Although variable-rate compressed image formats such as JPEG are widely used to efficiently encode images, they have not found their way into real-time rendering due to special requirements such as random access to individual texels. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of variable-rate texture compression on modern GPUs using the JPEG format, and how it compares to the GPU-friendly fixed-rate compression approaches

I can think of three policies—at least two of which are politically feasible, but only if they’re done together. These are “Property Income Limited Leverage” (“The PILL”), an “Affordable Housing Authority” (“AHA”), and a “Modern Debt Jubilee” (“MDJ”). The PILL and AHA have to be implemented together, because they attack two ends of the predicament we are now in, and they balance each other in terms of their effects on house prices. The PILL would reduce house prices, while the AHA would increase them, and simultaneously enable low income earners to buy a house.

Artificial intelligence and platforms are not exotic addons. They are infrastructure that reorganizes credit, logistics, retail, hiring, and policing. Ownership of compute, data, and networks is concentrated and tied by contract to states and militaries. Oligopolies and public security fund and coordinate the stack. Once you state that plainly, the absolute bargaining gap that the book likes to invoke stops looking like a metaphysical property of protocols and starts looking like the predictable result of capex concentration and security apparatus. One cannot bargain with an algorithm because one cannot bargain with a firm that owns the feed

In other words, the consequence of the AI boom is likely to be that every socioeconomic problem we have now is exacerbated. (This is not even taking into account the consequences of a financial crash, if the investment boom dries up.) A modest suggestion I would like to make to, you know, everyone is that we think of AI in terms of “What will this mean for everyone?” rather than “What will this mean for the stock market?”

Even more interestingly, what does it mean when predictions become positive sum with that level of granularity? Do more people start working together to make something a reality? Or stop something from happening? Who knows.

I see no better explanation for the rise of speculation, gambling, and public prediction in the last ten years of popular culture than as a mass revolt against the numbing apathy of late postmodernism.

The UFC Octagon on the White House lawn is not Camp. Instead, it’s Dashboard Culture. It’s what culture looks like when we’ve subordinated all values to the imperative of becoming so seen. Spectacle above all.

The Copeland-Long restoration of the earliest known recording of computer music, recorded at Alan Turing's Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester in 1951.

As with the aforementioned, if we are now witnessing an AI bubble, and that bubble bursts, the blast radius will not be contained to Silicon Valley. It will ripple through the U.S. economy, creating the kind of cascading slowdown that I believe will feel a whole lot more like a full-on crash than a small “contraction.” — IMO the crash is coming as soon as CAPEX moves over to OPEX on the books. AI investment has been a private bailout of the US economy by silicon valley – Jay

The reminder that “you can just do things,” then, has accrued a totemic power. The phrase is used by both left and right, by CEOs and shitposters alike, and is often accompanied by exhortations to become “more agentic” or “high agency.” The advice welds together self-help cliché, entrepreneurial spirit, and cod-Nietzschean will to power into a single maxim: you can do it if you really try. That so many feel the need to reiterate this claim so frequently makes you wonder what has troubled their sense of agency in the first place.

you might conclude young people just don’t care about music anymore. However, one unexpected source of music discovery is quietly booming among Gen Z listeners: college radio.

Perhaps as part of a larger decolonial project, we can think about the right to our own thermocultures — to accurately describe the climate around us wherever we are, and to decide how to live in it without fantasy or imposition from somewhere else.

In less than six months, Leo has already drawn a moral map of the digital world: – AI must remain a servant, never a substitute, for human creativity. – Communication must be freed from manipulation and spectacle. – Dignity – not novelty – is the measure of progress. It is a manifesto of sorts, and a remarkably consistent one.

Who controls access to these therapies? Will peptides become a standard part of healthcare, or remain the domain of elite longevity clinics? Right now, the regulatory landscape is murky. Some peptides are FDA-approved and widely available. Others exist in legal limbo, prescribed through wellness clinics or purchased from research suppliers. The biotech industry is watching closely, knowing that whoever commercializes the next breakthrough peptide could reshape medicine—and make billions in the process.

Let’s coin the term fan surplus. If consumer surplus is the difference between consumers’ willingness-to-pay and the market price, then fan surplus is fans’ excess willingness to engage more deeply, more frequently, and across more dimensions with the objects of their fandom. The media industry’s biggest necessity and opportunity is to capture fan surplus.e

here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late 1980s/early 1990s

We are demonstrably optimising about a mile from the bottleneck. AI may be giving you a million prototypes, but if you listen, AI is telling you in quite a painful way that being able to get feedback on your artefacts is much, much more important than the artefacts themselves.

“In the US, TNB — for “The Narrow Bank” — wanted to issue deposits and park its money in reserves at the Fed, but the Fed said no. It looks like if you tried that in the UK, and called it a stablecoin, the Bank of England might say yes,” Levine wrote.

Given the similar configuration between expert and lay knowledge, it is not a coincidence that the structure of the approach taken by Gerson and other demonologists to combat popular superstitions corresponds with approaches in cybersecurity to persuade lay users to conform with what is considered safe practice.

For now, he sees the most immediate applications in layouts and previs. “Showing a grayscale palace isn’t exciting. But if I can throw a camera into a splat and render something in real time that looks close to the final pixel—that changes the conversation. Directors can give meaningful feedback without waiting two days for a render.”