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.

Finished severance s02 this weekend. Very disappointing ending to me (that I will not spoil), even though it seems like it’s all anyone could talk about a couple months back.

Maybe it’s because I just played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and we were spoiled with incredible writing that does foreshadowing excellently with deep and nuanced themes, but while Severance’s execution is great in the details the overarching plot left me severely disappointed. As if they got great directors, actors, set designers, dialogue, but just wrote the s01e01 hook and then kind of just made up the plot as an afterthought. Keeping up mystery for its own sake because once the curtain is pulled back, we realize the stage pieces are not that impressive.

It’s still good TV but it ain’t that deep and IDK why everybody’s raving on about it. Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.

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!

Not books, but the Misfits and Magic TTRPG show from Dimension 20 is everything that HP isn’t. It’s fun and whimsical and the characters are lovable and the writing is great and the world building is astounding and it never misses a chance to take the piss at the many problematic aspects of HP it’s satirically lampooning. I think the first episode is free on YouTube.

I’ve wrapped plenty of sensitive electronics that I’d be comfortable throwing at a wall. Get a larger box than you think you need, some foam wrapping/bubble wrap from another package and use that to form a protective core. Fill the rest of the box with lightly crumpled scrap paper, or packing peanuts if you have them. It ain’t rocket science.

You just have to assume in the first truck the package will sit underneath seven other heavy packages, while the second truck will be completely empty as your package rattles around and bangs against the walls. Anything else is foolishness, you know damn well those trucks aren’t individually fastening every box for a couple euros of gross revenue per delivery.

The oval beige thing that takes up 1/5th of the width of the screenshot.

Literally, yes you can, on that specific website’s satellite imagery. Bloody thing’s over 10 km wide, it’s the size of a large city. I can still easily spot it on my screen if I zoom far enough out to also include Edinburgh and Riyad!

The only way not to see it from space would be to look in the wrong place or when it is cloudy.

Sure, but community moderators can’t. Spinning up my own instance shouldn’t be a requirement to use custom CSS.

If it’s a browser plugin it won’t receive widespread adoption. I don’t know what the actual numbers are but I’m willing to bet well over 95 % of desktop lemmy users are using the default frontend despite the many alternatives.

Old Reddit+RES did it right IMO: custom CSS but an easy-to-use toggle on a per-community basis, plus (IIRC) a global toggle in case one doesn’t want custom CSS at all.

Custom CSS wouldn’t even necessarily have to federate, though it would be better if it did (but there are probably security concerns to address). It’s CSS, it’s supposed to gracefully degrade; if CSS federation isn’t supported, it doesn’t break the user experience. That doesn’t have to change anything in ActivityPub either, you can just add a custom field for the styling and let clients figure out what to do with it.

Kind of the whole spirit is to give users a tool and no worry so much about the rough edges. Custom CSS doesn’t have to work perfectly, it just has to work for most users.

They perfectly illustrate the Corporate Mindset. I like to imagine they were designed by a conclave of neurotypical and painfully unfunny and uncreative MBAs who got together in a coworking space and brainstormed the most consensual and least offensive avatar tech they could fathom. Likely none of them ever had a passing thought about what makes for compelling character design. Certainly none of them can stomach the idea of emergent phenomenon in communication. And above all nothing must stick out; to them the idea that users would want to make a non-human, cyborg, furry, green-skinned, or whatever avatar is abhorrent. Jane’s quirky facial expression is the full extent of allowable creativity (and even then you know they had a 30 minute debate about including it).

These avatars do a better job of inspiring dread in me than half the shit in Severance.

Tangentially, it reminds me of when we went from Geocities/MySpace/custom reddit CSS/custom youtube pages to “you can change your PP and banner”. … okay? Was a unified design language really worth crushing all visual creativity?
… and now I think it’s a shame that Lemmy and Mastodon’s default clients don’t support (AFAIK) custom CSS for communities/user pages. I think that would be very iconic for the Free Web. Is someone working on this? I feel like someone should be working on this.

• 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.

Broadly correct. Franquin was a grassroots leftist by his peak in the '70s and even now a lot of his comics would generate a lot of “Gaston goes woke???” youtube thumbnails. His comics included a lot of overt anticapitalist & ecologist messaging in particular.

Idées Noires (apparently reedited as “Die Laughing” in English) has his most politically charged stuff and is what happened when Franquin didn’t try to draw for mass appeal:

I did however find some racist colonial stuff from his very early works (1950). I won’t like, it’s quite bad. However the 1950 stuff is ignorant & insensitive racist colonial fuckery from a then 26 year old author who later denounced it and tried to make up for it, while the 2023 stuff is very intentional dogwhistling to modern day racists from boomers who should really know better. It’s unfathomable that Dupuis would have greenlighted such backwards stuff in the modern age.

There is, though I can’t tell you how fun it is because I haven’t played it and never cared for the original games’ battle system.

Not a very hot take, only corpo bootlickers pretend that Nintendo isn’t squandering the franchise.

It’s supremely frustrating that franchises like these get enshittified to hell and there’s fuck-all anyone can do about it if they are not willing to work completely for free (i.e. fanfiction writers). Same with the Star Wars content mill which also went to shit while we’re forced to sit and watch or give up on the franchise entirely. Or LoTR which in the past 20 years only gave us The Hobbit (🤮) and the Amazon show (🤮🤮).
Human stories were meant to be evolved and expanded on; that’s how all of our ancestors built a rich tapestry of myths and folklore over generations, constantly retelling and updating stories. But we aren’t allowed to.

I’m Belgian. My grandparents, my parents, my cousins and my cousin’s children all grew up reading Belgian comics such as Tintin, Spirou&Fantasio, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs, etc, which were written in the mid-20th century. Yet if any of them publishes anything set in those universes they’ll get sued into the ground, so instead these important cultural works are left to rot and wither and be slowly forgotten by each subsequent generation while the Estate shits out a soulless (if not outright racist and sexist which shits on everything that Franquin ever stood for) reboot that no-one cares about every 15 years or so. Such a sad end for such important cultural landmarks that used to be the pride of our country.

Copyright should last 25 years, just like patents. That’s more than enough time to recoup your initial investment and doesn’t prevent you from making money after then, you’ll just have to compete for it on the marketplace of ideas. Isn’t that what capitalists should want?

Cobblemon is a pokémon mod for minecraft, and definitely has a charm to it and fits weirdly well into the minecraft-pixel-art-with-shaders esthetic IMO. Plus the “gotta catch em all” basic gameplay loop meshes well with Minecraft’s incentive to explore the world.

Of course it’s a free mod so it’s a bit rough around the edges and there doesn’t seem to be much to do beyond collect pokémon and build minecraft houses, but in my online circles it certainly has captured a lot more attention than any pokémon game released in the last forever. I would like to think Nintendo is taking notes, but we all know they Don’t Give A Fuck. They’ll pump out any asset flip and people will buy it because they’re nostalgic and Nintendo has a legally enforced monopoly on the franchise.

An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance).

I think you’re overplaying the distance part a little bit. America was “discovered” in the Age of Exploration right on time for distance to be an increasingly less important factor. Hence why America could sustain a federal state made up of an almost entire homogeneously WASP population, and Europe could not (and the idea of a “federal Europe” is still a pipe dream at this point). There’s more of a cultural divide by every metric between two cities 100 km away on either side of a linguistic border in Europe than there is between Boston and Los Angeles.

while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French

You’re over-exagerating. Heavily accented Texans have little to no trouble being understood by a Bostonner, but a heavily accented older Québécois is nigh impossible to understand for the unattuned French ear. It’s like the Hot Fuzz “sea mine” scene.

I appreciate that the US obviously doesn’t have a fully homogeneous culture (especially in cities with immigrant backgrounds), but it’s nothing Europe where Brits can tell which village someone comes from just from their accent. If I were to drive to Riga (which is actually barely as long of a drive as Boston to New Orleans) I would have to go through five sovereign states, each with their own language and variety of minority languages, their own idiosyncratic laws and justice systems (to the point that unlike the US the EU never make laws, it makes directives for EU states to implement individually), a completely different set of TV shows and radio shows and literature canon and more local food specialties than would be possible to keep track of. I’m sorry but going from Boston to New Orleans is nowhere near as much of a cultural shock. The only thing comparable to going from Belgium to Latvia is going from the US to Latvia.

Anyway it’s not a competition. Taking pride in our ancestors’ achievements is a dangerous road to go down, and anyway if we look at modern achievements then the entire developed world has unfortunately coalesced towards a very globalized (often american-centric) set of values and esthetic sensibilities. You can take a random new condo built in Phoenix, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and Bratislava and not be able to tell which is from where, and the people living in them are probably all watching an American TV show anyway.

I’m as basic-white-belgian as they come and even I have a little bit of Italian and Eastern European (IIRC) somewhere in there. “Pure” (ew) lineages are actually quite rare in Europe, only the most remote places were spared the millennia of warfare (and the grim reality that soldiers, uh, move genes around) and the urban flights of the industrial revolutions. The average European’s background isn’t as diverse as the average American’s, but a lot more than one might naively assume.

What is striking about North America though is the anglo-saxon cultural homogeneity, especially considering the diverse backgrounds. Besides Quebec there’s virtually no language barrier anywhere, and an almost entirely homogenous culture. You could probably raise a kid in 6 states and 3 provinces without any major issue. All North Americans eat Mac and Cheese and they all watch the Superbowl and all American children stand up for the Pledge. Meanwhile the only cultural references I am likely to have in common with the average Pole is American TV/movies/music and depending on their English skill having a conversation at all may be a major challenge.

Last time around Asahi Lina (major contributor to the Apple Silicon GPU driver) made a very nice writeup on mastodon about her attempts to mainline her work.

Part of the problem was that the C interface was straight-up broken; not only were a bunch of lifetimes undocumented, but freeing the kernel objects properly was impossible, but GCC doesn’t care and neither did anyone because GPU drivers are expected to just… never exit (IIRC). So she refactored it to be saner.

Anyway apparently it was rejected for much the same reasons, aka Rust bashing thinly disguised as concerns over maintainability.

Technically the R4L project did have an impact. But what’s the worst case? Spending some time on improving the C interface for an edge case? The ignominy! NAK.

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.