Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> 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…
Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
111–120 of 144 posts
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 cate…
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.
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cate…
> 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.
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#114These 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. 22…
Someone was just having fun here, it's not as if they present it as a general codec.
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#115This 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'…
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#116This is very impressive, but “perceptually lossless” isn’t a thing and doesn’t make sense. It means “lossy”.
also are .mp3, yet they are hardly discernible from the originals
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cate…
> 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.
Consider The Martian, early versions where posted online and the author changed what resources the character had to work with at the beginning. So what feels like a creative solution to limited resources was really giving the character exactly what they needed after a solution was found. Only examining a work we can’t distinguish ‘soft’ physics updated as the plot demands from a story based around fixed rules.
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. W…
Okay, did not know you measure distortion that way.
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 cate…
Re: Perceptually lossless (talking head) video compression at 22kbit/s
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cate…
Harry Potter isnt typically considered scifi because it doesn't critically examine its own premise and because the rules of the universe are yoked to the needs of the plot.
It’s common for the rules of the universe to be adapted to fit the plot of random Star Trek episodes.
HP is not considered science fiction because of the trappings of the story. People use spells and enchanted objects for telekinesis, teleportation, and time travel not psychic abilities and technology to do the same things.
> critically examine its own premise
A great deal of science fiction doesn’t do that while plenty of fantasy does.