cbolton

The handwavy section on RISC-V is underwhelming. Yes the ecosystem is still nascent but something like the SpacemiT K3 is far from "abysmal" for vector operations and would make a nice test case with its two core types both supporting RVV 1.0 (one with vlen 256, the other with vlen 1024). On the more industrial side, for example the SiFive Intelligence X280 has been used in TPU by Google for years already and I doubt they are the only ones so calling the ISA completely irrelevant is a bit of a stretch.

Just for the sake of curiosity it would be nice to have a peek at what SIMD in Rust looks like on RISC-V today. Yes, even if it requires some "obscure compiler flags" for now (while we wait for the Oilsm extension).

This video has 30 examples: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q

Not saying you're wrong on the main message (and those examples are with filters rather than true CRT) but it's still impressive how it can make the pixel art better looking in those cases.

Not so clear in the article is that also with consoles the game pixel grid didn't match the CRT grid (e.g. horizontally the number of "pixels" is similar but not 1:1) so just by geometry you have blending of one pixel data into several CRT "pixels" (plus varying intensity even in a single phosphor patch as the analog RGB signals rise and fall in intensity).

As for CRT filters one can argue how realistic they are but they show that scanline gaps and blending at least can produce amazing perceptual improvements as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/nw2QfPREu-Q

> Over 10% of the country will be in the top 1% of earners at some point in their life

Though most of them only for one year due to temporary revenue, so it's not that rational.

The republican program was in large part vetoed by Clinton though and the spending cuts that passed were largely offset by the tax cuts. From what I read the reduction in deficit is mostly due to the dot-com boom, helped with the "deficit reduction act" of 1993 that was pushed by Clinton and happened to hike taxes at the right time to tax the boom.

I completely agree.

Why the aggressive tone and the strawman rhetoric? I never said there was a consensus. Yes I'm talking more about the "optimistic" commenters and pointing out that this chess thing is a good datum to temper their enthusiasm. What's wrong with that?

Also these claims are not completely without merit, it's just that LLMs seem to excel at specific "cognitive" tasks and it's interesting to see where they fail.

Neither. As I said I want to measure cognitive abilities.

Your "ability of the box" is like "economic potential" in my previous comment. If that's what you want to measure, fine. But I want a deeper understanding: what is the thing doing, how is it solving problems? I want to get a sense of its abilities that is richer than a one-dimensional scale.

Well it's not a perfect test so you need a bit of care in how you use it. If you have no idea what the subject is doing, then you don't know if you're measuring cognitive ability or something else (like cheating ability, or algorithmic sophistication or whatever). But failing the test is a pretty clear sign of certain cognitive abilities being poor.

It's a great test of cognitive abilities. There are many claims that current LLMs surpass humans in cognitive abilities so it's noteworthy that they underperform on that test.

Letting the model execute a chess program (that it wrote) would make sense if you're measuring its economic potential, but for cognition that would be cheating just like if you let a human run a chess program. The fact that the human would have a much harder time writing a useful program is irrelevant.

Sorry if that was confusing, I have edited my post to clarify a bit: That sentence was about a feature specific to JPEG XL, which is that if you have JPEG files you can re-encode then as JPEG XL to save space without any loss of quality. It's nice for peace of mind, you can bulk convert a large archive and you know you still have the same pixels everywhere (later you can even turn them back to JPEG without loss if you want). AVIF cannot do that. Now if you are OK with some loss in the conversion, you can also do much better than 20% with JPEG XL.

The article makes a good point: JPEG XL is amazing but not specifically for the typical Web use cases, compared to AVIF. But the conclusion doesn't follow. Having an excellent and versatile format supported by browsers is very useful!

Maybe a lossless re-encoding of my website JPEGs to gain 20% size is not worth the 33% longer decode, and maybe the website doesn't need very high resolution images or more than 12 bits per channel. But my personal archives can definitely use that and it's great that such files can be viewed everywhere without specialized tooling, including served on the intranet and indeed the Web.

In summary JPEG XL easily beats AVIF on the not-so-long tail of use cases and having compatible viewers everywhere is quite useful. And with JPEG XL becoming part of PDF, it will soon be common use cases too.

As for the rest of the article: there are interesting points in the benchmark section but I think it's too early in the JPEG XL adoption cycle to draw conclusions. One thing bothers me though: There is a single picture comparison (with tag line "results speak for themselves") and I find it quite misleading: it's just picking one point on the "bytes received" line that looks best for AVIF compared to JPEG XL. Try it yourself and you'll see JPEG XL shows something already at 2KB while AVIF has nothing until 8KB, and JPEG XL looks better than AVIF after 100KB.

Looking it up I was actually remembering from Feynman's QED book (path integral approach). I don't have it at hand but I think it's a description based on photon particles. Anyway I agree my description with photon travel "between atoms", emission and absorption was quite bad (especially if you think absorption and emission as slow incoherent processes instead of a general way of describing interactions which is what I meant).

But still I think saying "the primary wave gets absolutely and completely delayed" is not helpful. Using a wave description as in Feynman's lecture[1] is more enlightening: the incoming wave travels at "full speed" through the medium, but doing so it interacts with atoms such that they emit an additional wave, and the sum is a slower wave.

You can say it's the same since there's only one electric field in space and so the only "real wave" is the sum of all effects. But I find it quite helpful to think that one of the components in this sum is the original wave traveling at the speed of light in vacuum, also in the space occupied by the medium.

[1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_31.html

Yeah I didn't find that helpful. What I remember from Feynman's lectures is that photons still travel at "full speed" c between atoms, but if you look at the global progression of light as photons get absorbed then emitted it progresses slower than c.

Maybe it's projecting but what I see is kids ganging up to break a target that is often human/animal-shaped, and that feels different to me.

Yeah I'm not saying it's bad for the children, but it's unpleasant for me. It seems violence is a concept that gets deeper and uglier as you grow. For young children it's often abstract and maybe harmless. I just read a book to my child that turned out to have violent scenes that horrified me a bit but he barely thought about it and only in technical terms (like where is that artery ripped by the wolf). Same with people that had fun watching horror movies as teens, then find them unpleasant when they're older.

It never occurred to me to consider efficiency in piñata, but I dislike them because it's making a game out of violence.

What did you do to get the money?

Isn't it a bit arrogant to pass judgement with such confidence based on a three word sentence? Anyway maybe this will convince you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25948632

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862016

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11943786

It's John Nagle as in Nagle's algorithm, I'm sure he has an existing intellect.

They didn't want to add 100K lines of multithreaded C++, for security reasons. See https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064.

(I edited the timeline to clarify)

I just wrote a timeline here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445897

To summarize the timeline:

2015-2021: Google and Cloudinary develop the technical foundations, work on standardization with the JPEG group and write the reference implementation

2021: Chrome and Firefox introduce experimental support

2022: The Chrome team decides to remove the experimental support, citing lack of interest in the ecosystem

2023: Apple surprises by shipping support in all their products

2024: Firefox says they don't want the attack surface of 100K lines of multithreaded C++ but they will ship support if Google implements a Rust version

September 2025: Google delivers jxl-rs v0.1.0 (a Rust implementation)

October 2025: The PDF Association announces they want to include the format in PDF, citing the need for HDR support in particular

November 2025: The Chrome team reverses its position, citing Safari support, Firefox's new stance, Interop proposals and the PDF announcement.

So while Google played the largest part by far in making JPEG-XL a thing, Apple probably played an outsize role in getting it adopted so fast. But its long-term fate? Who knows... The PDF Association might well have adopted JPEG-XL without Apple: they cited HDR support, wide-gamut, ultra-high resolution and channel number, not "works on iOS". And having it as the format for HDR in PDF would have forced Chrome's hand no matter what Apple did.

(Small heads up: the "anyone with a clue agrees with me" framing is more grating than useful.)

I wonder if piracy will eventually fill for physical releases of movies and games. It might be a fun project to make an online store game work on blue ray with nice packaging...

That's not true, not all games are Game-Key cards, see https://www.dekudeals.com/switch-2-physical-games

They can include these limitations in a contract which can be enforced like any contract.

No you can't. Statistical tests assume independent data points. Testing the same individual repeatedly would be pseudoreplication, leading to wrong conclusions.

If you mean run different tests, where you collect different kinds of data from the same individual, sure but that's not something you can "just do" in the general case.

Typst tags by default, which is more than LaTeX can say. But LaTeX supports automatic tags for math which is huge. There's good progress on this in Typst (this release just added MathML support for HTML and MathML is also the basis for automatic math tags from what I understand) but it's not there yet.

That just means lower net voltage => lower current => lower torque right? When you do need torque you need current and the losses that come with it.

Much speculation here. It could well be that Iran's hard-line government will become stronger because of the war. People that were not specially pro- or anti-government probably didn't like seeing the US and Israel bomb their country and kill their government officials. On the other hand Iran is taking a big economic hit indeed... We'll see.

Regarding the nuclear threat posed by Iran: the deal Obama made with Iran was not perfect but it was working, at least on that aspect. Quoting the New York Times[1]: "Under the deal, Iran shipped 98 percent of its uranium stockpile out of the country. Iran previously had enough uranium to fashion eight to 10 atomic bombs once fully processed; afterward it was left without enough for even one". It also enabled an unprecedented level of inspections by the IAEA.

Compare that with what Trump has achieved so far... It's really sad that he had to tank that deal because he couldn't stand Obama having a great lasting diplomatic achievement. So Trump effectively manufactured the conditions for Iran to be a nuclear threat again.

I also don't see evidence that Iran wants to target Europe. The Iranian government does have a despicable rhetoric (mostly against Israel) but their actions have been limited. Israel talks less but inflicts far more harm. Iran has indeed been messing around the region and in particular "holding Lebanon hostage" to some extent with the Hezbollah... We'll see if that gets better after this war.

As for holding internet cables hostage and such: they are just playing the only cards they have, as they are being forced to, by the US.

> Besides, you care about 1 thing: that the oil price rose a bit.

I'm personally rather happy that oil prices are rising. We should get off oil as fast as possible for geopolitical and ecological reasons.

> And yes, I'm very sorry how inconvenient it is that the rest of the world does not just let you live in peace.

Not sure what you mean. We had international institutions and international law to try and avoid conflicts. The UN is a beautiful project created by the US at a time when they had good thinking people in charge. Trump hates and tries to dismantle international institutions. He likes the law of the jungle. It puts us all closer to WW3.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/us/politics/2015-iran-nuc...