pwg

> sitting on piles of assets like dragons

They (the AI companies) are sitting on piles all right, but not "assets like dragons". Rather, what they are sitting on is piles and piles of debt that eventually will come due to be paid back. The "bet" their CEO's are making is that some "profit angle" will materialize at some point that provides the funds to pay back that debt when the bills start coming due.

> If they haven't saved any money

They have not "saved any money" (not in the sense of a "saving account" in a bank). They are leveraged as far into the future as one can see, and betting that before that lever starts to move they will have a revenue stream sufficient to pay it back.

This is actually good, because if anything will break the auto makers fascination with steering everyone to an SUV, it will be the next generation of buyers simply not buying the oversized monster trucks they are offering. It will take a few years of overfull dealer lots, but they will get the message in the end.

I wonder if your comment suggests a re-framing of the TV's name. Start referring to them as "Surveillance TVs" in all contexts. Maybe the idea will spread?

JPEG is a lossy format. JPEG -> AVIF adds a second loss operation. JPEG to JPEG-XL is lossless but with a smaller file size. So one does not further degrade the jpegs beyond what they were already degraded in creating them in the first place.

My guess: because the OP forgot that to decode AV2/AV3 it matters not that it is in an AVIF container, it matters that the display system (browser, etc.) actually have the codec available to it that can decode the new format (AV2/AV3/etc.).

With no codec for a new compression algorithm, it does not matter if the browser can read the container, you still see the "broken image" icon on your display.

> I leaned on AI for a lot of the site text.

So that's why the site text reads as AI slop.

No, during the 70's and part of the early 80's they were terrible quality.

But what the Japanese makers did was they analyzed the failures and rolled the findings back into the manufacturing line so that they continuously improved the product. After quite some time at this, they took the "quality built" mantle for themselves.

My father, mid to late 70's, worked as an auto-mechanic for a local Datsun dealer (Datsun is the company we know today as Nissan). Datsun corporate wanted every failed part on every car repaired returned to them for analysis as to why it failed. The other Japanese brands all did the same.

"Don't be evil" went away when the purchased Doubleclick advertising company completed hollowing out the old "Don't be evil" Google from the inside out.

> The executives just gave up once all the other browsers had added support.

The big turning point seemed to have been Adobe adopting JpegXL as an approved image compression algorithm for the upcoming PDF spec. update. With that, since all browsers seem to also want to be PDF renderers, meant they had no choice but to include a JpegXL decoder. The win, if there was one here, was that the decoder they have to ship anyway now was exposed for use by <img> tags as well as by the PDF renderer.

With Firefox, if one sets the dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled about::config setting to false, then websites can no longer block paste. Your pastes will work, despite their trying to intercept and block them.

Another comment in this thread pointed out that "return an SR-71 to operational flying" is /also/ the exact type of cover story that would be handed out for as cover for an actual project (likely some hyper-sonic aircraft) when trying to rehire retired engineers for this new secret project.

For military planes, every bit of weight you can shed up front increases some operational capability of the plane. In this case, not carrying an extra 200-300kg of weight for starters meant 200-300kg more spy equipment /could/ be carried along on the mission.

The SR-71 on display at the Udvar-Hazy branch of the Air and Space Museum located near Dulles Airport in Virginia does not have its engines in the nacelles. The rest of the exterior looks complete, but other internals could very well also be missing and the exterior would still look identical.