lossless recompression of existing JPEG Uh… how does it make a JPEG lossless? Or is it lossless in that it makes a JXL out of a JPEG without affecting the original JPEG quality (i.e. no further loss beyond JPEG's)? Being able to turn JPEGs into JXLs and JXLs back to JPEGs is cool, though What's with the AVIF thing? Yet another I am unfamiliar with (all I know about image formats is JPG = worse quality, PNG = better quality, GIF = animated (and something WebP. Idk much about that one either)) Also, in my research, I've found something about the distinction between lossless JXL vs lossy JXL. Seems like you wouldn't be able to tell if the image is lossy or lossless just from it being a JXL

Gobble that AI slop NPR. Reads like sponsored content.

I know everybody hates AI but to me it's weird to treat artificially generated nudity differently from if somebody painted a naked body with a real person's face on it - which I assume would be legally protected freedom of expression.

TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing. Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/ Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more. As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.

Epic is a piece of shit company. The only reason they are fighting this fight with Apple is because they want some of Apple’s platform fees for themselves. Period. The fact that they managed to convince a bunch of simpletons that they are somehow Robin Hood coming to free them from the tyrant (who was actually protecting all those users all along) is laughable. Apple created the platform, Apple managed it, curated it, and controlled it. That gives them the right to profit from it. You might dislike that but — guess what? Nobody forced you to buy it. Buy Android if Fortnight is so important to you. Seriously. Please. We won’t miss you. Epic thinks they have a right to profit from Apple’s platform and not pay them for all the work they did to get it to be over 1 billion users. That is simply wrong. They should build their own platform and their own App Store and convince 1 billion people to use it. The reason they aren’t doing that is because they know they will never be as successful as Apple has been.

Take a longer text (like 70 pages or so) and try to delete the first 30 pages.

So we need a documentary like Super Size Me but for social media. I think post that documentary coming out was the only time I've seen people's attitudes change in the general population about fast food.