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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • You say that it is sorted in the order of most significants, so for a date it is more significant if it happend 1024, 2024 or 9024?

    Most significant to least significant digit has a strict mathematical definition, that you don’t seem to be following, and applies to all numbers, not just numerical representations of dates.

    And most importantly, the YYYY-MM-DD format is extensible into hh:mm:as too, within the same schema, out to the level of precision appropriate for the context. I can identify a specific year when the month doesn’t matter, a specific month when the day doesn’t matter, a specific day when the hour doesn’t matter, and on down to minutes, seconds, and decimal portions of seconds to whatever precision I’d like.


  • Sometimes the identity of the messenger is important.

    Twitter was super easy to set up with the API to periodically tweet the output of some automated script: a weather forecast, a public safety alert, an air quality alert, a traffic advisory, a sports score, a news headline, etc.

    These are the types of messages that you’d want to subscribe to the actual identity, and maybe even be able to forward to others (aka retweeting) without compromising the identity verification inherent in the system.

    Twitter was an important service, and that’s why there are so many contenders trying to replace at least part of the experience.


  • This isn’t exactly what you asked, but our URI/URL schema is basically a bunch of missed opportunities, and I wish it was better designed.

    Ok so it starts off with the scheme name, which makes sense. http: or ftp: or even tel:

    But then it goes into the domain name system, which suffers from the problem that the root, then top level domain, then domain, then progressively smaller subdomains, go right to left. www.example.com requires the system look up the root domain, to see who manages the .com tld, then who owns example.com, then a lookup of the www subdomain. Then, if there needs to be a port number specified, that goes after the domain name, right next to the implied root domain. Then the rest of the URL, by default, goes left to right in decreasing order of significance. It’s just a weird mismatch, and would make a ton more sense if it were all left to right, including the domain name.

    Then don’t get me started about how the www subdomain itself no longer makes sense. I get that the system was designed long before HTTP and the WWW took over the internet as basically the default, but if we had known that in advance it would’ve made sense to not try to push www in front of all website domains throughout the 90"s and early 2000’s.


  • Your day to day use isn’t everyone else’s. We use times for a lot more than “I wonder what day it is today.” When it comes to recording events, or planning future events, pretty much everyone needs to include the year. Getting things wrong by a single digit is presented exactly in order of significance in YYYY-MM-DD.

    And no matter what, the first digit of a two-digit day or two-digit month is still more significant in a mathematical sense, even if you think that you’re more likely to need the day or the month. The 15th of May is only one digit off of the 5th of May, but that first digit in a DD/MM format is more significant in a mathematical sense and less likely to change on a day to day basis.


  • Functionally speaking, I don’t see this as a significant issue.

    JPEG quality settings can run a pretty wide gamut, and obviously wouldn’t be immediately apparent without viewing the file and analyzing the metadata. But if we’re looking at metadata, JPEG XL reports that stuff, too.

    Of course, the metadata might only report the most recent conversion, but that’s still a problem with all image formats, where conversion between GIF/PNG/JPG, or even edits to JPGs, would likely create lots of artifacts even if the last step happens to be lossless.

    You’re right that we should ensure that the metadata does accurately describe whether an image has ever been encoded in a lossy manner, though. It’s especially important for things like medical scans where every pixel matters, and needs to be trusted as coming from the sensor rather than an artifact of the encoding process, to eliminate some types of error. That’s why I’m hopeful that a full JXL based workflow for those images will preserve the details when necessary, and give fewer opportunities for that type of silent/unknown loss of data to occur.


    • Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people’s own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there’s benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.
    • JPEG XL encoding and decoding is much, much faster than pretty much any other format.
    • The format works for both lossy and lossless compression, depending on the use case and need. Photographs can be encoded in a lossy way much more efficiently than JPEG and things like screenshots can be losslessly encoded more efficiently than PNG.
    • The format anticipates being useful for both screen and prints. Webp, HEIF, and AVIF are all optimized for screen resolutions, and fail at truly high resolution uses appropriate for prints. The JPEG XL format isn’t ready to replace camera RAW files, but there’s room in the spec to accommodate that use case, too.

    It’s great and should be adopted everywhere, to replace every raster format from JPEG photographs to animated GIFs (or the more modern live photos format with full color depth in moving pictures) to PNGs to scanned TIFFs with zero compression/loss.




  • I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

    It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there’s essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We’ve seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

    Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we’ll all still be able to interact.



  • I don’t think the First Amendment would ever require the government to host private speech. The rule is basically that if you host private speech, you can’t discriminate by viewpoint (and you’re limited in your ability to discriminate by content). Even so, you can always regulate time, place, and manner in a content-neutral way.

    The easiest way to do it is to simply do one of the suggestions of the linked article, and only permit government users and government servers to federate inbound, so that the government hosted servers never have to host anything private, while still fulfilling the general purpose of publishing public government communications, for everyone else to host and republish on their own servers if they so choose.


  • Good writeup.

    The use of ephemeral third party accounts to “vouch” for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn’t easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it’s hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.

    I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.

    Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don’t know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren’t that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).

    Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.




  • I’ll take a look at the nostr protocol, but I still think that people will naturally organize themselves into outsourcing “sort/rank/filter/block” functionality to someone else, whether that’s the provider of the service or a third-party plugin that leverages lots of users’ observations and behavior to train the model. In the end, plenty of us want the ability to block content we don’t want to see, rank content (including comments) by interestingness or usefulness or whatever criteria we prefer, whether that’s provided by the actual service or not.

    After all, look at how we’ve created an ecosystem of ad blocking: we’ve whitelisted and blacklisted certain sites and domains, certain types of scripts, to where the user can control whether a website shows them ads. But it’s a cat and mouse game, and the software needs to be continually updated to be effective, so most of us just rely on a third-party-maintained browser extension or pihole config to do the ad blocking for us.

    In other words, we still want to be able to censor things before they reach ourselves, but certain methods of doing that are more user-friendly, or more user-centered, or more user-configurable than others.


  • I think tech support is inherently bad for the soul.

    I volunteered some time answering a few questions on a few Linux forums and chat rooms, at least the ones I could answer, and over time I would get more and more annoyed at the people who wouldn’t help me help them: unable to actually describe their problem or the steps they’ve already tried, and sometimes becoming aggressive towards me when my first suggestion was something they either already tried.

    But obviously it’s wrong to take it out on Bob just because you were previously annoyed with Alice in an earlier interaction. Still, over time, it starts to leak into your interactions with new people who don’t deserve it, and the repetitive iterations start to foster a particular toxic attitude that requires you to walk away. At this point my contributions are shielded away from actual people, where I fix things in wikis or documentation, rather than actually helping people troubleshoot real live issues.


  • I do want to talk about my hobbies and local happenings in my Canadian city.

    Shit, there’s not even an active community on lemmy for New York. The Toronto one on lemmy.ca is at least somewhat active, but not very lively. If lemmy can’t even get a critical mass for the biggest metro areas in North America, we’re never going to see communities for even medium sized cities.