Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by adrianN on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @05:59AM (#21123718)

Ok good, but why do these pictures have to be 2-3MB each? Each one of them would have taken an hour to download just a few years ago (or today, if you live in a less well developed area of the world).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by obituary_latte on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @06:35AM (#21123888)

I wonder if there is a way browsers could preemptively “compress“ (I doubt that’s the correct terminology) prior to downloading? Like somehow grab every nth bit, combine, render and then allow for further requests to refine at user discretion. Wonder if anyone has ever tried something like that.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by swebs on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @07:24AM (#21124147)

This feature is built into Jpeg images, though most image editors don't save them with this enabled by default. People call them progressive jpegs.

https://www.thewebmaster.com/dev/2016/feb/10/how-progressive...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by Izkata on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @06:29PM (#21131534)

Used to be really common around the late 90s/early 2000s...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by bootloop on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @06:51AM (#21123972)

I know that Opera had this feature once and Google Chrome on Android does this via it's "Lite mode":

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?co=GENIE.Pl...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by markdown on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @06:41AM (#21123916)

This used to be a feature of Opera. If you enabled it, it would run all webpages through the Opera proxy, which would downsize everything for you.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by slavik81 on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @06:48AM (#21123953)

The wavelet-based image formats like JPEG 2000 were designed to make that sort of thing possible. They never really caught on, though.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by shakna on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @06:48AM (#21123954)

I don't think that's even possible with the byte-ordering of a lot of the formats we use today.

Like the pass extraction of PNG [0] would make it somewhat possible, but you'd need to be dropping packets which you might as well receive. I don't think you'd be able to break after the first pass.

JPEG is probably worse.

However, the super-modern formats that are still gaining popularity, like WebP absolutely do support this. At the core of WebP is block prediction, so a low-bandwidth application might actually assume the values of certain blocks so it doesn't need to fetch them.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-PNG-20031110/#4Concepts.Encod...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by wil421 on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @09:06AM (#21124874)

I was downloading MP3s to my MP3 player with a 16MB san over ISDN circa 2000. For most people in the US it hasn’t taken hours to download an MP3 for over a decade maybe 2.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by adrianN on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @09:30AM (#21125087)

Ca 2000 will always be just a few years ago to me.

Besides, there are areas in Germany today where you can't get >1Mbit connections.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Lik... by buboard on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @08:24AM (#21124516)

Yeah People have to justify the cost of a their retina screens

[ Parent | on HN ]