I think it’s relevant in that they lack the personal experience, and so can’t comment on the given points from experience, as they might be expected to.

Saying you’ll do something that’ll harm someone (or, more precisely in this instance, their business) can reasonably be called a threat (in the broad sense of the word), though not necessarily the unfair kind of threat most people imagine when they say ‘threat’.

You can threaten someone with ceasing to be a customer if they don’t change their business practices, and that’s perfectly fine. Sharing publicly available information is generally not a problem, either. But in this case, the author of the message is coming off as very insincere, setting deadlines, and trying to strike up deals, which comes off as unreasonable and makes one wonder if they really are simply going to share publicly available information, or if they’re going to give undue focus over them being ‘uncooperative’. If they did not want their message to come off as a threat, this was very far from an ideal way to write it.

Can you quote the words in the article where somebody said that the business was or would be hurt

Because if not that would mean that this is an article about a threat that somebody imagined in their head

I think it’s pretty evident that letting ‘other artists’ (or ‘the community’) know implies hurting the business (since they are likely to disappreciate the use of AI, the way many other people have).

It’s more about the way it was phrased and presented. Just sharing publicly available facts with your community (or anyone really) is not a problem in itself, but the message does rub me the wrong way.

The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying to help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.

If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left her with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.

HN needing an explanation of how protection rackets work is like looking up money laundering in the dictionary in Office Space.

I agree, they should've just shared it immediately without contacting the owner

There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".

Well, the basic idea of it is not so bad. A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.

The important thing is how we go about it, and whether their reputation remains reflective of their actions, or we try and make it worse than it ought to be. We can’t say for certain the author of the message was going to do the latter, but it does not inspire good faith.

> Well, the basic idea of it is not so bad.

It's textbook extortion.

> so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.

Telling a business we're going to fuck you up unless you send our friends work, even by implication, is literally extortion.

I wrote my comment with the assumption that the ‘basic idea’ was intentionally making reputation worse on account of poor behaviour, and communicating that to the business owner. Of course, if you imagine the basic idea to be the extortive aspect, then it is literally extortion.

Threatening to damage the reputation of the business unless the business paid their friends to redo the art.

It's only not extortion if you ignore the extortative parts.

I did make a distinction between ‘the basic idea’ and the rest. That implies temporarily focusing on some parts more than the others, yes.

but the only way they can "fuck up" this business is by influencing their reputation. no one is getting a brick through their window. this is an attempt to try to mutate basic feedback mechanisms until they're equivalent to physical violence and turn "I won't shop here and neither will my friends" into "literally extortion".

> "A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal."

Yes, except this case isn't about a customer—it's a disgruntled vendor (commercial artist) acting on behalf of an association of other vendors. Not (AFAICT) on behalf of real customers.

A customer complaining about their needs and preferences is useful feedback.

A vendor whom you have no business relationship with (and want none) is not helpful.

If they criticize your business practices in public, that's certainly their right. But, if they're threatening to do that, with an attached demand of commercial services to them (or to their associates), that's something else. It's the linked demand for payment that loses them all legitimacy. (Possibly even into criminal racketeering; I'm not an expert).

Certainly, but considerate the alternative: the account simply publicly posts about a public posting (not private business). Which happens all of the time for public ridicule or shame. At least this provides some recourse for the person affected. Sure, the alternative is simply to not post in the first place; but such is the nature of large social media accounts.

In this case, the account clearly stated: -

1.) We don't like your poster so you better remove it or we'll badmouth you within our network.

2.) You have 1 day to comply.

3.) You can instead work with an artist we will recommend (aka connected to us), and we'll cease.

Textbook mafia-style extortion.

This is ludicrous, I'm sorry. People are treating this minor social scuffle like they're going to burn the business down. No, they're not saying 'work with us or die' unless you read it in the most hostile way possible to be terrified of something mundane. To them, the AI is the problem, if the owner took it down and replaced it with a Microsoft Word printout, they would be satisfied. Trying to recommend an artist they know may come off as an advertisement or as trying to get ahead of the owner claiming there's no one who can do this kind of work, depending on how charitable you want to be. But no matter how you read it, this isn't a mob boss forcing you into a protection racket. It's just some guy who probably wanted to name and shame on a Facebook group but decided to hold off for one day.

I don’t deny that based on the screenshot there is both strong-arming and a lack of sympathy or empathy from the other account towards the fact that it seems like many people are just using AI tools without giving it a second thought.

However, I’m just pointing out that as far as the implications of the threat goes, in most instances it would’ve just happened anyway, without a “warning”, because people simply post things to make fun of them and mock them. Sometimes those accounts might at least anonymize their subjects, but this might be a name them and shame them type situation.

True. I can’t speak from experience, but this seems like it might often fall within the scope of normal job duties, though.

Thank you for an interesting article. You’ve helped AV1 come a long way!

In the ‘Lossy Compression Efficiency’ section, you compare the codecs using various metrics, but I don’t think you say anywhere what quality the images were encoded for. Did you forget to mention that or am I just reading things wrong?

(I assume BD-rate tells us how similar the images look, but I also assume the values would change if the encoders were made to target different qualities, hence why the intended quality seems quite important to know.)

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.

Not at lossless, though.

jxl-rs will presumably get much faster in time. The work on it started much later than work on libjxl (because it took years for anyone to say they had vested interest in it), and if my understanding is correct, it hasn’t been production-ready until recently. Once it behaves correctly, speed improvements are next in line, presumably.

Well, anything that supports JPEG XL will support all of them, so you can just re-use the files an the web as-are.

It may not be as widely used as lossy, but it does have valid uses that lossy just can’t substitute and the web needs to accomodate for. And the space savings offered by JPEG XL seem pretty great in that regard.

‘The average Web consumer’ may not need lossless, but a non-negligible minority very well might, hence why lossless should absolutely be on topic.

JPEG XL isn’t consistently better enough to justify it. If lossless is so important, maybe we should be campaigning for HALIC.

Isn’t HALIC proprietary?

JPEG XL is an open format with a libre reference implementation, usually compresses better than WebP/PNG, and supposedly has plenty of room for improvement still (in said implementation). Add to that its versatility in other areas and the fact that it seems to have generated widespread interest (much unlike WebP in its time, from what I recall), and I think campaigning for it makes perfect sense.