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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • The eyebrow raiser in the Slate’s base configuration is that it doesn’t come with any audio systems: no radio antenna/tuner, no speakers. It remains to be seen how upgradeable the base configuration is for audio, how involved of a task it will be to install speakers in the dash or doors, installing antennas (especially for AM, which are tricky for interference from EV systems), etc.

    I’d imagine that most people would choose to spend few thousand on that audio upgrade up to the bare minimum expectations one would have for a new vehicle, so that cuts into the affordability of the package.



  • What I’m saying is if YouTube is sharing $10 million of revenue with channel owners in a month that has 1,000,000,000 total views across YouTube, that’s a penny per view.

    Then, if the next month the reconfigure the view counts to exclude certain bots or views under a particular number, you might see the overall view count drop from 1,000,000,000 to 500,000,000, while still hitting the same overall revenue. At that point, it’s $0.02 per view, so a channel that sees their view count drop in half may still see the same revenue despite the drop in view count.

    If it’s a methodology change across all of YouTube, a channel that stays equally popular as a percentage of all views will see the revenue stay the same, even if the view counts drop (because every other channel is seeing their view counts drop, too).



  • Most 4k streams are 8-20 Mbps. A UHD runs at 128 Mbps.

    Bitrate is only one variable in overall perceived quality. There are all sorts of tricks that can significantly reduce file size (and thus bitrate of a stream) without a perceptible loss of quality. And somewhat counterintuitively, the compression tricks work a lot better on higher resolution source video, which is why each quadrupling in pixels (doubling height and width) doesn’t quadruple file size.

    The codec matters (h.264 vs h.265/HEVC vs VP9 vs AV1), and so do the settings actually used to encode. Netflix famously is willing to spend a lot more computational power on encoding, because they have a relatively small number of videos and many, many users watching the same videos. In contrast, YouTube and Facebook don’t even bother re-encoding into a more efficient codec like AV1 until a video gets enough views that they think they can make up the cost of additional processing with the savings of lower bandwidth.

    Video encoding is a very complex topic, and simple bitrate comparisons only barely scratch the surface in perceived quality.







  • Javascript for this seems like the wrong tool. The http server itself can usually be configured to serve alternative images (including different formats) to supporting browsers, where it serves JXL if supported, falls back to webp if not, and falls back to JPEG if webp isn’t supported.

    And the increased server side adoption for JXL can run up the stats to encourage the Chromium team to resume support for JXL, and encourage the Firefox team to move support out from nightly behind a flag, especially because one of the most popular competing browsers (Safari on Apple devices) does already support JXL.


  • It’s not too late.

    The current standard on the web is JPEG for photographic images. Everyone agrees that it’s an inefficient standard in terms of quality for file size, and that its 8-bit RGB support isn’t enough for higher dynamic range or transparency. So the different stakeholders have been exploring new modern formats for different things:

    WEBP is open source and royalty free, and has wide support, especially by Google (who controls a major image search engine and the dominant web browser), and is more efficient than JPEG and PNG in lossy and lossless compression. It’s 15 years old and is showing its age as we move towards cameras that capture better dynamic range than the 8-bit limits of webp (or JPEG for that matter). It’s still being updated, so things like transparency have been added (but aren’t supported by all webp software).

    AVIF supports HDR and has even better file size efficiency than webp. It’s also open source and royalty free, and is maintained by the Linux Foundation (for those who prefer a format controlled by a nonprofit). It supports transparency and animation out of the box, so it doesn’t encounter the same partial support issues as webp. One drawback is that the AVIF format requires a bit more computational power to encode or decode.

    HEIC is more efficient than JPEG, supports high bit depth and transparency, but is encumbered by patents so that support requires royalty payments. The only reason why it’s in the conversation is because it has extensive hardware acceleration support by virtue of its reliance on the HEVC/h.265 codec, and because it’s Apple’s default image format for new pictures taken by its iPhone/iPad cameras.

    JPEG XL has the best of all possible worlds. It supports higher bit depths, transparency, animation, lossless compression. It’s open source and royalty free. And most importantly, it has a dedicated compression path for taking existing JPEG images and losslessly shrinking the file size. That’s really important for the vast majority of digitally stored images, because people tend to only have the compressed JPEG version. The actual encoding and decoding is less computationally intensive than webp or avif. It’s a robust enough standard for not just web images, but raw camera captures (potentially replacing DNG and similar formats), raw document scans and other captured imagery (replacing TIFF), and large scale printing (where TIFF is still often in the workflow).

    So even as webp and avif and heic show up in more and more places, the constant push forward still allows JXL to compete on its own merits. If nothing else, JXL is the only drop in replacement where web servers can silently serve the JXL version of a file when supported, even if the “original” image uploaded to the site was in JPEG format, with basically zero drawbacks. But even on everything else, the technical advantages might support processing and workflows in JXL, from capture to processing to printing.