Hacker News Reader

Snafuhon Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms

jxl-rs (rust) is just a decoder while libjxl (C++) can also encode.

There is a rust encoder in active developing by someone outside the core JPEG XL devs.

Snafuhon Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms

Luca Versari, one of the devs between both libraries, has a performance dashboard to compare performance between the two https://jxl-rs-perf.lucaversari.it/

jxl-rs started to outperform the C++ library 2 months ago.

Snafuhon A graph that should be front-page news

> less productive cars

How does enforcing emissions regulations result in less productive cars?

Cars move about 1.5 people per trip on average. A big pickup or SUV is not any more productive doing this task than a mid sized car.

Snafuhon Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability

Git-ish CLI is great. The GUI is more important though. Non-programmers don't want to dabble with CLI. One reason why Perforce is the defacto standard IMO. The GUI covers 99% of daily used operations and is easy to use.

Snafuhon Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a pardon from Trump

Apparently his net worth peaked at a billion dollars. And he only got 4 years. By the time a pardon would be arranged, he'd almost be out again.

SBF has more than 20 years left.

Snafuhon Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

Claude Code is not the majority of AI usage.

People asking any AI chat interface for ideas for their honeymoon will trigger some kind of search. SEO is still relevant and Google might still be able to sell top spots in their search so LLMs will pick it up.

Snafuhon Ferrari Luce

The Luce seats 5 and has a trunk.

The Rimac Nevera is a different car category. Ferrari just decided to not make this a 2 seat hypercar.

This is the daily driver Ferrari for a small family, similar to the Porsche Cayenne or Panamera.

Snafuhon A successful Japanese trial of a ramjet engine designed for Mach‑5 aircraft

Good luck getting a launch and landing pad anywhere close to a population centre.

Logistics around the flight would be a big asterisk behind the flight time.

Snafuhon AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

Simple piraciy is not even the worst possible outcome.

Without copyright, nothing stops one from simply selling a book under their own name.

Big publishers could just reprint anything and get it into brick & mortar stores. No money for authors.

Advocating for absolutely no copyright is wild.

Snafuhon Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust"

The bun team must love all the people pointing out errors. That's how they get a free, crowd sourced code review of their million lines.

Snafuhon France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins

I use an European made computer from Schenker (their XMG subbrand actually).

Of course the components are not European made. But Dell's components are not US made either.

I can also buy a Japanese or Korean (or Chinese) computer. There is no dependency on a single country.

Snafuhon We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

The engineer who identified 500k in savings is a great candidate I'd say. But solving a problem requires a problem to be there in the first place.

Snafuhon FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers

Do you apply the same scrutiny to the food you eat?

Some trust has to be created through testing standards and the law, but generally we do believe what the label says in day to day life.

Snafuhon Accepting US car standards would risk European lives

They are not even in the same ballpark size wise

https://www.carsized.com/en-us/cars/compare/porsche-cayenne-...

But or course you are correct this is not only about American cars. Europeans can build big cars as well.

Cars are taxed by engine displacement in Germany. It's rather low compared to insurance and gas cost though. Indirectly larger cars are taxed through high gas tax.

Snafuhon Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

It's already happening. Coal use in the US was up 15% in H1/25 compared to the previous year. Partially due to a shift from higher prices gas.

Coal retirement in the US is almost entirely driven by economics. If someone needs the power, coal plants will stay open and capacity factor go up.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/elec_coal_renew.php

Snafuhon Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock

The money was already granted without being tied to 10% equity. This looks like the government retroactively changing the deal.

Snafuhon How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast

There is a PR open since June. It's currently blocked by a MacOS CI issue.

https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/58491

Snafuhon X Prevents Research on Potential Election Interference

Just last week a report about election interference by foreign entities on a Twitter was released.

Twitter does not seem very interested in transparency or stopping behavior favoring certain views

https://www.canva.com/design/DAGesRcirKQ/4-mOPKQEfWtozFtO_jU...

Snafuhon Is the use of reCAPTCHA GDPR-compliant?

Germany also requires an imprint with name and address on any non-personal website. Non-Personal can basically mean anything beyond a purely personal blog without comments or anything.

Snafuhon Spotify Shuts Down ‘Unwrapped’ Artist Royalty Calculator with Legal Threats

Both Apple Music and Tidal (and Google Music, Amazon) can afford to lose money as long as leadership want the service to stay online.

I don't think it's sustainable for musicians to rely on cross financing via other services or VC money. Further consolidation under under big tech conpanies would be a negative IMO

Snafuhon The Porsche Macan EV is being recalled because its headlights are too bright

Germans cycle more than 4 times as much per capita than Brits. Absolute numbers are meaningless, you have to look at deaths per km. Germanies bike infrastructure is not great and there is lots to criticize, but that's true for most places in Europe.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kilometres-cycled-per-in...

Snafuhon Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

Even Chinese panels in Canada have a energy payback of less than 2 years

PDF link to a study comparing different installation countries: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

Snafuhon Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Does this work the other way round? Will it reference a deleted tweet, or even data that was deleted under a GDPR request?

I bet some people will do experiments, just like when AI code assists appeared and people found out it copies complete code snippets including comments.

Referencing "deleted" data might be an issue with laws in some countries.

Snafuhon Unreal Engine will no longer be free for all

Tim Sweeney confirmed on Twitter there will be a revenue threshold just like for game dev. Small time studios or individuals won't have to pay unless they make money.

Lots of enterprise customer paid before already anyway for Epic's (questionable) support

Snafuhon OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

Godot actually has a bit of an issue with too many PRs. Lots of them are just small changes, usability or documentation changes, but they still have to be reviewed.

They need steady funding to have a team of capable full time devs. Their fund seems a step into this direction.

Snafuhon Norway to fine Meta $98,500 a day over user privacy breach from 14 August

How much are they making in Norway? Why would global revenue/profit be relevant for a fine in Norway about Norwegian users?

Snafuhon Speed Up C++ Compilation

Unreal Engine actually switched to C++20 with their next release (preview available).

I was quite surprised to read this in their roadmap, as Unreal's codebase is quite massive and also uses some custom build tools.