A very simple black-to-white gradient can only be, at most, 256 pixels wide before it starts banding on the majority of computers that use SDR displays. HDR only gives you a couple extra bits where each bit doubles how wide the gradient can be before it starts running out of unique color values. If the two color endpoints of the gradient are closer together, you get banding sooner. Dithering completely solves gradient banding.
The average desktop computer is running with 8 bit color depth the vast majority of the time, so find or generate basically any wide basic gradient and you'll see it.
In terms of color spaces, SRGB (the typical baseline default RGB of desktop computing) is quite naive and inefficient. Pretty much its only upsides are its conceptual and mathematical simplicity. There are much more efficient color spaces which use dynamic non-linear curves and are based on how the rods and cones in human eyes sense color.
>if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier
Misconception: perfect conditions are what lossy codecs are designed for. You're actually more likely to hear compression artifacts under imperfect conditions that break the assumptions of psychoacoustic masking. Examples include strongly distorted frequency response from poor speakers, accidental comb filtering from room reflections, or even merely listening through a home surround sound system that matrix-decodes a stereo signal into additional channels, thus spatially isolating sounds that were assumed to be masked.
"Thinking mode" only provides the illusion of debuggability. It improves performance by generating more tokens which hopefully steer the context towards one more likely to produce the desired response, but the tokens it generates do not reflect any sort of internal state or "reasoning chain" as we understand it in human cognition. They are still just stochastic spew. You have no more insight into why the model generates the particular "reasoning steps" it does than you do into any other output, and neither do you have insight into why the reasoning steps lead to whatever conclusion it comes to. The model is much less constrained by the "reasoning" than we would intuit for a human - it's entirely capable of generating an elaborate and plausible reasoning chain which it then completely ignores in favor of some invisible built-in bias.
I'm always amused when I see comments saying, "I asked it why it produced that answer, and it said...." Sorry, you've badly misunderstood how these things work. It's not analyzing how it got to that answer. It's producing what it "thinks" the response to that question should look like.
Pulseaudio is both a protocol and also an implementation of that protocol. Pipewire also implements the pulseaudio protocol, hence its compatibility with all existing software.
Wayland is a protocol only. Every compositor - and there are many - implements it "from scratch". The "pipewire of display" would simply be yet another Wayland compositor. No one is going to solve the problems of Wayland in one fell swoop by releasing another Wayland compositor. What is actually happening is that problems are being gradually solved by the introduction of protocol extensions, which usually get adopted by other compositors after achieving success in one.
The impact to quality of life could be minimal. Right now, today, there exist plant-based burgers (Beyond) and even steaks (Juicy Marbles) that are in every way superior to the average offal-based "meat" you get from the average fast food joint. Granted that you can't replicate the very nicest of fine cuts with plants - yet - but how often are you really eating rare sirloin for lunch anyway? Right now the plant based alternatives are more expensive than animal meats, but this is an economic artifact that would evaporate in a hypothetical world where meat consumption was de-normalized (and meat subsidies halted!).
Perhaps you mean it's counterfactual because you don't think it's a social norm that has a hope of being challenged. I think that's defeatist. Vegetarianism is practiced globally. You must begin from the following perspective: this is an indulgence, not a necessity for survival or even a requirement for a happy life. Raising an entire animal only to slaughter it for consumption is wanton extravagance of both physical and moral resource. Its practitioners deserve no subsidy, financial or social. Most people would be quite put off their meat if forced to viscerally confront the reality, but are carefully insulated from it - usually by simple distance and pleasant marketing, but in some places by actual legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
In short, like most of the evils of world today, it's not a necessary evil. Just a lazy, can't-be-bothered-to-change, would-upset-the-current-economic-order evil.
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