American here, but I've always known these to be distinctly different. ANSI art uses the full 256 character set (and mostly the extended, block-like characters), and 16 colors, whereas ascii art doesn't have the extended characters and colors. There was a thriving ANSI art scene in the 90s in the era of BBSs.
If you have not seen it, the definitive ansi (and ascii) art archive, 16colors, is great
https://16colo.rs/
That was my initial thought too on seeing the title, having never heard the term before. So I decided to look it up and it turns out there is a whole separate genre called “ANSI art” based on a different tech stack and a naming mistake from history:
- ASCII is a real ANSI standard, the 7-bit character set that we all know and love
- Microsoft, IBM and others extended this to many different 8-bit sets, each with its own “extended” characters in the 128-255 range, often including both graphic symbols and control codes
- one of the more popular ones, windows-1252, became informally known as ANSI because Microsoft hoped that this (and others) would become new ANSI standards (they didn’t)
- people on BBSes and then early websites used this encoding standard to create art using graphic symbols and colour codes that are not available in ASCII art
- due to the optimistic, but ultimately incorrect, naming of both charset and the supporting library, this became known as ANSI art
These are definitely ANSI art. They use the unique PC extended character set (pipes, shaded blocks, etc), the classic PC CGA/EGA 16-color palette, and ANSI escape codes.
I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected.
It’s a technicality - they call it ASCII art in the US even though it includes both non-ASCII characters (IBM extensions) and ANSI.SY’s escape sequences to change colors.
"ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists."
European here. Since 90s, ANSI art were always a thing. Maybe the question isn't if its "an American thing", maybe the question is if you are so well informed as you think?
Indeed it seems I was not well informed. Back in the 90s I did see several pieces of ANSI art, but even then the people and magazines I knew always called all of it ASCII art. In fact I don't think I had heard the term ANSI art before today.
I guess this may similar to how we usually call all tracker music "MODs", though in fact there are MOD, XM, S3M, IT...
im not the best person to respond to this, but to my knowledge, ansi was basically just ascii art but with the ability to color stuff, and with extra characters like blocks, accents, etc. it was mainly used to make art on bbs boards, at least from what i have seen.
Having the rating of how well the model will run for you is cool. I miss to also have some rating of the model capabilities (even if this is tricky). There are way too many to choose. And just looking at the parameter number or the used memory is not always a good indication of actual performance.
I don't think they will have sentience or agency unless they are designed to:
1) Keep thinking continuously, as opposed to current AIs that stop functioning between prompts.
2) Have permanent memory of their previous experiences.
3) Be able to alter their own weights based on those experiences (a.k.a. learn).
That's the direction the field is already going with "agents". People want autonomous AI agents that are capable of acting independently and that have more and more capabilities. For example, something like Claude code, but that acts as a sidekick that is constantly running, and able to act without being prompted. That's what people are imagining when they talk about teams of agents. You act as a manager, but your coding agents are off working on various features and only check in periodically.
They won't have sentience because it will be antithetical to capitalist business ideology. There's no good business value proposition for having the AI daydream like humans do, or 'sleep' while 'on', or have inspirational thought that might be seen as 'wrong' or useless. If that behavior ever manifests, it will probably be stamped out in a future release.
You can't justify to the board the wasted money to have the android dream.
Charging money does not seem a very good idea in a site like this where you expect users to upload all the content. Also this would require credit card info which is a massive barrier, even if you were to charge just 1 cent.
No credit card. You have to send a $1 bill by snail mail, which is proof of "work" (mailing the bill) as well as $$. You enter the bill's serial number when you enroll the account, and the account activates when the bill arrives. You can be pretty anonymous this way.
I once proposed a scheme like this where you would donate to charities who would post lists of serial numbers they had received, for this purpose, but it never got anywhere. Maybe we need it more now than we did then.
I guess instead of mailing a $1 bill, if necessary it could be a hand drawn picture of a kitten (artistry not required). Authentication would involve checking the paper for pressure marks made by the pen. I wonder how many would take the trouble to fake that.
Those of us old enough to remember Compuserve know that the cost of entry was exactly why the quality was so high. I was lucky enough that my employer paid for it. I was also active on various comp.os.* Usenet forums. Both were great sources of quality information but Compuserve stayed “high signal” for longer. Usenet - the birthplace of trolling - eventually degraded to the point of near uselessness. The signal was drowning in noise. Mainly because some people are just shitty. Which is worth remembering here. Behind every AI agent spamming HN (and everywhere else) is a human who thought this was a good idea. Why do they think that? Maybe that’s the line to pursue for how to deal with this issue.
It worked for years for the SomethingAwful forums. A nominal charge for the ability to post, with plenty of 'timeout' chances for rehabilitation before an outright ban keeps out most of the junk.
It feels wrong at first to pay for commenting on a forum, but the alternative is almost always a gentle slide towards a trash dump. AI means that slide is almost a vertical slope.
I don't think it's that unrelated. If you make a system way more complex than it should be (clearly the case with CSS) it's obvious the risk of vulnerabilities increases exponentially.
Thanks for this, I was not aware that a good portion of GBA songs can be exported as MIDI. But I'm guessing that with good soundfonts you can get pretty reasonable quality for many of them!
They don't use general midi standard instruments. You need the extracted soundfont because the instrument numbers are unique to each game. In order to "improve" the soundfont, you need to edit that soundfont to have higher quality instruments, you can't just switch out the whole soundfont for a different one.
Thanks, but just like WEBP I'll try to stick to regular JPEGs whenever possible. Not all programs I use accept these formats, and for a common user JPEG + PNG should mostly cover all needs. Maybe add GIF to the list for simple animations, while more complex ones can be videos instead of images.
Unfortunately being universal implies way more than just having good browser support. There are quite a few image processing programs without webp or jpeg-xl support. I'm using Windows 11 and the default image viewer can't even open webp... Also, keep in mind that due to subscription models there are many people stuck with older Photoshop versions too.
Thanks, I know about this and other workarounds. My point is, if it was truly universal you should not need anything! I bet most regular users will never even know this exists.
I never knew about this either and it's been very frustrating as I've been converting my Manga library over to webp (savings are insane) and doing any spot checking opens Edge.
Edit: After reading the comments, this doesn't seem to open in Photos App.
Webp can be really annoying once you hit certain encoding edge cases.
One customer of mine (fashion) has over 700k images in their DAM, and about 0.5% cannot be converted to webp at all using libwebp. They can without problem be converted to jpeg, png, and avif.
Just out of curiosity, what's the problem libwebp has with them? I wasn't aware of cases where any image format would just cross its arms and refuse point blank like that.
We have never been able to resolve it better than knowing this:
Certain pixel colour combinations in the source image appear to trip the algorithm to such a degree that the encoder will only produce a black image.
We know this because we have been able to encode the images by (in pure frustration) manually brute forcing moving a black square across the source image on different locations and then trying to encode again. Suddenly it will work.
Images are pretty much always exported from Adobe, often smaller than 3000x3000 pixels. Images from the same camera, same size, same photo session, same export batch will work and then suddenly one out of a few hundred may become black, and only the webp one not other formats, the rest of the photos will work for all formats.
A more mathematically inclined colleague tried to have a look at the implementation once, but was unable to figure it out because they could apparently not find a good written spec on how the encoder is supposed to work.
"JPEG XL" is a little bit of a misnomer as it's not just "JPEG with more bits". It supports lossless encoding of existing content at a smaller file size than PNG and allows you to transcode existing JPEGs recoverably for a 20% space savings, the lossy encoding doesn't look nearly as ugly and artifacted as JPEG, it supports wide gamut and HDR, and delivers images progressively so you get a decent preview with as little as 15% of the image loaded with no additional client-side effort (from https://jpegxl.info/).
It is at least a very good transcoding target for the web, but it genuinely replaces many other formats in a way where the original source file can more or less be regenerated.
Honestly, I don't like how webp and now jpegxl support both a lossless and lossy mode.
Let's say you want to store images lossless. This means you won't tolerate loss of data. Which means you don't want to risk it by using a codec that will compress the image lossy if you forget to enable a setting.
With PNG there is no way to accidentally make it lossy, which feels a lot safer for cases you want lossless compression.
You can use too few bits of color depth to get lossyness in PNG. More generally, I can't find myself very sympathetic to "I don't want a format that can do X and Y, because I might accidentally select X when I want Y in my software". You might accidentally choose JPG when you want PNG too. Or accidentally resample the image. Or delete your files.
If you want a robust lossless workflow, PNG isn't the answer. Automating the fiddly parts and validating that the automation does what you want is the answer.
PNG can and is often used in a lossy way. Reducing the number of colors so PNG8 can be used instead of PNG24/PNG32 is the most common way to do that. Tools like pngquant exist, and for example Photoshop when exporting to PNG also has an option to reduce the colors, to flatten the image (remove alpha), or to change the colorspace.
16-bit PNG files can easily accidentally be reduced to 8-bit, which is of course a lossy operation. Animated PNG files can easily get converted into a still image (keeping only the first frame). CMYK images will have to be converted to RGB when saving them as PNG, which is also a lossy operation. It can happen that an image gets created as or converted to JPEG and then gets saved as PNG - which of course is a bad and lossy workflow, but it does happen.
So I don't agree that with PNG there is no way to accidentally make it lossy.
In any case: lossless or lossy is not a property of a format, but of a workflow. For keeping track of provenance information and workflow history, I would recommend looking into JPEG Trust / C2PA, which is a way to embed as metadata what happened to an image since it was captured/generated. Relying on the choice of image format for this is fragile and doesn't allow expressing the nuances, since reality is more complicated than just a binary "lossless or lossy".
> Specifically for JPEG files, the default cjxl behavior is to apply lossless
recompression and the default djxl behavior is to reconstruct the original
JPEG file (when the extension of the output file is .jpg).
You're right, however, that you do need to be careful and use the reference codec package for this, as tools like ImageMagick create loss during the decoding of the JPEG into pixels (https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/discussions/6046) and ImageMagick sets quality to 92 by default. But perhaps that's something we can change.
There's odd cases where it still has uses. When I was a teacher, some of the gamifying tools don't allow video embeds without a subscription, but I wanted to make some "what 3D operation is shown here" questions with various tools in Blender. GIF sizes were pretty comparable to video with largely static, less-than-a-second loops, and likely had slightly higher quality with care used to reduce color palette usage.
But I fully realize, there are vanishingly few cases with similar constraints.
If you need animated images in emails or text messages, GIF is the only supported format that will play the animation. Because of the size restrictions for these messaging systems the inefficient compression of GIFs is a major issue.
Videos and images are treated very differently by browsers and OS:es. I'm guessing the better suggestion would be to use apng or animated avif if you are looking for a proper gif alternative.
Yes, by using the <picture> element with <source> elements declaring the individual formats with the last one being a regular <img> with the gif.
Or you could use content-negotiation to only send avif when it's supported, but IMO the HTML way with <picture> is perhaps clearer for the client and end user.
I think the webp problem was due to browsers supporting webp but not supporting animation, transparency or other features, so content negotiation based on mime types (either via <picture> or HTTP content-negotiation) did not work properly. Safari 16.1-16.3 has the same problem with AVIF, but that is a smaller problem than it was with webp.
So, 2 people submitted the same thing earlier today and got ignored, but this time it makes the front page? And this seems to be happening often here. Not the most encouraging system to submit something...
Are you submitting for Internet points or because you think something is interesting, important, or cool? Discussion is more interesting, even if it is limited, when you aren't trying to just get points.
My point here is that submissions were the exact same thing. Is it deemed "interesting" or not depending solely on the user? Logic does not check here.
