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made you look

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2024

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  • Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances

    For lower quality images sure, for high quality ones JPEG will beat it (WebP, being an old video format, only supports a quarter of the colour resolution than JPEG does, etc.) JPEG is actually so good that it still comes out ahead in a bunch of benchmarks, it’s just it’s now starting to show it’s age technology wise (like WebP, it’s limited to 8bpc in most cases)

    It also doesn’t hurt that Google ranked sites using WebP/AVIF higher than ones that aren’t (via lighthouse).

    Edit: I should clarify, this is the lossy mode. The lossless mode gives better compression than PNG, but is still limited to 8bpc, so can’t store high bit depth, or HDR images, like PNG can.

    Edit 2: s/bpp/bpc/









  • Þere must be a half dozen cheap ways to generate true random numbers.

    The problem isn’t generating random data, it’s ensuring it’s “high quality” (It’s all statistical checks, you can’t know ahead of time what random numbers should look like, otherwise they’re not random)

    That’s the problem the AMD chips seem to have, that function is failing and letting through low quality data it should otherwise reject.




  • For all the wireless printers I’ve ever owned CUPS would recognize the printer once, do a job, and then magically act like the printer either doesn’t exist or is currently doing a job in perpetuity.

    I mean odds are it’s the printer that’s acting up. I owned a brother laser printer that I had to connect via the network, and that thing only ever configured the network on boot. If anything happened to the network connection it’d go offline until you restarted it.

    There’s a reason I’ve seen multiple people recommend using something like a Raspberry Pi connected via USB as a replacement print server rather than relying on the native printer support. And since the modern printer protocols are basically lifted from CUPS, compatibility would be improved.


  • The headline makes this sound a lot worse than the article does.

    From the article there’s basically a list of exemptions in the law that describes who doesn’t need to follow it (e.g. an online booking site for doctors visits), everybody else needs to check the rules to see if they do. And if they do, they then need to follow extra child safety rules (e.g. Roblox is opting out under-16s from open DMs by default)

    GitHub can quite rightly say they don’t fall under the restrictions of the law, and that could be the end of it. The simple fact that it doesn’t have any form of private messaging feature is probably enough.



  • JXL is two separate image formats stuck together. An improved version of JPEG that can also losslessly and reversibly recode most existing JPEG images at a smaller size, and the PNG like format (evolved from FLIF/FUIF) that can do lossless or lossy encoding.

    “VarDCT” (The improved JPEG) turns out to be good enough that the “Modular” mode (The FLIF/FUIF like one) isn’t needed much outside of lossless encoding. One neat feature of modular mode though is that it progressively encodes the image in different sizes, that is if you decode the stream as you read in bytes you start with a small version of the image and get progressively larger and larger output sizes until you get the original.

    Why is that useful? Well you can encode a single high DPI image (e.g. 2x scale), and then clients on 1x scale monitors can just stop decoding the image at a certain point, and get a half sized image out of it. You don’t need separate per-DPI variants.


  • iirc the main reason for QOI was to have a simple format because “complexity is slow”, so by stripping things that the author didn’t consider important the idea was the resulting image format would be quicker and smaller than something like PNG or WebP.

    Not sure how well that held up in practice, a lot of that complexity is actually necessary for a lot of use cases (e.g. you need colour profiles unless you’re only ever dealing with sRGB), and I remember a bunch of low hanging fruit optimisations for PNG encoders at the time that improved encoding speed by quite a bit.


  • AVIF is funny because they kept the worst aspects of WebP (lossy video based encoding), while removing the best (lossless mode) There was an attempt at WebP2, using AV1 and a proper lossless mode, but Google killed that off as well.

    But hey, now that they’re releasing AV2 soon, we’ll eventually have an incompatible AVIF2 to deal with. Good thing they didn’t support JPEG-XL, it’d just be too confusing to have to deal with multiple formats.