Giver of skulls

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Joined 102 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • In a way LinkedIn is federated. You create a profile or post, and within minutes hundreds of shady data brokers and contact details resellers have a copy of your post available for their customers!

    I don’t really see the benefit, though. LinkedIn is functionally almost the same as Facebook, and can be replicated by adding a theme to a Friendica instance with a few custom fields. The biggest difference is that LinkedIn allows recruiters to spam and stalk youoffer you jobs, other than that it’s just Facebook where most adults have decided to only talk about work stuff.


  • I think it’s a similar situation to the weather radars and sattelite receivers that are getting broken as more and more components of 5G are rolled out: these industries didn’t think the regulators would be so monumentally stupid as to reassign frequencies like that. Normal politics gives years of heads up before dramatic changes like these take place, but it’s been a while since normal politics have been practiced.

    As for unlicensed bands themselves, I believe here in Europe several of them got moved around a bit, though that was mostly small bands that were used for devices that have since (i.e. more than 10 years ago) been altered to use Bluetooth and WiFi and other such technologies, essentially freeing up the spectrum. Someone using their thirty year old room broadcast microphone or wireless handset may be technically committing a crime, but I doubt the impact will ever register on a scale large enough to set off any investigations.

    My point is that devices can and should support these kinds of regulation changes. Allowing your customers to comply with the law while using your hardware is part of their corporate responsibility.



  • PNGv4/v5 may improve compression but it won’t be backwards compatible. It’ll get stuck in the same kind of limbo JPEG-XL is. Until that gets resolved, we’ll have to stick with AVIF/HEIFF/WebP.

    I don’t really see the need for advanced compression in lossless files. You generally don’t download those in bulk without looking at lower quality previews anyway. Would be nice if the real file supports the same colour space the preview file does anyway. I’ll appreciate it when it lands, but I don’t think I’ll spend the hours converting my photo library to save maybe half a gigabyte of space.


  • What a weird take. Alpha channels are used all the time. A lot of tools use WebP for them, though. Things like stickers and emoji in chat apps often recode into WebP or force you to figure out how to make a WebP with a certain configuration to accept your pack, but from there on out they rely on alpha channels.

    MacOS app icons are a collection of layers with alpha channels embedded into them, stacked on top of each other, or themed individually. Unless you’re blind, any iOS or macOS user encounters alpha channels every time they turn on their screen. On Android, those files are even actual PNGs. On Windows, those are .ico resources, and everything larger than 64x64 is guaranteed to be a PNG embedded inside of an .ico (possibly embedded inside of a .exe/.dll/etc.

    WebP has replaced jpeg for most web content already when it comes to compression. This just solves things like “how do I save my HDR images without degrading them every time I hit save”.



  • Kids shouldn’t even be on social media, but at least the corporate ones are covering their ass against lawsuits well enough that they try to moderate content.

    The Fediverse is not a place for kids. Servers catering especially towards kids are DEFINITELY not for kids, because that’s exactly the kind of server I would build if I were a pedo.

    The legal requirements for hosting content for kids are a massive headache that you definitely don’t want to take on as a volunteer. The Fediverse can’t even comply with the GDPR, let alone COPPA and its many international alternatives that actually see enforcement.

    Of course I was a kid on the internet too and very few websites care about lying about your age, but if you do that and see the occasional dick, fetish porn or gore, you’ve only got yourself to blame. Plus, the Fediverse is full of misinformation, lies, and propaganda, from every side of the spectrum. Moderators can only do so much, and some moderators straight-up post misinformation and propaganda themselves. Best not to expose kids to any it that shit until their brains have developed a bit more.