Counterpoint - yes.

Generally, if someone’s being a total asshole so severely that they have to be yeeted with several thousand other unaware bystanders, I expect to see a bunch of examples within the first… 2, maybe 3, links.

If someone can point me to a concise list of examples (actual data), I find it more disturbing that an admin on another server can yeet my account because they make noise on a discord server.I mean, yes, federating is a feature, but why even offer the ability to enroll users? Maybe for a group of friends, or something, but just rando users is nothing but a liability to everyone involved.

Oh, I understand the tactics being used. I was implying that person c was obviously stalking person a and pounced the moment they did something less than perfect.

My guess is there isn’t anything of substance, so person c’s sensitivity got amplified with time and obsessing over whatever is going on, leading them to overreact. But, not c has to double down if they want any chance of being taken seriously if a significant cause to defederate occurs.

I got around 5 links deep for each of the links in the admin’s post, and fuck if I know. There was an argumentative user, but they were articulate and thoughtful. Not dropping slurs or wasting space nonsense, but still bordering on “edgy”. The person pushing the defederation appeared to be bullying them and on a power trip.

It was embarrassing. That’s all I took away. (My opinion can change if someone digs through the shitpiles of nothingness to pull up some actual naughty posts, but that’s not going to be me.)

I almost thought I had written your comment and completely forgot about it. No, I just almost made the exact comment and want that hour of my life back.

If there was some over the top racist rant, I sure didn’t see it. And the admin pushing for the defederation sounds so bizarre. Bizarre is the best word I could come up with because “petty” makes me think it was like high school politics. This is closer to a grade school sandbox argument.

The worst I saw was “defedfags” and it was used in a way that was meant to highlight how they never said anything offensive. Like saying, “If you thought what I said before was offensive, let’s see how you respond to something intended to be negative.”

The crazy thing is that the decision is being made because the admin just liked a post. It’s not even because of the post content - which has nothing controversial and appeared maybe 8 times in my Lemmy/kbin feed yesterday.

Editing to add that this is the article: https://kbin.social/search?q=wakeup+call

At first glance, I probably thought JXL was another attempt at JPEG2000 by a few bitter devs, so I had ignored it.

Yeah, my examples/description was more intended to be conceptual for folks that may not have dealt with the nitty gritty. Just mental exercises. I’ve only done a small bit of image analysis, so I have a general understanding of what’s possible, but I’m sure there are folks here (like you) that can waaay outclass me on details.

These intermediate-to-deep dives are very interesting. Not usually my cup of tea, but this does seem big. Thanks for the info.

(fair warning - I go a little overboard on the examples. Sorry for the length.)

No idea on the details, but apparently it’s more efficient for multithreaded reading/writing.

I guess that you could have a few threads reading the file data at once into memory. While one CPU core reads the first 50% of the file, and second can be reading in the second 50% (though I’m sure it’s not actually like that, but as a general example). Image compression usually works some form of averaging over an area, so figuring out ways to chop the area up, such that those patches can load cleanly without data from the adjoining patches is probably tricky.

I found this semi-visual explanation with a quick google. The image in 3.4 is kinda what I’m talking about. In the end you need equally sized pixels, but during compression, you’re kinda stretching out the values and/or mapping of values to pixels.

Not an actual example, but highlights some of the problems when trying to do simultaneous operations…

Instead of pixels 1, 2, 3, 4 being colors 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, you apply a function that assigns the colors 1.1, 1.25, 1.25, 1.4. You now only need to store the values 1.1, 1.25, 1.4 (along with location). A 25% reduction in color data. If you wanted to cut that sequence in half for 2 CPUs with separate memory blocks to read at once, you lose some of that optimization. Now CPU1 and CPU2 need color 1.25, so it’s duplicated. Not a big deal in this example, but these bundles of values can span many pixels and intersect with other bundles (like color channels - blue can be most efficiently read in 3 pixels wide chunks, green 2 pixel wide chunks, and red 10 pixel wide chunks). Now where do you chop those pixels up for the two CPUs? Well, we can use our “average 2 middle values in 4 pixel blocks” approach, but we’re leaving a lot of performance on the table with empty or useless values. So, we can treat each of those basic color values as independent layers.

But, now that we don’t care how they line up, how do we display a partially downloaded image? The easiest way is to not show anything until the full image is loaded. Nothing nothing nothing Tada!

Or we can say we’ll wait at the end of every horizontal line for the values to fill in, display that line, then start processing the next. This is the old waiting for the picture to slowly load in 1 line at a time cliche. Makes sense from a human interpretation perspective.

But, what if we take 2D chunks and progressively fill in sub-chunks? If every pixel is a different color, it doesn’t help, but what about a landscape photo?

First values in the file: Top half is blue, bottom green. 2 operations and you can display that. The next values divide the halves in half each. If it’s a perfect blue sky (ignoring the horizon line), you’re done and the user can see the result immediately. The bottom half will have its values refined as more data is read, and after a few cycles the user will be able to see that there’s a (currently pixelated) stream right up the middle and some brownish plant on the right, etc. That’s the image loading in blurry and appearing to focus in cliche.

All that is to say, if we can do that 2D chunk method for an 8k image, maybe we don’t need to wait until the 8k resolution is loaded if we need smaller images for a set. Maybe we can stop reading the file once we have a 1024x1024 pixel grid. We can have 1 high res image of a stoplight, but treat is as any resolution less than the native high res, thanks to the progressive loading.

So, like I said, this is a general example of the types of conditions and compromises. In reality, almost no one deals with the files on this level. A few smart folks write libraries to handle the basic functions and everyone else just calls those libraries in their paint, or whatever, program.

Oh, that was long. Um, sorry? haha. Hope that made sense!

Oh, I’ve just been toying around with Stable Diffusion and some general ML tidbits. I was just thinking from a practical point of view. From what I read, it sounds like the files are smaller at the same quality, require the same or less processor load (maybe), are tuned for parallel I/O, can be encoded and decoded faster (and there being less difference in performance between the two), and supports progressive loading. I’m kinda waiting for the catch, but haven’t seen any major downsides, besides less optimal performance for very low resolution images.

I don’t know how they ingest the image data, but I would assume they’d be constantly building sets, rather than keeping lots of subsets, if just for the space savings of de-duplication.

(I kinda ramble below, but you’ll get the idea.)

Mixing and matching the speed/efficiency and storage improvement could mean a whole bunch of improvements. I/O is always an annoyance in any large set analysis. With JPEG XL, there’s less storage needed (duh), more images in RAM at once, faster transfer to and from disc, fewer cycles wasted on waiting for I/O in general, the ability to store more intermediate datasets and more descriptive models, easier to archive the raw photo sets (which might be a big deal with all the legal issues popping up), etc. You want to cram a lot of data into memory, since the GPU will be performing lots of operations in parallel. Accessing the I/O bus must be one of the larger time sinks and CPU load becomes a concern just for moving data around.

I also wonder if the support for progressive loading might be useful for more efficient, low resolution variants of high resolution models. Just store one set of high res images and load them in progressive steps to make smaller data sets. Like, say you have a bunch of 8k images, but you only want to make a website banner based on the model from those 8k res images. I wonder if it’s possible to use the the progressive loading support to halt reading in the images at 1k. Lower resolution = less model data = smaller datasets to store or transfer. Basically skipping the downsampling.

Any time I see a big feature jump, like better file size, I assume the trade off in another feature negates at least half the benefit. It’s pretty rare, from what I’ve seen, to have improvements on all fronts.

Even better, this must be fantastic when you’re training AI models with millions of images. The compression level AND performance should be a game changer.

Thank you so much for this! It reminded me to revisit my library’s general resources and look specifically for which archive collections they had available. I’m 1 state over, so I figured there was a good chance we would have Newspapers.com Library Edition access here.

The main/default collection my library sent me to was no help, but they had a Newspapers.com Library Edition portal listed further down. Final-fucking-ly got it. I really, really appreciate the help.

I’m sure it’s a fine service, if you want to use it regularly, but I just wanted 1 tiny thing. If they had a $1 for an obit or a page deal, sure. Instead, there’s this whole microcosm of bullshit where some are archived, others available, some omitted from public collections, some on different 3rd party sites, etc.

The family paid for an obit. It wasn’t in the 1800s. The paper has been digitized. I should be able to go to the paper with the name, exact date, and city and find it. They literally say it doesn’t exist. Not that it’s on our archive site or our partner site, just nothing.

I would have thrown a couple bucks to any of the sites for access, but no, I need to sign up for a subscription, give them all my details, get spam calls for the next 100 years, just no. Super frustrating.

Haha, that just made my day. I’m among my own kind here.

I really like the all screen infotainment idea, but the implementation is always shitty. Part is because they still won’t fully commit to the strengths of the interface, and part is cost. Well, screens are much cheaper now. No need to settle for a 5 inch shit tier TN panel. I want a big, honkin, high contrast, ambient light modulated brightness screen with a minimal set of buttons to switch the interface between tasks.

Personally, I HATE every dial system I’ve ever used and miss my old Prius’s touch screen. It had nice, big on-screen buttons and almost all functionality duplicated through the steering wheel. Instead of hitting a button 20 times or spinning a dial 2.24123 rotations to select the option I wanted, it was 2 taps. No rubberbanding around my intended selection or trying to compensate for whatever acceleration algorithm they used.

Right now, I have a trackpad on the center console and I hate it. The acceleration is bizarre. It snaps the some elements, but seems to not like others. It miss clicks because I bump it or something partially rests on it. Every time I use it, I have to get a feel for where I’m touching it - am I off in a corner, on the edge, in the middle.

Simply adding some dynamic buttons like a Streamdeck (little screens on each button) would solve many of the problems. Have the function and image change with the domain you’re customizing (Audio, AC, etc.). After that, allow more customization of the elements within each domain. Maybe some of them need to step up their steering wheel buttons game.

There’s also the subtle muscle memory advantage to screens. Screen of buttons, you have to still look at the target, reach to the target, and activate the switch. In the case of dials, you have to performs a different action to undo an error. You never get to repeat the proper initial action - turning to the right selection based on feedback of success. With touch controls, most errors either resolve by repeating the motion you intended correctly, or moving back a screen/reverting an element and repeating the intended motion.

I think many people assume that the tactile feedback of running your fingers over the buttons matters. In reality, I don’t see many people do that. The feedback of a selection or click is nice, but by now everyone’s had gummy keyboards, cheap electronics, and a bunch of different button-covered devices. That click confirmation isn’t anywhere near as reliable as audio cues. Hell, there can be 10 different types of buttons in the car with varying resistances and actuation distances.

Oh, and I’d like to se a study testing if the presence of constant, slow animations are less distracting that static images for consoles. I think a large part of the distraction is how sudden things can change on a screen. Like loading the next music track changes the time marker, the album art, etc. It you become accustomed to perceiving motion in that location, it may reduce the urge to orient to sudden changes.

Anyhoo, I’m rambling. Sleepy time for me.

Ah, yes, you’re right! Thanks for that.

smh

That’s fucking tragic. Makes me want to whip out the ole Hacker Manifesto.

Kids will never again know the fun of dealing with long distance calling plans and the barely usable international calling that used to cost half you rent for a 15 minute conversation.

Probably based on the Cap’n Crunch whistle pay phone hack.

Someone correct me if I’ve missed a few bits, but here’s the story…

First, a little history.

Payphones were common. If you’re younger, you’ve probably seen them in movies. To operate them, you picked up the handset, listened for the dial tone (to make sure no one yanked the cord loose), inserted the amount shown by the coin slot, and then dialed. You have a limited amount of time before an automatic message would ask you to add more money. If you dialed a long distance number, a message would play telling you how much more you needed to insert.

There were no digital controls to this - no modern networking. The primitive “computers” were more like equipment you’d see in a science class. So, to deal with the transaction details, the coin slot mechanism would detect the type of coin inserted, mute the microphone on the handset, and transmit a series of tones. Just voltage spikes. The muting prevented the background noise from interfering with the signal detection. Drop a quarter in the slot and you’d hear the background noise suddenly disappear followed by some tapping sounds (this was just bleed through).

It’s also relevant to know that cereals used to include a cheap, little toy inside. At one point, Cap’n Crunch had a whistle which had a pitch of 2600Hz.

The story goes that someone* figured out that the tones sent by the payphones were at 2600Hz - same as the whistle. You could pick up a payphone handset and puff into the whistle a certain number of times, and ti would be detected as control signals (inserting money).

That’s right! Free phone calls to anywhere. I’m hazy on the specifics, but I’m pretty sure there were other tricks you could do, like directly calling restricted technician numbers, too. The reason the 2600Hz tone was special had to do with something like it was used as a general signal that didn’t trigger billing.

It knocked the idea of phone hacking, or “phreaking”, from a little known quirk, to an entire movement. Some of the stuff was wild and if you’re interested, look up the different “boxes” that people distributed blueprints for. Eventually, the phone companies caught on and started making it harder to get at wires and more sophisticated coin receptacles.

If you’ve ever seen the magazine 2600 back in the 90s and early 00s, that’s the origin of the name.

All that is to say, if you knew nothing about technology and watched a guy whistle into a phone to get special access, you’d probably be freaked out. Who knows what that maniac could do with a flute!

• I could have sworn it was Mitnick, but might have been someone else.

True. They created their own problem by trying to up each other’s lumens claims over and over to the point where decent flashlights are claimed to have 5.6 million lumens and included 25000mAh 18650s.

Most of the $5+ flashlights are probably fine for most people’s needs. I have several and they’ve been fine for me. Different models, similar modes, similar brightness, and all fine for walking the dog or if the power goes out. Now, if I were relying on them for survival, I might think twice. All have held up fine, including the 12 year old one from dealextreme (pre-alibaba). But, since I don’t know if people are asking for recommendations where spec accuracy matters, I’m hesitant to recommend them to random people on the internet.

(I had to check, just for fun, and there are 18650 batteries listed as 19900mAh. Pretty impressive, since Panasonic is capped out at 3500-3600.)

Yeah, it really caught me off guard the first time I used the site. It was during one of those special celebration discount days where they had the audacity to mark items as literally $0.01 when basically nothing was that price.

For 3D printer filament, which is usually bought in 1kg/2.2lb spools, most places list a 2m sample or a 250g spool to game the search. And my other favorite is the whack-a-mole shipping setup where on variation might be free shipping, but choose a different color and the shipping jumps to $300+.

With Amazon, I’m seeing a ton more overpriced items discounted to still higher priced than their competition. If you look at their deals pages, you can find things like portable monitors for $70 (down from $150), but checking that category shows the same monitor (same specs under a different name) for $60.

Here’s as close as I can find right now, since all the lightning deals are ending for the day. There’s a USB laptop docking station that’s “discounted” from $139 to $70. There isn’t an exact match (there usually is), but similar products go for ~$60-$70 (2 HDMI, 4+ USB3 ports, 100W PD, ethernet). What’s funnier is that the specific company’s Amazon site has at least 4 identical docks at slightly different prices.

I just tried it again on desktop and it worked, but the reason was that I downloaded an extension a while ago and forgot about it. When I disabled the extension, it stopped working.

There used to be a way to enable installing any extension on mobile FFx Dev, but I’m not sure if that still works. The desktop extension just changes the user agent string, so that might be another route to enabling it.

I use the ChatGPT feature from desktop Firefox with no problems. Maybe it specifically denies Chrome, in which case I bet you could change the user agent string and get it to work.