the OS layer and the way apps write files to storage that limits it.

You’ll see it if you use something like a BT client without pre-allocation, those files can get heavily fragmented depending on the download speed.

It’s got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it’s Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.

I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.

She used all the code words and dog whistles from the start.

Yep, Elon picked her for a reason.

The dog?

Draw distance sucks for a vast ocean of plants and sealife. Seriously, I have a really good video card, and this fucking Unity engine can’t draw 500 feet in front of me.

If anything Subnautica lets you see too much.

PNG gets you the best compatibility and features, at the expense of file size. But I probably wouldn’t use it for uploading photographs to the web of course.

WebP is the same, it’s got a lossy mode (VP8) and a lossless mode (Which is more limited than PNG, but beats it where it overlaps). But to make it more complicated the lossless mode also has lossy processing modes, where it alters the image first to achieve smaller output sizes.

And PNG is no different.

People have a long habit of turning JPEG files into PNG files, the file extension won’t help you there. They also could have reduced the colour depth or resized it, all lossy operations. All it really tells you is that it can have an alpha channel.

As for AVIF, personally I don’t like the format, it feels like an “open media” (But still patented) version of HEIF to oppose Apple. Like WebP it makes the (baseless IMO) assumption that a format designed to encode motion data is better at encoding still data than a format designed to encode still data. It’s got all the limitations of a video format (It’s got a max resolution, only supports 12bit images, and no progressive decoding), and they left out all the enhancements from WebP (The dedicated lossless mode, “lossless AVIF” files are huge and the last I checked badly supported, so nobody actually used them, and they just called very high quality settings “lossless”)

A team inside of Google was working on WebP2 around the same time, that used AV1 but actually added the useful stuff like efficient lossless encoding, it got killed too in favour of AVIF.

So it depends on the specific HDR encoding used, Rec2020 is the most common ones you’ll see (It’s meant for “pure” setups, i.e. where the source and output are tightly linked, e.g. gaming consoles or blu-ray, or so) and the raw data won’t look great. While something like HLG (Hybrid-Log Gamma) is designed for better fallback (As it’s meant for TV broadcast, where the output device is “whatever TV the user has”), so should just look dimmer.

This is a HDR screenshot I took of Destiny 2, which uses Rec2020, tone mapped to SDR

And here’s the raw screenshot data from before tonemapping.

If the second image had all the right HDR metadata, and the viewer supported it properly, then both images would match.

AVIF is generally smaller in size than both WebP and PNG. AVIF supports animation while PNG does not.

The lossless mode in AVIF is so bad that a BMP in a ZIP file produces smaller results.

Which makes sense, as it doesn’t actually have a dedicated lossless mode (like WebP does), the encoder is just to not quantise the video data it produces.

JXL can do lossy images (like JPEG) and lossless ones (like PNG), and on average it’ll produce smaller file sizes than both (While beating JPEG quality wise). The killer feature is that it can do lossless recompression of existing JPEG files and shave off about 20% of the file size, and it’s reversible so you can turn those JXL files back into JPEG images for existing software.

The downside is that it was created by Google Research (among others), but the Chrome team made AVIF instead and decided that’s what they’d support and nothing else.

At least Safari supports it.

I switched a year ago, after trying and failing multiple times over the years whenever I gave it a try.

1. Linux has massively improved, systemd is a lot cleaner than the mess of disparate shell scripts it displaced. Network Manager is also a lot nicer now than I remember it being when it was first introduced into Red Hat.
2. Windows hasn’t, in a lot of ways it was actually regressing. I used to get multiple shell crashes a week with no insight as to why, friends would claim it was just me but then receive an update and start having similar crashes. Also noticeable UI issues that went unfixed for multiple revisions, made it felt cheap.
3. MS went all in on AI garbage and was jamming it into everything, kept getting popup notifications and the like to try Copilot, notifications went from being useful to just being an ad delivery mechanism.
4. Gaming on Linux massively improved, last time I tried it OpenGL support was a mess. Now OpenGL is very mature, and all the D3D translation stuff uses Vulkan which has been rock solid for me. I’ve found games run better than they did on Windows on the same hardware, and the only game I’ve had an issue with was Destiny 2, which is intentional on the devs behalf (Luckily the game’s boring now)

I find I’m a lot more willing to let issues slide though, like I’ve had some Thunar crashes which I’m cool with since there’s like 4 devs maintaining it, vs. the multi-billion dollar company working on Explorer which I expect better from. Also unsurprisingly the only actual shop-stopper issue I’ve had was with a memory leak in the Nvidia drivers, the actual FLOSS stuff has been great.

We still do.

For a community called “technology” there’s a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.

Are you surprised people have opinions about technology, in a community dedicated to discussing technology?

Use Zola or Hugo then

Wouldn’t have to order them to do anything, they’d gleefully offer to do it first.

Yeah this is a perfect use case for torrents, could go a step further and keep track of a downloader’s ratio to stop people leaching.

deleted by creator

Tizen (resting place of Meego)

I’d say SailfishOS is the final resting place of MeeGo, especially since it’s maintained by ex-Nokia devs.