No need to rewire anything - just get a universal plug adapter for NEMA 6-15P (or whatever your kitchen outlet is going to be) from Amazon, plug it onto the UK plug of your kettle, and Bob’s your uncle. (The building inspector doesn’t need to even see your kettle and plug.)
As in, a clear way to detect whether a given file is lossy or lossless?
I was thinking that too, but on the other hand, even a lossless file can't guarantee that its contents aren't the result of going through a lossy intermediate format, such as a screenshot created from a JPEG.
I find it incredibly helpful to know that .jpg is lossy and .png is lossless.
There are so many reasons why it's almost hard to know where to begin. But it's basically the same reason why it's helpful for some documents to end in .docx and others to end in .xlsx. It tells you what kind of data is inside.
And at least for me, for standard 24-bit RGB images, the distinction between lossy and lossless is much more important than between TIFF and PNG, or between JPG and HEIC. Knowing whether an image is degraded or not is the #1 important fact about an image for me, before anything else. It says so much about what the file is for and not for -- how I should or shouldn't edit it, what kind of format and compression level is suitable for saving after editing, etc.
After that comes whether it's animated or not, which is why .apng is so helpful to distinguish it from .png.
There's a good reason Microsoft Office documents aren't all just something like .msox, with an internal tag indicating whether they're a text document or a spreadsheet or a presentation. File extensions carry semantic meaning around the type of data they contain, and it's good practice to choose extensions that communicate the most important conceptual distinctions.
> Knowing whether an image is degraded or not is the #1 important fact about an image for me
But how can you know that from the fact that it's currently losslessly encoded? People take screenshots of JPEGs all the time.
> After that comes whether it's animated or not, which is why .apng is so helpful to distinguish it from .png.
That is a useful distinction in my view, and there's some precedent for solutions, such as how Office files containing macros having an "m" added to their file extension.
Obviously nothing prevents people from taking PNG screenshots of JPEGs. You can make a PNG out of an out-of-focus camera image too. But at least I know the format itself isn't adding any additional degradation over whatever the source was.
And in my case I'm usually dealing with a known workflow. I know where the files originally come from, whether .raw or .ai or whatever. It's very useful to know that every .jpg file is meant for final distribution, whereas every .png file is part of an intermediate workflow where I know quality won't be lost. When they all have the same extension, it's easy to get confused about which stage a certain file belongs to, and accidentally mix up assets.
>I find it incredibly helpful to know that .jpg is lossy and .png is lossless.
Unfortunately we have been through this discussion and author of JPEG-XL strongly disagree with this. I understand where they are coming from, but for me I agree with you it would have been easier to have the two separated in naming and extensions.
But JPEG has a lossless mode as well. How do you distinguish between the two now?
This is an arbitrary distinction, for example then why do mp3 and ogg (vorbis) have different extensions? They're both lossy audio formats, so by that requirement, the extension should be the same.
Otherwise, we should distinguish between bitrates with different extensions, eg mp3128, mp3192, etc.
In theory JPEG has a lossless mode (in the standard), but it's not supported by most applications (not even libjpeg) so it might as well not exist. I've certainly never come across a lossless JPEG file in the wild.
Filenames also of course try to indicate technical compatibility as to what applications can open them, which is why .mp3 and .ogg are different -- although these days, extensions like .mkv and .mp4 tell you nothing about what's in them, or whether your video player can play a specific file.
At the end of the day it's just trying to achieve a good balance. Obviously including the specific bitrate in a file extension goes too far.
Legacy. It’s how things used to be done. Just like Unix permissions, shared filesystem, drive letters in the file system root, prefixing urls with the protocol, including security designators in the protocol name…
Be careful to ascribe reason to established common practices; it can lead to tunnel vision. Computing is filled with standards which are nothing more than “whatever the first guy came up with”.
If the alternative was putting the information in some hypothetical file attribute with similar or greater level of support/availability (like for filtering across various search engines and file managers) then I'd agree there's no reason to keep it in the file extension in particular, but I feel the alternative here is just not really having it available in such a way at all (instead just an internal tag particular to the JXL format).
Well yeah, you can turn any lossless format lossy by introducing an intermediate step that discards some amount of information. You can't practically turn a lossy format into a lossless format by introducing a lossless intermediate step.
Although, if you're purely speaking perceptually, magic like RAISR comes pretty close.
Bloomberg reported last year that Sam is angling for the board to give him 7% of the company, and the board was seriously discussing it. The optics weren’t right at the time, but you can rely on something being in planning.
Sam doesn’t do anything for free, even though he is already a billionaire 2-3 times over.
Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses.
Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.
That's Adam Smith liberalism. You can have a market and competition without capitalism. Just look at what China did for EVs and solar panels, its full liberalism under state planning.
China does have _some_ capitalism, state capitalism but still, capital owners decide what is produced, with state supervision (nuclear, coal, rail sector, Alibaba). Already for its telco sector we knew it was different, it wasn't like the usual, a sort of capitalist liberalism with state planning. Now we have more data, and i'm not the only one to think its EV boom is the perfect example of a non-capitalist liberalism.
COVID was a black swan, the completely irresponsible and unnecessary redistribution from taxpayers to company owners that was the PPP was a choice. (One that most other governments worldwide didn’t make.)
> The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) is a $953-billion business loan program established by the United States federal government during the Trump administration in 2020
That is very very variable. In the last five years, raw lithium carbonate world market prices have been swinging from $10/kg to >$70/kg and back. So right now LiFePo is getting cheaper, but if lithium explodes in price again, battery prices will rise too.
Macbooks shipped to Europe don't ever touch US ground (and I'd wager 99.9% of their parts don't either). So US tarriffs should be irrelevant - and the EU doesn't have big China tarriffs outside of EV and solar panel anti-dumping retaliation.
The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours.
In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.
“Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works.
If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.
It sounds like there’s some sort of rule in the UK where al of the suppliers have to charge the same price per watt (or something), and they’ve named this rule “marginal pricing”? So, it is not entirely the same as a market based pricing.
Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest.
On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…
That’s not the EU’s fault, is it? At best the import taxes (if any) are on the EU. VAT is added by your country, and if something is more expensive after everything than importing it yourself, that’s on a lack of competition in your marketplace…
This looks like a classic EU vs constituent countries debate.
Your points are correct, but that's a general rebuff against photios' points: nothing is imposed by the EU itself; everything comes from the countries themselves, even if they all do the same thing.
However, I think photios' point was rather that EU countries tend to tax things to hell and back, even if the countries arrived at the same situation by their own means, rather than it being a general EU directive. dvfjsdhgfv's comment is the same: all the positive things in that comment come from the countries themselves; they're not EU directives, either.
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