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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It can do both, lossiness is toggleable.

    If you’ve seen a picture on Lemmy, you’ve almost certainly seen a WebP. A fair bit of software – most egregiously from Microsoft – refuses to decode them still, but every major browser has supported WebP for years and since superior data efficiency compared to JPG/PNG means is already very widely used on the web. Bandwidth is not that cheap.


  • Nowadays “buggy” is not how I’d describe it, though there were certainly teething issues at the beginning. By now other DEs have learned to deal with it.

    However it’s still true that the GTK4 design is ill-fitting, and very opinionated. Quite exemplary of this are the applications that hardcode the GTK file picker (like Firefox and chrome) even though it’s inferior in every way to the Qt file picker and forces the infuriating GTK “design” choice of doing fuzzy search when you type in the file list instead of jumping to the relevant file. Very annoying when dealing with organized directories especially when no other file browser on my system works that way!


  • Poor sound balance is 95 % bad downmixing.

    Going from 5.1 channels to 2 the media player should first bump up the center channel (the one for dialogue) a fair bit. But they don’t because they use the coefficients from some manual from the fucking 1990s or whatever calibrated for expensive-ass headphones. Some players (e.g. Kodi) do have an option to amplify the center channel.

    The second issue is overly large dynamic range which is inappropriate in noisy environments or when someone may be sleeping nearby. That’s easily solved with an audio compressor. My receiver has a “night mode” that does exactly that.

    Every streaming service should have both of those as easily toggleable options on their media players, but for some reason they don’t. IDK if it’s stupidity on their part or if their licensing contracts disallow “tampering” with the media or what it is but it would solve 95 % of audio balance complaints.


    • Eventually Company decides “agile will fix things”
    • Developers are told to work agile but the only stakeholder they talk to is the PO, who talks to PM, who talks to Sales, who talks to Customers
    • PM&Sales don’t want to deliver an unfinished/unpolished product so they give a review every sprint, by themselves, based on what they think the customer wants (they are Very Clever)
    • A year or two later the project is delivered and the customer is predictably unhappy.
    • Management says “how could this have happened!” and does it all over again.


  • Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you’re only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don’t give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).

    OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
    So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.


  • Don’t force me to deal with your shiny language of the day,

    WE HavE LegItImaTe COnCeRNs

    Exact same shit as last time, some cranky old dude with the territorial instinct of a bulldog sabotages anything to do with rust under a very thin layer of so-called technical concerns, yet refuses to partake in constructive discussion. Like, literally, the changeset is just bindings in rust/kernel? What even is there to complain about regarding maintainability of kernel/dma, given that as far as I can tell the rust devs will deal with any future incompatibilities?

    Very shameful for the kernel community that this kind of aggressive sabotage is regular and seemingly accepted. The incessant toxicity is not a good look and very discouraging to anyone thinking of contributing.


  • What? I’m not privy to RedHat/IBM/Google’s internal processes but they are all massive FOSS contributors at least some of which I assume are using Agile internally. The Linux kernel is mostly corpo-backed nowadays.

    The development cycle of FOSS is highly compatible with Agile processes, especially as you tend towards the Linux Kernel style of contributing where every patch is expected to be small and atomic. A scrum team can 100% set as a Sprint Goal “implement and submit patches for XYZ in kernel”.

    Also agile ≠ scrum. If you’re managing a small github project by sorting issues by votes and working on the top result, then congratulations, you’re following an ad-hoc agile process.

    I think what you’re actually mad at is corporate structures. They systematically breed misaligned incentives proportional to the structure’s size, and the top-down hierarchy means you can’t just fork a project when disagreements lead to dead ends. This will be true whether you’re doing waterfall or scrum.