I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I'll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it's day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. "Retina" display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was... several gigabytes, I don't remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3's, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, "All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck."

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

Animated PNG has been trying to be an extension to the PNG spec for 20+ years.

APNG - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

Speaking for animation, your browser probably already supports APNG. APNG is 21 years old and has decent adoption. But it’s officially part of the club.

That said, APNGs are fat as fuck and they’re a pretty old solution to animated graphics with an alpha channel. Don’t expect to see everyone making APNGs all of the sudden. There is a reason why people have kept it at a distance.

It's not irrelevant, it's that you don't actually know if it's true or not, so it's not a valuable contribution.

If you started your comment by saying "This is something I completely made up and may or may not be correct" and then posted the same thing, you should expect the same result.

The PNG format is made of chunks that have determined roles, and provides provisions for newer "standardized" chunks alongside the custom chunks it had supported until now. It is likely that PNG made with newer software that does not use new features, or uses only additional features, will remain readable by older software to some extent.

Likely, you'll see the first frame only on older software. Encoding animation in a dedicated animation chunk and using the base spec for the first keyframe sounds like the sane thing to do, so they likely did that.

I'm not going to look into it now, because I would then have to implement it.

Yes. But if you live in the future, you have to wait for dozens of dozens of intermediate to do so! Great!

Flash was a security nightmare all round, not counting the security flaws. It was just designed without any security features. It was also terribly inefficient at its core job, that was supposedly vector animation. It filled a gap in a time where browser and standards where not that advanced.

Over time, Flash issues where never resolved, but the bloatness of the software kept increasing. Along the way, HTML got better specs, JavaScript got vast improvement, especially in everyone adhering to roughly the same standard (thanks microsoft for finally caving in…), and so the flash interpreter was highly redundant with the browser itself.

For a while flash editors could export in HTML5 and you'd get roughly the same result, but with a fraction of the resources requirements, so naturally there was little incentive to keep the flash player around.

I'm not sure if "killing flash" could be attributed to their author, or to the loss of interest.

Also note that alternative flash players exists to still play older swf files, and some sites uses them alongside with plain video conversion for flash animations that weren't dynamic.

I'll tell you if I can find some new files for testing.

Even JPEG isn't always back compatible either. I loaded an image into my software which uses some ancient library internally, and it swapped the blue and red channels.

Now if anyone don't mind explaining, PNG vs JXL?

Jxl train choo choo

I did check some of the references.

What I dont understand is why you would perceive this content as more trustworthy if I didn't say it's AI.

Nobody should trust blindly some anonymous comment on a forum. I have to check what the AI blurbs out but you can just gobble the comment of some stranger without exercising yourself some critical thinking?

As long as I'm transparent on the source and especially since I did check some of it to be sure it's not some kind of hallucination...

There shouldn't be any difference of trust between some random comment on a social network and what some AI model thinks on a subject.

Also it's not like this is some important topic with societal implications. It's just a technical question that I had (and still doesn't) that doesn't mandate researching. None of my work depends on that lib. So before my comment there was no information on compatibility. Now there is but you have to look at it critically and decide if you want to verify or trust it.

That's why I regret this kind of stubborn downvoting where people just assume the worse instead of checking the actual data.

Sometime I really wonder if I'm the only one supposed to check my data? Aren't everybody here capable of verifying the AI output if they think it's worth the time and effort?

Basically, downvoting here is choosing "no information" rather than "information I have to verify because it's AI generated".

Edit: Also I could have just summarized the AI output myself and not mention AI. What then? Would you have checked the accuracy of that data? Critical thinking is not something you use "sometimes" or just "on some comments".

Haha dont worry, just curious. Your answer is good!

You realize that if we wanted to see an AI LLM response, we'd ask an AI LLM ourselves.
What you're doing is akin to :

Hey guys, I've asked google if the new png is backward compatible, and here are the first links it gave me, hope this helps : [list 200 links]

JXL is badly supported but it does offer lossless encoding in a more flexible and much more efficient way than png does

Basically jxl could theoretically replace png, jpg, and also exr.

If you prefer to know nothing about PNG compatibility rather than something that might be true about PNG. That's fine but definitely not my approach.

Also, as I said to another commenter. Critical thinking is not some tool you decide to use on some comments and not others. An AI answer on some topics is actually more likely to be correct than an answer by a human being. And it's not some stuff I was told by an AI guru it's what researchers are evaluating in many universities. Ask an human to complete various tasks and then ask the AI model and compare scientifically the data. And it turns out there is task where the AI outperforms the human pretty much all the time.

YET on this particular task the assumption is that it's bullshit and it's just downvoted. Now I would have posted the same data myself and for some reason I would not see a single downvote. The same data represented differently completely change the likelihood of it being accurate. Even though at the end of the day you shouldn't trust blindly neither a comment from an human or an AI output.

Honestly, I'm saddened to see people already rejecting completely the technology instead of trying to understand what it's good at and what it's bad at and most importantly experiencing it themselves.

I wanted to know what was generative AI worth so I read about it and tried it locally with open source software. Now I know how to spot images that are AI generated, I know what's difficult for this tech and what is not. I think that's a much healthier attitude than blindly rejecting any and all AI outputs.

Ooh, that was the coaster company, I remember them.

I'm not sure you can turn an hdr image into a regular one just by snipping it down to 8 bits per channel and discarding the rest.

I mean it would work but I'm not certain you'll get the best results.

Interestingly, I downloaded GNOME's pride month wallpaper to see what it looked like, and the files were JXL. Never seen them in the wild before that

it would work

And that's probably enough. I don't know enough about HDR to know if it would look anything like the artist imagined, but as long as it's close enough, it's fine if it's not optimal. Having things completely break is far less than ideal.