Was that the same book that had the concept of (paraphrasing using modern terminology) doing interstellar communications by sending back and forth LLMs trained on the people who wanted to talk, prompted to try and get a good business deal or whatever?

And also it was a deep fake.

BTW This is the best sci-fi book ever.

At least for audio, that dystopia is already shipping in end-user product: https://blog.webex.com/collaboration/hybrid-work/next-level-...

I came here to reply just this exactly and found a fellow geek beat me to it. Indeed a brilliant book.

This is my field as well, although I come from the neural network angle.

Learned video codecs definitely do look promising: Microsoft's DCVC-FM (https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC) beats H.267 in BD-rate. Another benefit of the learned approach is being able to run on soon commodity NPUs, without special hardware accommodation requirements.

In the CLIC challenge, hybrid codecs (traditional + learned components) are so far the best, so that has been a letdown for pure end to end learned codecs, agree. But something like H.267 is currently not cheap to run either.

Why so sour? This particular article doesn't seem to ignore a lot, it even references the Nvidia work that inspired it, as well as a recent benchmark.

Someone was just having fun here, it's not as if they present it as a general codec.

Really? Would there be a way to replicate this with currently available encoders? I'd like to try it

It may sound like marketing wank, but it does a appear to be an established term of art in academia as far back as 1997 [1]

It just means that a person can't readily distinguish between the compressed image and the uncompressed image. Usually because it takes some aspect(s) of the human visual system into account.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=per...

I read “perceptually lossless” to be equivalent to “transparent”, a more common phrase used in the audio/video codec world. It’s the bitrate/quality at which some large fraction of human viewers can’t distinguish a losslessly-encoded sample and the lossy-encoded sample, for some large fraction of content (constants vary in research papers).

As an example, crf=18 in libx264 is considered “perceptually lossless” for most video content.

Can you propose a better term for the concept then? Perceiving something as lossless is a real world metric that has a proper use case. "Perceptually lossless" does not try to imply that it is not lossy.

why not? if you change one pixel by one pixel brightness unit it is perceptually the same.

for the record, I found liveportrait to be well within the uncanny valley. it looks great for ai generated avatars, but the difference is very perceptually noticeable on familiar faces. still it's great.

It means what it already says for itself, and does not need correcting into incorrectness.

"no perceived loss" is a perfectly internally consistent and sensible concept and is actually orthogonal to whether it's actually lossless or lossy.

For instance an actually lossless block of data could be perceptually lossy if displayed the wrong way.

In fact, even actual lossless data is always actually lossy, and only ever "perceptually lossless", and there is no such thing as actually lossless, because anything digital is always only a lossy approximation of anything analog. There is loss both at the ADC and at the DAC stage.

If you want to criticize a term for being nonsense misleading dishonest bullshit, then I guess "lossless" is that term, since it never existed and never can exist.

Why don't you think it's a thing? A trivial example is audio. A ton of audio speakers can produce frequencies people cannot hear. If you have an unprocessed audio recording from a high end microphone one of the first compressions things you can do is clip of imperceptible frequencies. A form of compression.

As there are several patents, published studies, IEEE papers and thousands of google results for the term, I think it's safe to say that many people do not agree with your interpretation of the term.

"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding." -Sloman and Fernbach

It is definitely a thing given a good perceptual metric. The metric even doesn't have to be very accurate if the distortion is highly bounded, like only altering the lowermost bit. It is unfortunate that most commonly used distortion metrics like PSNR are not really that, though.

also are .mp3, yet they are hardly discernible from the originals

Yeah, all lossy compression could be called "perceptually lossless" if the perception is bad enough...

Is this the real-time discussion all over again?

His gaze also doesn’t quite match.

Very noticeable jitter in bicycle front tire too.

One cool use would be communication in space - where it's feasible that both sides would have access to high-end compute units but have a very limited bandwidth between each other.

Staying in contact with someone for hours on metered mobile internet connection comes to mind. Low bandwidth translates to low total data volume over time. If I could be video chatting on one of those free internet SIM cards that's a breakthrough.

One use case might be if you have limited bandwidth, perhaps only a voice call, and want to join a video conference. I could imagine dialling in to a conference with a virtual face as an improvement over no video at all.

130m parameters isn’t insanely large, even for smartphone memory. The high GPU usage is a barrier at the moment, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to have 4090-level GPU performance in an iPhone before 2030.

The trade-off may not be worth it today, but the processing power we can expect in the coming years will make this accessible to ordinary consumers. When your laptop or phone or AR headset has the processing power to run these models, it will make more efficient use of limited bandwidth, even if more bandwidth is available. I don't think available bandwidth will scale at the same rate as processing power, but even if it does, the picture be that much more realistic.

> unless you’re so far on the spectrum you won’t make eye contact even with a picture of a person.

I don't know. I think you'd be surprised.

That's already kind of an issue with vloggers. Often they're looking just left or right of the camera at a monitor or something.

Now that you mention it, it never occurred to me that Snake's radio transmitted video as well. "Did you like my new sunglasses?"

If you could reserve a small portion of the radio bandwidth to broadcast a thumbnail + low bandwidth compressed representation of the face movements, you could technically have something similar without encoding any video (think low res, eye + mouth movements).

Nice feature for many to one video conferencing as well. Though I don’t know if the organizers will agree.

Indeed! Bollywood makes it to HN xD

We could run something like TensorFlow.js in a Chrome extension to identify the person in the image and replace it in the dom. A little resource intensive for inference on every image in but probably worth it in this case.

As there are several patents, published studies, IEEE papers and thousands of google results for the term, I think it's safe to say that many people do not agree with your interpretation of the term.

You’re still listening to vinyl, arntcha?

Lossiness definitely matters when you’re doing forensics. But not for consumers.

If you just want to bop to Taylor who the fuck cares. The iPod ended that argument. Yes I can be a perfectionist, or I can have one thousand songs in my pocket. That was more than half of your collection for many people at the time.

It means you don't perceive the loss. What are you arguing; that you can perceive any loss?

There is no oxymoron in "no perceived loss".

Clearly Sauron is a jealous ringmaker and doesn't like hobbits using his ring to shitpost.

The greatest feat ever: let magic disappear before wonder of understanding.

Oh shut up. There's plenty of awful uses for ai but this isn't one of them

This is the power of numerical methods.

What did you mean by this?

> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

- Arthur C. Clarke

?