is it just me or do people start talking about christmas creep earlier every year
If you're anything like me, you've wondered what would happen if you used a compression algorithm for something it was not designed for. A lot of the time, the results are boring — you just get really large output.
However, image and audio codecs are special. Nowadays, psychoacoustic and psychovisual codecs are used — that is, codecs that are tuned specifically for human perception, and throw away information that humans will not notice. A great example of this is that most audio codecs will simply discard all audio frequencies above 20kHz. But the characteristics of the visual system and the auditory system are very different.
To explore this idea, I've created a dedicated page on my site with an interactive demo showing a sample image converted to audio, compressed with a lossy codec, and then back again, with various different codecs and parameters to choose from. That page has an extended introduction, I'll reproduce some of it here:
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Unity developers can use multiple slurp juices on a single app. so if you have 1 iPhone app install and 3 slurp juices you can create 3 new paid installs.
Anonymous User asked: why still on twitter?
you know... not in a condescending or otherwise hurtful way, just... i mean.. in some way i can see the appeal of seeing the shit go down live, but... the prospect of watching something that was nice kinda eventually die like this doesnt sound very appetizing to me
love
hey! 👋 i think i've been spared a lot of twitter's Badness thanks to
- being away from social media for a few months (seasonal depression) and not experiencing a lot of the user frustrations first-hand, and
- using an old twitter client on my phone, and the "control panel for twitter" addon in my web browser, which strips out a lot of the latest additions (i don't see the "x" logo, it's still the bird logo in both places).
so it's not so much that i'm willingly looking at something falling apart before my eyes; it's really the opposite, i keep forgetting that place is in decline!
apart from that, i don't know of a better place to go:
- bluesky is the most like twitter, but sadly seems to be pretty inactive right now, especially among my closest friends
- cohost is a pleasant site to be on, but doesn't satisfy my urge for Scrolling Through Lots Of Posts, and since it lacks an app it'd be a massive pain for me to use on my phone
- mastodon is the same as it's always been: the internal politics of having to choose a "good" instance to register at, horribly clunky software
at the start of summer i was hoping to have switched over to bluesky about now, but i don't really see a point to it now since i'd more or less just be isolating myself. and i've already gone through a few months of that… 😒 hopefully, one of the Twitter Alternatives will become active enough in my friend group to motivate me to switch over soon.
UPDATE: speaking of "the latest additions", i forgot that everyone else has had to live with the "here are some tweets i think are good, do you like this" feed for months. i havent updated my client for ages (version 9.65.7-release.0) so my app ui still looks like this. i have quite literally been shielded from having to stand all of the latest changes, so it's probably understandable that i'm not, like, repulsed by using twitter like most of my friends are
(the lists to the side there are art lists, in case you were wondering… the ⭐ feed is for the people who reliably post mostly really good art, and then i have four more feeds – named "1" to "4" – that have a bit more cruft in them. those are for the artists who retweet game announcements or post photos of their food)