> We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is.
Fuzzy edges don't render the centers un-useful. Philosophical debates about the edges consume all the oxygen, but regardless of whether you think an iPhone is a phone or a computer or a television, it is definitely not a cricket bat. An inability to draw a sharp boundary doesn't mean classification has broken down, and it's nihilistic to conclude that real, meaningful distinctions cannot be drawn.
I happened to be born at the right time for Mornington Crescent to be temporarily closed in the exact window when I was travelling to London often, using the Tube on my own, and listening to ISIHAC and so for a while I assumed the joke was that it'll never open - and then one day of course it re-opened.
I tried to pass Mornington Crescent the other day, but I was in Knip; bloody typical. As you’d expect, I ended up double-shunting onto the Victoria Line.
The chart showing jxl-rs taking 1209ms to decode a 5456x3632 image in a single thread is a little damning, but is there an equivalent benchmark showing multithreaded decode performance? Clients tend to have an abundance of threads these days.
The JPEG XL report [1] measured between 240-270 Megapixels/s on 6 cores using the C++ implementation (disclosure: I was responsible for its SIMD/threading), about twice as fast as the then-current libaom.
Measuring on a single core is deeply misleading because our code was designed to scale well. I believe AVIF requires tiling in order to parallelize, which causes artifacts at tile boundaries.
It’s a measurement error: the `hyperfine` command uses `jxl_cli --speedtest` which, by default, does a warmup run that ends up in hyperfine’s measured time.
The time would be less, but you still need to power those cores. Single thread performance can be a good indicator of what it'll do the battery on your phone.
CPU power is proportional to frequency^2. Running on 4-6 little/efficiency cores (which are widespread on mobile) is likely faster than one big core, and uses less energy.
jxl-rs is a relatively new implementation, not yet optimised for speed. It’s hard to say how much faster it’ll get, but I assume it would at least get near libjxl’s level.
I'm pretty certain that mine don't come from a calendar, because the colors are a bit odd and Tuesday and Sunday both being black is quite unusual for any calendar.
Context does matter though? There are plenty of substances which are legal for certified professionals to use in controlled settings that would be illegal for untrained amateurs to use for recreational purposes. Plutonium, for example.
I've just been sucked into the same online shitstorm as everyone else, I guess. I'm posting right now directly after reading tonight's clickbait about the woman who got sentenced for child abuse for letting her 5 year old kid walk a few blocks alone in a gated community. Transposing that to all this, it makes me think about what impacted me, my family and my cohort and allowed us to be self-sufficient, and further, the whole commentary demonstrates that such things are perceived by a good chunk of the population as "abuse" when they're really tools you need to give your children which other people would love to deprive you of giving to your children. I am an example of someone who would be nothing without the framework of expectations and responsibilities I was given at an early age (including at times radical freedom that I had to use judiciously or else face extreme disappointment) so I'm speaking in defense of that style of parenting.
But as to why I'm here writing in the middle of the night, it's pretty much on myself and my own addictions. I should be doing something more productive.
Or even the tightly controlled Systembolaget [0] in Sweden, compared to the modern markets for cannabis and cocaine.
Tax and regulate lowers violence and increases tax revenue, outright prohibition/making it illegal increases violence and lowers tax revenue.
I do believe "sin prohibition" policies, for not just drugs but gambling, prostitution, etc, are one example of "low-hanging fruit", where there is a noticeably better option that is usually not implemented.
Really, for all trades usually controlled by violent criminals (so everything the Mafia/Yakuza/crime groups traditionally specialize in), I believe that the citizens of a given state will be happier if the trade is controlled by the state and not given over to criminals, which is functionally what "make it illegal" does.
BTW, Australia has shown the limits of sin taxation with our very high tobacco taxes. They got so high we induced a criminal black market in tobacco, that now is very hard to eradicate and is causing gang warfare, etc. Given we now have the crime anyway, maybe banning tobacco would have better outcomes than taxing it at this point.
I don't think it's at all obvious that a regulation-based approach could produce better outcomes than a prohibition-based approach. No doubt prohibition causes much violence and misery, but prohibition was a response to other great harms, most famously the condition of opium addicts.
Rather than rehash the arguments for and against, I would ask a meta-question: if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?
> if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?
First off, you do have countries switching over to tax-and-regulate, Canada, for example, some U.S. states, countries in Europe (Germany, Netherlands).
But to answer the question of countries going to prohibition-based instead of tax-and-regulate - off the top of my head
1) US-led world order + US deciding to ban a bunch of drugs for political reasons (I hear, from multiple sources that discriminating against Mexican immigrants was one reason cannabis was outlawed, Reagan and his whole 'War on Drugs' schtick...)
2) tradition - have you noticed that, also for the last ~200 years, basically all world leaders, from French presidents to the Emperor of Japan, will dress in the style of the English monarch George IV (and, more precisely, in the the style George IV copied from Beau Brummell)?
We ban drugs because that's what we're used to doing. Our leaders dress in suits because that's what we expect them to do.
3) naive ignorance - much as how, for hundreds if not thousands of years, "sacrifice a bull" was considered the state of the art in ensuring that there would be water for the crops, people growing up with no additional knowledge will often arrive at "ban it" as a logical way to handle a social ill, even if, as those who have suffered the negative consequences [0][1] know, "ban it" generally just makes the problem worse.
Source [1] notes
"Analysts estimate wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales range from $13.6 to $49.4 billion annually".
Not the illicit part. The market is there, even if outlawed. Dozens of billion of dollars per year, and if you tax-and-regulate, all of a sudden you've got billions in tax revenue to help you "respond to social harms, such as the condition of opium addicts".
At the risk of an analogy, this is like finding that the Linux kernel provides no guarantee that a process won’t contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities. While buffer overflows are bad, and it would be a good idea to try to prevent them, enforcing against them at the kernel level would be a far-reaching prospect with many consequences, intended and unintended.
The judge is opining that other layers of protection are available.
Low stakes conspiracy: the high-security operation to move the tapestry to London was actually cover for the simultaneous movement of gold from European nations as part of their recent hedge against US counterparty risk.
Fuzzy edges don't render the centers un-useful. Philosophical debates about the edges consume all the oxygen, but regardless of whether you think an iPhone is a phone or a computer or a television, it is definitely not a cricket bat. An inability to draw a sharp boundary doesn't mean classification has broken down, and it's nihilistic to conclude that real, meaningful distinctions cannot be drawn.
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