BurningCycles

Anime is not the dominant form of media in Japan, and is largely targeted at a relatively narrow age band

But it seems very popular, out of the top ten highest grossing films in Japan, 5 are anime (Spirited Away, Demon Slayer, Your Name, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle), and the top two are Spirited Away and Demon Slayer.

In North America's top ten you will only find one animated feature, Incredibles 2, and it is at position ten.

Yes you are correct. Take something like the Super Nintendo, it typically displayed hundreds of colors on screen, however each graphical element could have a maximum of 16 colors (4 bits).

The way they solved this was by having CLUTs (color lookup tables), so for the Super Nintendo (if my memory serves me) you had 16 different CLUTs that you could assign to a graphical object, each able to contain 16 unique colors.

This is what made something like the Super Nintendo graphics look so much better than say the Amiga 500, both used bitmap graphics, but the Amiga did not have a CLUT solution, so you were stuck with 32 colors except for more advanced graphic modes which weren't really usable for games.

As I understand it, the reason for child separation is that they can't certify that the adult traveling with them is their actual parent, and given that child trafficking is a reality and much worse than potentially being temporarily separated from your parent, I can't see what other solution is at the table ?

I don't think someone is free if they don't have the material resources to make their own decisions.

So who is the one who is to be forced to provide them with said material resources ? They don't just magically appear. The vast majority of people with material resources have worked very hard to aquire them, very often by working very hard at producing material resources.

That's to say nothing of minority rights

What rights are being denied to minorities ?

As someone who always saw myself on the left, being a proponent of universal healthcare and focused on class issues, I can no longer recognize myself on the left with them going all in on identity politics, dividing people not by economic class, but by immutable characteristics like race and gender.

Well, video and audio should be fine either way, right ?

Downloading and running executable files from file sharing networks seems like asking for trouble no matter what the network is.

Anyone know what the state of the network is these days ? I haven't used it for at least 8+ years, I remember servers drying up but with kademlia that's not really a problem.

In Finland we put Vitamin D in milk that’s sold on normal shops.

I'd wager it's the same in all the Nordic countries, at least it's the same here in Sweden.

A couple a months ago when I spoke to my dad, he told me he had a checkup because he had been unusually tired, turned out that the only thing the testing showed was that he had d-vitamin deficiency.

What surprised me is that he was given prescription d-vitamins, since you can buy them anywhere without prescription.

For good reason, this is an emulator for a current-gen system, and from what I've seen on Youtube, a lot of games are fully playable.

Companies are likely not that bothered by legacy systems being emulated, but this is the current Nintendo flagship console. Thankfully the Switch seems to be selling amazingly, which should mean Nintendo don't really care that much.

Another factor is that you will likely need a pretty beefy PC to play games in full speed, and compatible controllers.

Yes, correlation is not causation and all that, but when I was there I was struck by how very little obesity there was. I later learned that Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world.

I don't think so, I believe the worst case scenario is they might have to rename the project to not have 'Diablo' in its title.

Only project that I know Blizzard shut down was a Starcraft server re-implementation, presumably because it would allow you to play without having a legitimate cd-key.

Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic

How do you know what is 'misinformation' ? WHO claimed that face masks were worthless, now you are forced to wear them in lots of places. WHO also claimed that there was no human to human transmission of COVID-19, etc.

The powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation when it suits them, they just want no one to be able to question it. The right to question is something we can't give up just to avoid bad actors.

Then why was this legislation introduced ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes.

Do you have any numbers to back this up with ? I think you are likely right but if there is any data on this then I would love to see it.

I remember seeing an article where the Patreon CEO said it wasn't sustainable a year or so ago, was this after they started banning nudes ?

Also I recall that Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and others left the platform due to censorship, which I believe happened around the same time as the CEO statement.

A lot of prominent gatekeepers are all about the status quo.

Who are these ?

The thing that has put us off the last few cruises is realizing how workers on the ships are treated.

I read somewhere that the main reason these cruise ships, including those owned by well known US companies like Disney, won't register their ships under the American flag is so that they can avoid US labor laws, I don't know if this is true but it sadly wouldn't surprise me.

Sorry, but look at how China, South Korea, Taiwan etc. are doing right now

I'm taking China numbers with a LARGE grain of salt (basically I don't believe them at all given how they have lied from day one of this pandemic). I'd wager South Korea has a level of preparedness that few other countries in the world has, given that they share border with a hostile country.

Overall it seems that South Korea and Taiwan were very successful in restricting and tracking travelers (I read Taiwan totally closed the border for foreigners a couple of weeks ago) and were therefore quick to quarantine people coming from countries with outbreaks.

Very anectdotal, but the three Japanese persons I know have told me that people in Japan are generally negative towards holding an Olympics and think it's just a waste of resources.

Do new Android phones save photos in HEIC format ?

Then HEVC isn't doing so bad

Sure, but it was massively pushed as the successor of h264 as the new de facto video codec standard, after almost a decade in use it has clearly failed in that respect.

IMO this codec generation saw no winner, instead h264 remains the undisputed king, the next battle for the crown will likely be between AV2 (or whatever it ends up being called) and VVC (Versatile Video Coding).

They get slammed for being funded by Google

I don't see that at all, I mean they've been funded by Google for practically their entire existence.

On the contrary it seems to me that Firefox users find that funding the project through selling the default search engine is a good compromise as it is both easy to switch to a different search engine, and also that the vast majority use Google either way.

Also it's not as if Pocket will ever come anywhere remotely near making Mozilla self-sustainable, it's all so weird to me as this really hurts their image as a 'users-first' organisation.

I've not seen any indication that users wanted it, I've also read that Mozilla developers agree that it should be an extension. Yet Mozilla buys this and puts it inside Firefox, where it can at best be disabled by going through about:config and changing parameters.

Why Mozilla is hellbent on pushing this upon their users is beyond me, it just hurts their image in my opinon.

You can go back from XL to jpeg losslessly as well

I don't think so, but I don't quite see the point unless you are thinking of using it as a way to archive jpeg's, but in that case there are programs specifically for that, like PackJPG, Lepton etc.

Yes, it losslessly recompresses existing jpeg's into the jpeg XL format, while also making the files ~20% smaller, key point being lossless. Thus it is the 'perfect' upgrade path from jpeg which is the current lossy standard, as you will get better compression and no loss in quality when shifting to Jpeg XL.

This being a 'killer feature' of course relies on Jpeg XL being very competitive with AVIF in terms of lossy/lossless compression overall.

Interesting. Where have you seen that adoption will be swifter with JPEG XL instead of, say, AV1/AVIF?

Well, it's not finalized as of yet (though it is imminent), so rate of adoption is just pure guesswork at this stage. However, things I deem necessary for a new image codec to become the next 'de facto' standard are:

royalty free

major improvements over the current de facto standards

Both AVIF and Jpeg XL tick these boxes, however Jpeg XL has another strong feature which is that it offers a lossless upgrade path for existing jpeg's with significantly improved compression as a bonus.

Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF

I used to think the same as well, however I now think Jpeg XL is poised to be the 'winner' among next gen image codecs. It's royalty free, great lossy and lossless compression which is said to beat the competition, as well as providing a perfect upgrade path for existing jpeg's as it can losslessly recompress them into the jpeg XL format with a ~20% size decrease (courtesy of the PIK project).

It's slated for standardisation within a couple of weeks, it will be very interesting to see large-scale comparisons of this codec against the likes of AVIF and HEIF.

Linux purposely makes proprietary drivers crap.

No it doesn't, the devs refuse to provide stable in-kernel APIs because they want the flexibility to be able to modify them as they please when a better solution comes along. Also maintaining support for proprietary drivers is harder due to them being black boxes, not only in terms of debugging, but also in security and stability.

NVidia is basically the one major holdout these days, and its proprietary driver for Linux is very good, so it's not as if it's impossible to maintain a proprietary driver in the Linux ecosystem. The motivation here comes from Linux being huge in accelerated computing and 3d, not due to any particular love for Linux on Nvidia's part.

Indeed the lack of a stable interface has made it cumbersome to maintain a out-of-tree driver, which is GREAT since it means hardware vendors are more likely to open source their drivers or at least give enough documentation for them to be created by a third party. This ends up being a huge part of Linux's success, as it supports the widest range of hardware of any system 'out of the box', hardware support which is then functional on any platform on which Linux runs, which in turn is practically everything under the sun.

And if this wasn't enough, it is also a boon for alternative systems which will never see official proprietary drivers due to being niche, as they can port Linux drivers, or even add Linux driver compability layers.

Another 'estimate' by a 'analytics firm' and this still does not say anything about 'The Mandalorian' specifically.

is the most streamed television show in recent history Where did you find those numbers ? All I could find was:

'The Mandalorian earned nearly 40 million “demand expressions” during the week of Nov. 10-16, according to data provided to Observer by research firm Parrot Analytics. The firm tracks video streaming, social media activity, photo sharing, blogging, fan and critic rating platforms and other consumer demand sources to put together a composite of viewership and growth. Demand expressions represent the total audience demand being expressed for a title within a market and not specific viewership statistics.'

Which sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo presented by a 'research firm' wanting to get customers.

I've only seen clips of the movie, but those don't look very promising IMO. I read that this had a $95 million production budget, I can't fathom what they spent it on when looking at the end result.

Beyond that I'm quite a bit sceptical of choosing Cats for a movie adaption at all. It's nowhere near 'Phantom of the Opera' in terms of popularity, and the last (2004) movie of that musical didn't do particularly well at the box office.

Blender was a commercial product

18 years ago, since then it's been open source and paid for by donations

and has some big studios doing those donations

These big studios started donating this past year when the development fund was started (and really took off during the latter part of this year for some reason), before that it was donations and in later years also the Blender Cloud service.

And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.

Well, most (if not all) of the Blender developers now working full time where Blender contributors, also Blender is a non-profit organization.