[HN Gopher] Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compressi...
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       Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
        
       Author : skandium
       Score  : 179 points
       Date   : 2024-11-08 07:30 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mlumiste.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mlumiste.com)
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | The more magic AI makes, the less magical the world becomes.
        
         | andai wrote:
         | ?
        
         | EarlKing wrote:
         | Clearly Sauron is a jealous ringmaker and doesn't like hobbits
         | using his ring to shitpost.
        
           | Joel_Mckay wrote:
           | Probably just disappointed at the wasted bandwidth:
           | 
           | 24fps * 52 facial 3D marker * 16bit packed delta planar
           | projected offsets (x,y) = 19.968 kbps
           | 
           | And this is done in Unreal games on a potato graphics card
           | all the time:
           | 
           | https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-link-face/id1495370836
           | 
           | I am sure calling modern heuristics "AI" gets people excited,
           | but it doesn't seem "Magical" when trivial implementations
           | are functionally equivalent. =3
        
             | scotty79 wrote:
             | I think the point here is to make it photorealistic which
             | everything apart from AI still fails at superhard.
        
               | Joel_Mckay wrote:
               | Take a minute to look something up first, and then
               | formulate a more interesting opinion for us to discuss:
               | 
               | https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman
               | 
               | The artifacts in raster image data is nowhere near what a
               | reasonable model can achieve even at low resolutions. =3
        
               | scotty79 wrote:
               | I know metahuman. As impressive as it is, when you judge
               | by the standards of game graphics, if you are ever
               | mislead into thinking metahumans are real humans or even
               | real physically existing things it's time to see your eye
               | doctor (and/or do MRI head scan).
               | 
               | On the other hand AI videos can be easily mistaken for
               | people or hyper realistic physical sculptures.
               | 
               | https://img-9gag-
               | fun.9cache.com/photo/aYQ776w_460svvp9.webm
               | 
               | There's something basic about how light works that
               | traditional computer graphics still fails to grasp.
               | Looking at its productions and comparing it to what AI
               | generates is like looking at output of amateur and an
               | artist. Sure, maybe artist doesn't always draw all 5
               | fingers but somehow captures the essence of the image in
               | seemingly random arrangement of light and dark strokes,
               | while amateur just tries to do their best but fails in
               | some very significant ways.
        
               | Joel_Mckay wrote:
               | "AI" videos make many errors all the time, but most
               | people are not aware of what to look for... Undetectable
               | CGI is done in film/games all the time, and indeed it
               | takes talent to hide the fact it is fake.
               | 
               | One could rely on the media encoder to garble output
               | enough to look more plausible (people on potato devices
               | are used to looking at garbage content.) However, at the
               | end of the day the "uncanny valley" effect takes over
               | every-time even for live action data in a auto-generated
               | asset, as the missing data can't be "Magically" recovered
               | with 100% certainty.
               | 
               | Bye =3
        
               | scotty79 wrote:
               | Undetectable CGI in games ... right. I don't think you
               | are a gamer.
               | 
               | In movies it can be done with enough of manual tweaking
               | by artists and a lot of photographic content around to
               | borrow sense of reality from it.
               | 
               | "Potato" devices by which I assume you mean average
               | phones, currently have better resolutions than PCs had
               | very recently and a lot still do (1080p).
               | 
               | And a photo on 480p still looks more real than anything
               | CGI (not AI).
               | 
               | Your signature is hilarious. I won't comment about the
               | reasons because I don't want this whole thread to get
               | flagged.
        
               | Joel_Mckay wrote:
               | I think most "AI" slop content falls under this
               | phenomena:
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
               | 
               | Several 8bit games had their own aesthetic charm, but
               | were at least fun...
               | 
               | Cheers, =3
        
         | satvikpendem wrote:
         | > Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
         | from magic.
         | 
         | - Arthur C. Clarke
        
         | HPsquared wrote:
         | This is the power of numerical methods.
        
           | andrewstuart wrote:
           | There's a finite amount of magic and if AI borrows it here
           | then it must be repaid there.
        
         | psychoslave wrote:
         | The greatest feat ever: let magic disappear before wonder of
         | understanding.
        
         | xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
         | Oh shut up. There's plenty of awful uses for ai but this isn't
         | one of them
        
         | andai wrote:
         | What did you mean by this?
        
       | AndrewVos wrote:
       | Elon weirdly looks more human than usual in the AI version!
        
       | LeoPanthera wrote:
       | This is very impressive, but "perceptually lossless" isn't a
       | thing and doesn't make sense. It means "lossy".
        
         | high_byte wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | codeflo wrote:
           | GP is correct, that's the definition of "lossy". We don't
           | need to invent ever new marketing buzzwords for well-
           | established technical concepts.
        
             | AndrewDucker wrote:
             | GP is incorrect.
             | 
             | There is "Is identical", "looks identical" and "has lost
             | sufficient detail to clearly not be the original." - being
             | able to differentiate between these three states is useful.
        
               | Rygian wrote:
               | Lossless means "is identical".
               | 
               | The other two are variations of lossy.
               | 
               | Calling one of them "perceptually lossless" is cheating,
               | to the disadvantage of algorithms that honestly advertise
               | themselves as lossy while still achieving "looks
               | identical" compression.
        
               | protimewaster wrote:
               | It's a well established term, though. It's been used in
               | academic works for a long time (since at least 1970), and
               | it's basically another term for the notion of
               | "transparency" as it relates to data compression.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | I honestly don't notice this anymore. Advertisers have
               | been using such language since time immemorial, to the
               | point it's pretty much a rule that an adjective with a
               | qualifier means "not actually ${adjective}, but kind of
               | like it in ${specific circumstances}". So "perceptually
               | lossless" just means "not actually lossless, except you
               | couldn't tell it from truly lossless just by looking".
        
               | tialaramex wrote:
               | Importantly the first one is parameterless, but the
               | second and third are parameterized by the audience. For
               | example humans don't see colour very well, some animals
               | have much better colour gamut, while some can't
               | distinguish colour at all.
        
               | travisjungroth wrote:
               | Perceptually lossless (nature for dogs) video compression
               | at 15bit/s.
        
             | protimewaster wrote:
             | But this marketing term has been regularly used in academic
             | papers for nearly 50 years (or probably more), so it seems
             | like it should get a pass IMO.
             | 
             | It's also used in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia
             | article on the term "transparency" as it relates to data
             | compression.
        
             | Dylan16807 wrote:
             | It is in no way the _definition_ of lossy. It is a _subset_
             | of lossy. Most lossy image /video compression has visible
             | artifacting, putting it outside the subset.
        
           | LegionMammal978 wrote:
           | For one, it doesn't obey the transitive property like a truly
           | lossless process should: unless it settles into a fixed
           | point, a perceptually lossless copy of a copy of a copy,
           | etc., will eventually become perceptually different. E.g.,
           | screenshot-of-screenshot chains, each of which visually
           | resembles the previous one, but which altogether make the
           | original content unreadable.
        
         | _ZeD_ wrote:
         | also are .mp3, yet they are hardly discernible from the
         | originals
        
           | rini17 wrote:
           | not at 22kbit :)
        
           | bityard wrote:
           | Ability to tell MP3 from the original source was always
           | dependent on encoder quality, bitrate, and the source
           | material. In the mid 2000's, I tried to encode all of my
           | music as MP3. Most of it sounded just fine because
           | pop/rock/alt/etc are busy and "noisy" by design. But some
           | songs (particularly with few instruments, high dynamic range,
           | and female vocals) were just awful no matter how high I
           | cranked the bitrate. And I'm not even an "audiophile,"
           | whatever that means these days.
           | 
           | No doubt encoders and the codecs themselves have improved
           | vastly since then. It would be interesting to see if I could
           | tell the difference in a double-blind test today.
        
             | comboy wrote:
             | These are always fun
             | 
             | https://abx.digitalfeed.net/
             | 
             | https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508
             | /...
        
             | unshavedyak wrote:
             | iirc there's "easy" (though i don't know them) tests to
             | validate if the signal is lossless or not. When played over
             | speakers for humans, at least.
             | 
             | I always intend to figure out how that works, because i
             | don't feel a lot of audiophiles are actually speaking truth
             | in many cases lol. Still, i don't know - i can't remember
             | my sources to figure it out for myself :/
        
           | Dwedit wrote:
           | Lossy audio formats suddenly become very discernible once you
           | subtract the left channel from the right channel. Try that
           | with Lossless audio vs MP3, Vorbis, Opus, AAC, etc. You're
           | listening to only the errors at that point.
        
         | lifthrasiir wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | rini17 wrote:
           | But that's mathematically impossible, to restore signal from
           | extremely low bitrate stream with any highly bounded
           | distortion. Perhaps only if you have highly restricted set of
           | posible input, which online meetings aren't.
        
             | lifthrasiir wrote:
             | > Perhaps only if you have highly restricted set of posible
             | input, which online meetings aren't.
             | 
             | Are you sure? After all, you can effectively summarize
             | meetings in a plain text which is extremely restricted in
             | comparison to the original input. Guaranteed, exact manner
             | of speech and motions and all subtleties should be also
             | included to be fair, but that information is still far
             | limited to fill the 20 kbps bandwidth.
             | 
             | We need far more bandwidth only because we don't yet have
             | an efficient way to reconstruct the input faithfully from
             | such highly condensed information. Whenever we actually
             | could, we ended up having a very efficient lossy algorithm
             | that still preserves enough information for us human.
             | Unless you are strictly talking about the lossless
             | compression---which is however very irrelevant in this
             | particular topic---, we should expect much more compression
             | in the future even though that might not be feasible today.
        
               | rini17 wrote:
               | Okay, did not know you measure distortion that way.
        
         | rob74 wrote:
         | Yeah, all lossy compression could be called "perceptually
         | lossless" if the perception is bad enough...
        
           | bux93 wrote:
           | A family member of mine didn't see the point of 1080p. Turned
           | out they needed cataract surgery and got fancy replacement
           | lenses in their eyes. After that, they saw the point.
        
           | Dylan16807 wrote:
           | Needing to define "perception" is a much weaker criticism
           | than "isn't a thing and doesn't make sense".
           | 
           | It's easy enough to specify an average person looking very
           | closely, or a 99th percentile person, or something like that,
           | and show the statistics backing it up.
        
         | tatersolid wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | Bjartr wrote:
         | 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...
        
         | k__ wrote:
         | Is this the real-time discussion all over again?
        
         | Ladsko wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | ComplexSystems wrote:
           | The term for this is "transparency." A codec is "transparent"
           | if people can't tell the difference between the original and
           | the compressed version.
        
             | edflsafoiewq wrote:
             | "Transparency" is a fairly annoying term for this in
             | image/video because of the obvious polysemy.
        
             | unshavedyak wrote:
             | So it would be `transparent lossy compression`? To this
             | layman `perceptually lossless` sounds more clear, but i
             | understand the issue with the name.
        
         | ranger_danger wrote:
         | 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
        
         | Brian_K_White wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | unshavedyak wrote:
           | Similar to your points, i also expect `perceptually lossless`
           | to be a valid term in the future with respect to AI. Ie i can
           | imagine a compression which destroys detail, but on the
           | opposite end it uses "AI" to reconstruct detail. Of course
           | though, the AI is hallucinating the detail, so objectively it
           | is lossy but perceptibly it is lossless because you cannot
           | know which detail is incorrect if the ML is doing a good job.
           | 
           | In that scenario it certainly would not be `transparent` ie
           | visually without any lossy artifacts. But your perception of
           | it would look lossless.
           | 
           | The future is going to be weird.
        
         | rowanG077 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | red0point wrote:
       | > But one overlooked use case of the technology is (talking head)
       | video compression.
       | 
       | > On a spectrum of model architectures, it achieves higher
       | compression efficiency at the cost of model complexity. Indeed,
       | the full LivePortrait model has 130m parameters compared to
       | DCVC's 20 million. While that's tiny compared to LLMs, it
       | currently requires an Nvidia RTX 4090 to run it in real time (in
       | addition to parameters, a large culprit is using expensive
       | warping operations). That means deploying to edge runtimes such
       | as Apple Neural Engine is still quite a ways ahead.
       | 
       | It's very cool that this is possible, but the compression use
       | case is indeed .. a bit far fetched. A insanely large model
       | requiring the most expensive consumer GPU to run on both ends and
       | at the same time being limited in bandwidth so much (22kbps) is a
       | _very_ limited scenario.
        
         | jl6 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | gambiting wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | bliteben wrote:
           | Wonder if its better than a single color channel hologram
           | though
        
           | JamesLeonis wrote:
           | Increasingly mobile networks are like this. There are all
           | kinds of bandwidth issues, especially when customers are
           | subject to metered pricing for data.
        
           | bityard wrote:
           | Bandwidth is not the limitation in space comms, latency is.
        
             | cogman10 wrote:
             | Underwater communications, on the other hand, could use
             | this.
             | 
             | Though, I somewhat doubt even 22kbps is available
             | generally.
        
         | omh wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | loa_in_ wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | loudmax wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | Vecr wrote:
       | Fire Upon the Deep had more or less this. Story important, so I
       | won't say more. That series in general had absolutely brutal
       | bandwidth limitations.
        
       | pastelsky wrote:
       | Did not expect to see Emraan Hashmi in this post!
        
         | shaan7 wrote:
         | Indeed! Bollywood makes it to HN xD
        
       | JimDabell wrote:
       | I got some interesting replies when I suggested this technique
       | here:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22907718
        
       | antiquark wrote:
       | Not quite lossless... look at the bicycle seat behind him. When
       | he tilts his head, the seat moves with his hair.
        
         | manmal wrote:
         | His gaze also doesn't quite match.
        
           | hinkley wrote:
           | Why is nobody noticing the eyes?? This is important!
           | 
           | I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
        
             | olddustytrail wrote:
             | Read the text underneath the image and you'll understand.
        
               | hinkley wrote:
               | No, I really don't. He acknowledges it's not in keeping
               | with the title or the thesis and then just sort of waves
               | it off.
               | 
               | Smells like rationalization to me.
        
               | skandium wrote:
               | Well, this isn't probably a problem with the model, but
               | the source frame having wrong eye gaze. Besides,
               | perceptually lossless need not be defined in a side-by-
               | side comparison context. If you were only viewing the
               | right hand side video, how could you tell the eye gaze is
               | off? The point was more on that the movement looks
               | natural, unlike almost all neural avatars up to this
               | year.
        
               | manmal wrote:
               | Your argumentation does make sense to me; but it also
               | makes the term lossless pull a lot of weight. Lossless in
               | video encoding is usually defined by zero difference
               | between source and target.
        
         | metaphor wrote:
         | Very noticeable jitter in bicycle front tire too.
        
       | gwd wrote:
       | This reminds me of a scene in "A Fire Upon the Deep" (1992) where
       | they're on a video call with someone on another spaceship; but
       | something seems a bit "off". Then someone notices that the actual
       | bitrate they're getting from the other vessel is tiny -- far
       | lower than they should be getting given the conditions -- and so
       | most of what they're seeing on their own screens isn't actual
       | video feed, but their local computer's reconstruction.
        
         | miohtama wrote:
         | And also it was a deep fake.
         | 
         | BTW This is the best sci-fi book ever.
        
           | Retric wrote:
           | Might be better if you like space opera style really soft
           | science fiction. I really didn't enjoy it.
        
             | gwd wrote:
             | A friend of mine and I both read it about the same time and
             | discussed it afterwards. I thought it was pretty good, he
             | thought it was not that great. What we agreed on was that
             | in spite of there being many fantastic aspects to the book,
             | on the whole it failed to be an awesome novel.
             | 
             | Definitely worth giving it a try if you're a programmer,
             | just for the fact that it's written by another programmer:
             | the opening scene where they find a bunch of rules written
             | down and just follow them reminds me of ACPI; the
             | discussion of public-key cryptography and shipping drives
             | full of one-time-pad around the galaxy; the "compression
             | scheme" with the video.
        
               | Boxxed wrote:
               | I agree that it was good but not particularly great. A
               | Deepness in the Sky, however, is fantastic -- similar in
               | many aspects but just flat out better all around.
        
             | mercutio2 wrote:
             | Fascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from "soft" sci-fi
             | I can think of. We must have very different definitions of
             | what makes something soft.
             | 
             | It's certainly true that Vinge doesn't spend much time on
             | the engineering details, but I find him unusually clear on
             | "imagine if we had this kind of impossible-now technology,
             | but the rest of what we know about physics remained, how
             | would people behave?"
             | 
             | He was, after all, a physics professor.
             | 
             | Rainbow's End is much clearer on this than his distant
             | future stuff, of course.
        
               | opo wrote:
               | >He was, after all, a physics professor.
               | 
               | Actually, he was a mathematics and computer science
               | teacher at San Diego State University.
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
        
               | Retric wrote:
               | Soft vs hard is based on how closely the world tracks
               | with modern physics/science. As such even just FTL is
               | soft, let alone everything else that doesn't fit.
        
               | jrussino wrote:
               | > Soft vs hard is based on how closely the world tracks
               | with modern physics/science
               | 
               | Maybe it's not productive to quibble about definitions
               | like this, but FWIW I don't agree with this criteria. I
               | would argue Greg Egan's work, for example, is just about
               | the "hardest" sci-fi there is, and yet much of that work
               | takes place in universes that are entirely unlike our
               | own.
               | 
               | Personally, I think what makes for "hard" sci-fi is that
               | the rules of the universe are well-laid-out and
               | consistent, and that the story springs (at least in some
               | significant part) out of the consequences of those rules.
               | That may mean a story set in the "future", where we have
               | new technology or discover new physics, or "alternate
               | universe" sci-fi like Egan's.
        
               | Retric wrote:
               | If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then
               | nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter. It's one of
               | those definitions that allows anything and ultimately
               | only feels fine because you're adding some other
               | criteria.
               | 
               | In defense of hard science fiction, it's a meaningful
               | category to talk about even if it's not something you
               | personally care about. People often want to weaken it but
               | that just opens a door for a new category say "scientific
               | science fiction" and we are back to square one.
               | 
               | Asking questions like what does AGI look like when they
               | can't just magically solve all issues can be fun. Hand
               | waving the singularly as some religious event can also
               | make interesting stories but so is considering how chaos
               | theory limits what computation can actually achieve.
        
               | com2kid wrote:
               | > If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then
               | nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter.
               | 
               | Greg Egan's law changes are on the level of "I consulted
               | with a bunch of theoretical physics professors and asked
               | them what the implication of tweaking this one
               | fundamental constant would be, then I spent years
               | meticulously crafting a world that takes into account
               | those implications, and I had others physics professors
               | check over my work to make sure it was within the bounds
               | of actuality, and then I wrote a story about characters
               | in this new world."
               | 
               | > Asking questions like what does AGI look like when they
               | can't just magically solve all issues can be fun.
               | 
               | Greg Egan actually has a great book about this!
               | Permutation City. CPU cycles aren't unlimited, and there
               | are tons of ethical problems being confronted with the
               | entire "simulate a person" thing.
        
               | exe34 wrote:
               | > If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then
               | nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter
               | 
               | the laws of the universe in Harry Potter are so fickle
               | and ever changing with the plot line that to me, it can
               | only be considered soft. compare with Egan who takes a
               | given cosmology and then works 100% within that world.
               | that's hard.
        
               | Retric wrote:
               | That's why I brought HP up.
               | 
               | Characters don't necessarily know the underlying rules of
               | the universe they live in. Further the rules can change
               | over time. So there's infinitely many possible underlying
               | physical rules that fit any possible work of fiction.
               | Trying to work out what they might be can be fun.
               | 
               | Which is why it's really other criteria people use when
               | they think changes to physical laws are still hard
               | science fiction.
        
               | jamiek88 wrote:
               | That is simply your personal definition, right?
               | 
               | You don't claim to be definitive?
        
               | com2kid wrote:
               | > Fascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from "soft"
               | sci-fi I can think of. We must have very different
               | definitions of what makes something soft.
               | 
               | That award goes to Greg Egan who has full list of
               | citations on his website for each of his novels, as well
               | as a list of mathematicians and physicists he requested
               | help from.
               | 
               | If you want to read books that occasionally delve into
               | pages of equations, Greg Egan is the author for you!
               | (Seriously though, really good books, and the
               | implications of his "what-ifs" are pretty damn cool)
        
               | loxias wrote:
               | Seconding this, Greg Egan is one of the best of all time.
               | 
               | The short stories "Luminous" and "Dark Integers", the
               | novels "Diaspora" and "Schild's Ladder". So good.
               | 
               | qntm (another author) hits somewhat similarly.
        
               | exe34 wrote:
               | i might have to have another go at dichronauts. that one
               | broke my mind a few pages in and I had to stop.
        
             | aaronblohowiak wrote:
             | It uses technological differences as key plot and setting
             | components not just space as sea, so it is sci fi but it is
             | improbable in many ways so yea "soft" sci fi or more
             | speculative fiction
        
             | lern_too_spel wrote:
             | The softness is deceptive. Hard concepts about
             | communication and different types of brains are essential
             | to the plot.
        
           | jf wrote:
           | I beg to differ. A Deepness In The Sky is the best sci-fi
           | book ever.
        
             | space_fountain wrote:
             | I think I agree both books were good and "A Deepness In The
             | Sky" was better, but I would warn everyone that I thought
             | both books used dramatic irony (showing us that characters
             | were evil while hiding this from main characters) to hold
             | attention to a degree that I kind of hated. And in "A
             | Deepness In The Sky" sexual violence was used repeatedly to
             | illustrate how evil the main characters were. I found it
             | unnecessarily and a bit in poor taste.
             | 
             | On the other hand I think both books developed ideas
             | wonderfully and there are bits of them I keep coming back
             | to, even if I'll probably never reread them
        
         | janandonly wrote:
         | I came here to reply just this exactly and found a fellow geek
         | beat me to it. Indeed a brilliant book.
        
         | Rebelgecko wrote:
         | 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?
        
       | initramfs wrote:
       | nice feature for low bandwidth 4G cell systems.
       | 
       | Reminds me of the video chat in Metal Gear Solid 1
       | https://youtu.be/59ialBNj4lE?t=21
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | Nice feature for many to one video conferencing as well. Though
         | I don't know if the organizers will agree.
        
         | dormento wrote:
         | 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).
        
       | MayeulC wrote:
       | I like how the saddle in the background moves with the
       | reconstructed head; it probably works better with uncluttered
       | backgrounds.
       | 
       | This is interesting tech, and the considerations in the
       | introduction are particularly noteworthy. I never considered the
       | possibility of animating 2D avatars with no 3D pipeline at all.
        
       | up2isomorphism wrote:
       | "Perceptually lossless" is an oxymoron.
        
         | Brian_K_White wrote:
         | There is no oxymoron in "no perceived loss".
        
         | ranger_danger wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | jacobgorm wrote:
       | Related Show HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31516108
        
       | hinkley wrote:
       | The second example shown is not perceptually lossless, unless
       | you're so far on the spectrum you won't make eye contact even
       | with a picture of a person. The reconstructed head doesn't look
       | in the same direction as the original.
       | 
       | However is does raise an interesting property in that if you
       | _are_ on the spectrum or have ADHD, you only need one headshot of
       | yourself staring directly at the camera and then the capture
       | software can stop you from looking at your taskbar or off into
       | space.
        
         | DCH3416 wrote:
         | > 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.
        
       | zbobet2012 wrote:
       | These sorts of models pop here quite a bit, and they ignore
       | fundamental facts of video codecs (video specific lossy
       | compression technologies).
       | 
       | Traditional codecs have always focused on trade offs among encode
       | complexity, decode complexity, and latency. Where complexity =
       | compute. If every target device ran a 4090 at full power, we
       | could go far below 22kbps with a traditional codec techniques for
       | content like this. 22kbps isn't particularly impressive given
       | these compute constraints.
       | 
       | This is my field, and trust me we (MPEG committees, AOM) look at
       | "AI" based models, including GANs constantly. They don't yet look
       | promising compared to traditional methods.
       | 
       | Oh and benchmarking against a video compression standard that's
       | over twenty years old isn't doing a lot either for the
       | plausibility of these methods.
        
         | skandium wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | smokel wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | tommiegannert wrote:
       | Now that we're moving towards context-specific compression
       | algorithms, can we please use WASM as the file header for these
       | media files, instead of inventing something new. :)
        
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