There is a paper titled “What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic” by David Goldberg. It’s a bit theoretical, but IMO it’s a must-read for any programmer doing more than the occasional floating point calculation. It goes beyond just limited precision and rounding errors.

Randall Munroe. You may know him from such gems as xkcd 3472 and 6548.

“And while Spectral JPEG XL dramatically reduces file sizes, its lossy approach may pose drawbacks for some scientific applications.”

This is the part that confuses me. First of all, many applications that need spectral data need it to be as accurate as possible. Lossy compression in that might not be acceptable.

More interestingly (and I’ll read the actual paper for this): which data will be more compressed? Simply put, JPEG achieves its best compression by keeping the brightness but discarding colour. Which dimension in which spectral space do the researchers think can be more compressed than others? In this case there is no human visual system to base the decision on.

Kind of, but JPEG converts image data to its own internal 3 came channel colour space before applying DCT. It is not compressing the R, G and B channels of most images. So a multichannel compression is not just compressing each channel separately.

JPEG 2000 supports lossless mode.

It’s also a very good introduction to programming, and just a good read. Probably the best book about programming I’ve ever read.

I’m no expert, but as I understand it, there are several things that can go wrong just by clicking. This depends somewhat on your browser settings and how you use it.

Visiting a compromised site may allow the attacker to access data from other tabs and windows in the same browser session. Some sites warn you to close the whole browser when logging out because of this.

Sometimes bugs in a browser can allow a site to run arbitrary code on your machine. These hopefully get patched quickly.

I can’t comment on the others, but PDF to JPEG should be easy enough. ImageMagick, which another commenter suggested, is possible but not user friendly. However you can just open the PDF in many applications and export it as an image. Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop can do it. GIMP probably too.

I’m a last ditch effort you can even just open the file and screenshot it.

As someone who has interviewed candidates for developer jobs for over a decade: this sounds like “in my day everything was better”.

Yes, there are plenty of candidates who can’t explain the piece of code they copied from Copilot. But guess what? A few years ago there were plenty of candidates who couldn’t explain the code they copied from StackOverflow. And before that, there were those who failed at the basic programming test we gave them.

We don’t hire those people. We hire the ones who use the tools at their disposal and also show they understand what they’re doing. The tools change, the requirements do not.

Just fire some people, that’ll drive profits up.

Meta says its working urgently to fix a problem

WTF BBC

it’s

Click a link? Oh you young whippersnapper! We used to have a note with written domain names or even IP addresses that we would type in if we wanted to go somewhere online.

There is nothing wrong with your device. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical.

Well then we just kill all the Beholders and voila, no more evil.

A variant of the Hering illusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hering_illusion

Maybe I’m jaded but with the brand still being visible, I’m not sure this isn’t a marketing ploy.

Ah the eternal arms race between parents and children. For me it was lights out so I couldn’t read, circumvented with a flashlight under the blanket.

My 80+ year old parents don’t care about ads or AI. They just want a working PC, and W11 won’t install on the cheap machine they got a few years ago. They’re not going to buy a new one because this works perfectly fine.

And yes they tried Linux for several years, but went back to Windows because it was just too much hassle and not compatible with too many things.

It absolutely is a hardware problem.

I knew booze was the only way to make using a Mac bearable.

I always go into stores to throw stuff from the racks onto the floor, to make sure the people whose job it is to clean that up stay employed.

I never buy anything of course, I don’t want stuff that’s been on the floor!