The_Decryptor

What hasn’t changed is that the Chromatic is still tied to a controversial figure. Although the Chromatic reflects Luckey’s past as a Game Boy modder before he created the Oculus Rift VR headset, he was an early Donald Trump supporter, and after selling Oculus to Facebook he was fired following controversial political donations. Luckey went on to found Anduril, a defense contractor that makes military tech, including lethal weaponized drones.

An Analogue Pocket it is then.

On Wednesday, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after Grok began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.

The special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, told ABC’s RN Breakfast on Friday she had held meetings with a number of social media platforms, including X. “They’re very keen to ensure that hate is not associated with their platform,” she said, adding: “AI is the answer.”

Ah, this must be a new definition of antisemitism that I’m not familiar with.

While there’s an overhead to safer runtime environments, I wouldn’t put much blame there. I feel like “back in the day” when something was inefficient you noticed it quicker because it had a much larger impact, windows would stop updating, the mouse would get laggy, music would start stuttering. These days you can take up 99% of the CPU time and the system will still chug along without any of those issues showing.

I remember early Twitter had a “famous” performance issue, where the sticky heading bar would slow systems down, because they were re-scanning the entire page DOM on every scroll operation to find and adjust the header, rather than just caching a reference to it. Meanwhile yesterday I read an article about the evolution of the preferences UI in Apple OSs, that showed them off by running each individual version of said OS in VMs embedded within the page. It wasn’t snappy, but it didn’t have the “entire system slows down and stops responding” issues you saw a decade or so ago.

Basically, devs aren’t being punished (by tooling) for being inefficient, so they don’t notice when they are, and newer devs never realise they need to.

In an interview on Sky News, Segal wouldn’t nominate examples of media coverage she felt breached that standard, but said Australian media outlets should represent the situation in the Middle East with “fairness and balance”.

So no examples of unfairness, but still needs to change.

It’s got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it’s Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.

I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.

She used all the code words and dog whistles from the start.

Yep, Elon picked her for a reason.

The dog?

Draw distance sucks for a vast ocean of plants and sealife. Seriously, I have a really good video card, and this fucking Unity engine can’t draw 500 feet in front of me.

If anything Subnautica lets you see too much.

PNG gets you the best compatibility and features, at the expense of file size. But I probably wouldn’t use it for uploading photographs to the web of course.

WebP is the same, it’s got a lossy mode (VP8) and a lossless mode (Which is more limited than PNG, but beats it where it overlaps). But to make it more complicated the lossless mode also has lossy processing modes, where it alters the image first to achieve smaller output sizes.

And PNG is no different.

People have a long habit of turning JPEG files into PNG files, the file extension won’t help you there. They also could have reduced the colour depth or resized it, all lossy operations. All it really tells you is that it can have an alpha channel.

As for AVIF, personally I don’t like the format, it feels like an “open media” (But still patented) version of HEIF to oppose Apple. Like WebP it makes the (baseless IMO) assumption that a format designed to encode motion data is better at encoding still data than a format designed to encode still data. It’s got all the limitations of a video format (It’s got a max resolution, only supports 12bit images, and no progressive decoding), and they left out all the enhancements from WebP (The dedicated lossless mode, “lossless AVIF” files are huge and the last I checked badly supported, so nobody actually used them, and they just called very high quality settings “lossless”)

A team inside of Google was working on WebP2 around the same time, that used AV1 but actually added the useful stuff like efficient lossless encoding, it got killed too in favour of AVIF.

So it depends on the specific HDR encoding used, Rec2020 is the most common ones you’ll see (It’s meant for “pure” setups, i.e. where the source and output are tightly linked, e.g. gaming consoles or blu-ray, or so) and the raw data won’t look great. While something like HLG (Hybrid-Log Gamma) is designed for better fallback (As it’s meant for TV broadcast, where the output device is “whatever TV the user has”), so should just look dimmer.

This is a HDR screenshot I took of Destiny 2, which uses Rec2020, tone mapped to SDR

And here’s the raw screenshot data from before tonemapping.

If the second image had all the right HDR metadata, and the viewer supported it properly, then both images would match.

AVIF is generally smaller in size than both WebP and PNG. AVIF supports animation while PNG does not.

The lossless mode in AVIF is so bad that a BMP in a ZIP file produces smaller results.

Which makes sense, as it doesn’t actually have a dedicated lossless mode (like WebP does), the encoder is just to not quantise the video data it produces.

JXL can do lossy images (like JPEG) and lossless ones (like PNG), and on average it’ll produce smaller file sizes than both (While beating JPEG quality wise). The killer feature is that it can do lossless recompression of existing JPEG files and shave off about 20% of the file size, and it’s reversible so you can turn those JXL files back into JPEG images for existing software.

The downside is that it was created by Google Research (among others), but the Chrome team made AVIF instead and decided that’s what they’d support and nothing else.

At least Safari supports it.

I switched a year ago, after trying and failing multiple times over the years whenever I gave it a try.

1. Linux has massively improved, systemd is a lot cleaner than the mess of disparate shell scripts it displaced. Network Manager is also a lot nicer now than I remember it being when it was first introduced into Red Hat.
2. Windows hasn’t, in a lot of ways it was actually regressing. I used to get multiple shell crashes a week with no insight as to why, friends would claim it was just me but then receive an update and start having similar crashes. Also noticeable UI issues that went unfixed for multiple revisions, made it felt cheap.
3. MS went all in on AI garbage and was jamming it into everything, kept getting popup notifications and the like to try Copilot, notifications went from being useful to just being an ad delivery mechanism.
4. Gaming on Linux massively improved, last time I tried it OpenGL support was a mess. Now OpenGL is very mature, and all the D3D translation stuff uses Vulkan which has been rock solid for me. I’ve found games run better than they did on Windows on the same hardware, and the only game I’ve had an issue with was Destiny 2, which is intentional on the devs behalf (Luckily the game’s boring now)

I find I’m a lot more willing to let issues slide though, like I’ve had some Thunar crashes which I’m cool with since there’s like 4 devs maintaining it, vs. the multi-billion dollar company working on Explorer which I expect better from. Also unsurprisingly the only actual shop-stopper issue I’ve had was with a memory leak in the Nvidia drivers, the actual FLOSS stuff has been great.

That last screenshot is fantastic

Tons of software meant to run on 32-bit hasn’t been updated to run on 64-bit natively.

32bit only Linux apps are basically non-existent, anything with the source available and maintainers would have been ported at some point in the last 2 decades, otherwise they have very specific technical reasons for being 32bit only (like OBS iiuc), the source has been lost somehow, or it’s a proprietary program where the company has no interest (e.g. Valve with Steam)

In fact I think Steam might really be it.

Or Automattic doesn’t have enough employees left to implement it

We still do.

For a community called “technology” there’s a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.

Are you surprised people have opinions about technology, in a community dedicated to discussing technology?

Yeah from a quick glance over the spec it’s basically just small clarifications, promoting existing extensions (EXIF and APNG) to the core spec, and adding the new HDR metadata chunks.

The HDR stuff will be hit or miss, it’s backwards compatible in the sense that a viewer that doesn’t understand it will fall back to the ICC profile, but that still requires the viewer to support the (now deprecated) ICC based HDR method. If it doesn’t support HDR at all then you’re just out of luck since these images just require fundamentally different ways to view them.