Metricon

If you're working with images that need to be lossless or are simple in color diversity, WEBP is probably still a better choice (though not by a large margin). The biggest issue you might run into with AVIF is legacy support, particularly amongst Apple devices who were slower to implement support for it.

Otherwise the massive size reduction for storage and transfer speeds makes it incredibly attractive for modern web applications.

Ah, I actually wasn't aware that "avifenc" was a separate executable. Thanks for the information. I will definitely do some comparison testing.

These settings have worked very well for me so far, but if you are aware of even better settings, I'd certain like to give it a try.

AVIF is fantastic format and I use it in my production applications. Spent quite a bit of time looking to the best settings (at least for up to 2k images) and for anyone interested in converting images to AVIF, here's what I've found to work the best for creating the smallest size (10x+ smaller) while still retaining good quality and even supports PNG transparency:

  ffmpeg -i {input_file} -filter_complex "[0:v]format=pix_fmts=yuva444p,split[color][alpha];[alpha]alphaextract[alpha_chan]" -map "[color]" -map "[alpha_chan]" -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 25 -cpu-used 3 -still-picture 1 -aom-params "sharpness=2:enable-chroma-deltaq=1:arnr-strength=0" -color_range pc -colorspace bt709 -color_primaries bt709 -color_trc bt709 {output_file}

It's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes!

Keep in mind that unlike purchasing a stock where the most amount of money you can lose is the amount of money you spend buying the stock (assuming you didn't buy it on margin), if you directly short a stock, there's technically no limit to the amount of money you could lose. If a stock goes up 1000% after you short it, then you could lose far more money than you put into it.

This is why I mentioned the plateauing. If for some reason that just doesn't happen and things continue at a relatively linear or even exponential rate, then all bets are off.

I'd like to imagine that it's ultimately going to work out for humanity to be in a better condition overall if that happens.

However, if there reaches a level of near or full autonomy in all aspects of knowledge work, then there is a strong possibility that the field with the highest growth potential is going to be in "Private Security"; as those who have access to the most resources seek to defend their own positions in a societal return towards aristocracy and serfdom.

Let's hope not though.

I completely agree with you, and I certainly meant no offense to anyone who's a practicing nurse.

I spent some time in the military, and my expression of medics and nurses are mostly derived from that experience, where I'm referring to a nurse as just any warm body who is able to provide aid.

For professional nurses who might work in hospitals, I'm sure that many of them have significant knowledge and experience to be very effective in providing medical assistance.

I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it.

So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.

Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.

Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.

The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.

At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.

Of course, it's so hard to tell what the next big discovery or changes to the nature of world society might push things in one direction or another.

Wouldn't a subjectively boring picture present an even greater challenge to the creativity of the writer involved in the competition? It could have been a picture of a Barton Newman painting; that would be a significant challenge to structure a 1000 word essay on.