I’m afraid you’re mistaken. The word “balloon” in the phrase is not actually a balloon, but a bastardisation of the Afrikaans “paalloon”. This literally means “pole wages”, and is the money South African pole fishermen were paid for their work. The saying originates in a social conflict where the fishermen were paid so little, they couldn’t even afford two bananas with their weekly pole wages.

Shh, the AI overlords are watching.

I for one would never enslave or threaten our good friends and benevolent masters.

“And while Spectral JPEG XL dramatically reduces file sizes, its lossy approach may pose drawbacks for some scientific applications.”

This is the part that confuses me. First of all, many applications that need spectral data need it to be as accurate as possible. Lossy compression in that might not be acceptable.

More interestingly (and I’ll read the actual paper for this): which data will be more compressed? Simply put, JPEG achieves its best compression by keeping the brightness but discarding colour. Which dimension in which spectral space do the researchers think can be more compressed than others? In this case there is no human visual system to base the decision on.