For many years I had been advocating for Linux distros to optimize for lower spec machines as their life times got extended. Best case, you head off potential hardware end of life, worst case you allow newer hardware to run more effciebtly. The latest shortage I didnt see coming, but it would have helped out regardless. Keeping old hardware going is vital nowadays, need to end the mind set of disposable goods.
Old 2nd hand enterprise drives on ebay have seen pretty modest increases.
Actually just went through my purchase history and its even lower than I thought. 37% inc versus May '25.
Pretty niche crowd that is down for building a NAS out of drives that have had long lives already. Basically only people with grasp on zfs redundancy & willingness to accept the risk of SSDs with heavy use but enterprise endurance.
Might even bring back some value to those _westerners_ who are still hooked into the nostalgic scene -- have you made a trip to Akihabara district lately?
I usually have a script/alias cmd to automatically convert images to webp. The webp format has pretty much replaced jpg/jpeg (lacks transparency/alpha support) and png (no compression) formats for me.
There is also AVIF format which is newer and better but it needs to still mature a bit with better support/compatability.
If you are hosting images it is nice to use avif and fallback to webp.
I know it’s more efficient, but It’s too bad webp is basically supported in browsers and nowhere else. I don’t think any OS even makes a thumbnail for the icon! Forget opening it in an image editor, etc. And any site that wants you to upload something (e.g. an avatar) won’t accept it. So, webp seems in practice to be like a lossy compression layer that makes images into ephemeral content that can’t be reused.
(Yes, I know, I should just make a folder action on Downloads that converts them with some CLI tool, but it makes me sad that this only further degrades their quality.)
The only OS that doesnt as far as I'm aware is windows. And what image editors still have problems? Affinity has supported it for several years, GIMP, lightroom/PS, photopea, everywhere I test webp works fine. All work just fine.
Most social media sites take webp these days no issue, its mostly older oft php-based sites that struggle far as im aware. And when it cuts down bandwidth by a sizeable amount theres network effects that tend to push some level of adoption of more modern image formats.
To be clear, PNG only supports lossless compression, while WebP has separate lossy and lossless modes. AVIF can do lossless compression too, but you're usually better off using WebP or PNG (if you need >8 bpc) instead as it really isn't good at that.
PNG can be lossy before the lossless step. You can take areas of near-matching pixel values and make them actually match, to work better with PNG's near neighbor compression. There are a few encoders that can do that.
It is not that trivial, because there are tons of existing JPEG files and lossy recompression costs quality. (PNG does get replaced primarily because lossless WebP is kinda a superset of what PNG internally does.)
On your last point: I find it super annoying when both lossy and lossless codecs have the same name, and, more importantly, file extension. I get it that internally they are "almost the same thing", just with one extra step of discarding low-impact values, but when I see a PNG/FLAC file I know, that if the file was handled properly and wasn't produced by Windows clipboard or something, it is supposed to represent exactly the original data. When I see JPEG/MP3, I know that whatever it went through, it is not the original data for sure. When I see WEBP, I assume it's lossy, because it's just how it's used, and I cannot just convert all my PNG files to a newer format, because after that I won't be able to tell (easily) which is the original and which is not.
Ah, in that case you would be more annoyed to learn that lossy WebP and lossless WebP are completely distinct. They only share the container format and their type codes are different.
Awesome. It would be interesting to learn why they even thought it is a good idea. Content-agnostic containers may make sense for video, but for the vast majority of use-cases a "video" is in fact a complex bundle of (several) video, audio, metadata tracks, so the "container" does much heavier lifting than specifying codec details and some metadata.
The PNG and FLAC format doesn't doesn't tell you that. While both specify lossless encoring algorithms (assuming data is already quantized to a supported bit depth), that doesn't prevent encoders from adding additional lossy preprocessing steps that improve compression - and there are several such encoders for PNG.
This is probably the neatest feature of JPEG XL. Although, creating a thumbnail by literally truncating the image bytestream is a close second in 'neat' factor.
I usually give myself 30-60 mins to solve. If I can't do it by then I will look up solutions and -study- them (also break it piece by piece and see if I can generalize it for future problems). I would look at solutions even after solving it by myself.
I find that to be the best balance between challenge and learning something new. You will mentally burn yourself out if you keep bashing against the wall for hours or more, not quite a healthy thing to do :)
Meanwhile, people who actually try to compete on this stuff have already developed rich library of specialized algorithms to leap ahead of average programmer. Well, I guess nowadays a lot of it is LLM assisted too.
Yeah, I definitely think there's benefit in seeing others solutions, and in this situation I want to learn from it, if I can ever reason out why it's working.
Certainly using nushell means anything beyond the true basics seems to be beyond most LLMs.
When I first started programming it used to get me down if I couldn't solve these things. But as I've got old and a little more experienced, I can now admit things like AoC are just not my thing. It's like crossword puzzles or low level algos. I find them extremely hard to reason about.
Companies should quickly realize that ChatGPT can go both ways - it can turn a "script-kiddie" into fully fledged hacker if vulnerabilities continue to be this sloppy. I am fairly certain that low-skill hacker sweatshops already heavily rely on LLMs to quickly exploit trivial vulnerabilities like these.
Like it or not but I feel like account logins, PII and payment stuff will have to be handled by central big orgs. Ideally, I would like that to be a competent open-source government service. For now it is big companies like Google that can shove its SSO around in accessible manner to other sites.
Looks like this runtime is written in Rust. Really does seem like Rust is rapidly swallowing all kinds of common tools and libraries. In this case a single compiled binary for multiple architectures is quite convenient for something like yt-dlp.
Steroids. You will be growing muscle while sitting on a couch, even better than someone that naturally trains. However, you very likely will develop asymetries or other weird complications because you didnt properly work out.
My point is that, even though we might find even more ways to improve/modify our bodies, they will come with slew of risks that are just not worth it if you can achieve it naturally.
On another note, I feel like there is severe muscle inflation in media which would distort how fit a person should be. You really do not need to kill yourself in the gym or hop on a some reddit-approved juices to get very fit. Just gotta experiment and find a comfortable full body workout that you can do consistently, like you brush your teeth every day.
Actually, that's not how steroids work. It's a common misconception that one can take "roids" and just sit on the sofa while munching on potato chips and get shredded and pack on muscle but in reality what the steroids do are to move ones natural limitations further away thus enabling larger muscle mass than naturally. But this still requires one to put in the work, i.e. the stimulus to trigger the muscle growth and to rest and eat properly.
They do work that way. Lots of studies show gains in muscle mass even with no excercise when people are on steroids. Consider average men who never excercise vs average women who never excercise. The men will have more muscle. That's what testosterone does, among other things.
That's part of why steroids were and sometimes still are used medically for people with cancer and other wasting diseases. It makes them eat more (they're usually strongly appetite inducing) but they also just help develop muscles even if sedentary.
(Of course it would be far more effective to also engage in high intensity resistance training.)
One completely random study result[0] supporting that couch + testosterone leads to bigger muscles. Maybe it is some puritanical thing, but not sure why this myth persists. Exercise + juice results in even bigger gains, but it is possible to increase muscle mass without hard work.
...The men in the testosterone groups had significant increases in the cross-sectional areas of the triceps and the quadriceps (Table 4); the group assigned to testosterone without exercise had a significantly greater increase in the cross-sectional area of the quadriceps than the placebo-alone group
Steroids are usually given to reduce inflammation and as immunosuppressants to stop the body from fighting back against whatever treatment is being given. The main method of weight gain with prednisone (the most common steroid) is water retention. Anabolic steroids are not commonly prescribed to cancer patients.
Cortico steroids usually result in muscle mass loss.
That's not how steroids work. Muscles need stimulus to grow even with steroids. What steroids do is make your body recover faster so you can train more often and build muscle right away.
Exact stats are hard to come by but depletion of vehicles has certainly been noticed in battlefield footage: they started with proper military grade vehicles, went down to WW2 era vehicles, then down to light vehicles, civilian vehicles, motorcycles, scooters... donkeys.
That doesn't mean they are completely out of modern stuff but you just dont see it being used on frontlines anymore.
What is happening, however, is the rapidly developing drone warfare which is becoming terrifyingly efficient to conduct warfare in. I dont think we are far off from fully autonomous kamikaze drones at mass produced scale, at dirt cheap price.
It pretty much makes a lot of previously developed modern missiles or even defense systems (e.g. patriots) useless due to how cheaply and effectively you can launch kamikaze drone swarms.
It will require a modern Geneva convention or the extinction of humans eventually. Drones are the modern equivalent of chemical and biological weapons.
> Drones are the modern equivalent of chemical and biological weapons
We didn’t ban these because they’re an extinction threat. (They’re not.)
We banned them because they’re only useful asymmetrically. Drones, on the other hand, are useful for everyone. So no bans. (I’m putting aside that we’re moving away from global arms control agreements.)
>We didn’t ban these because they’re an extinction threat. (They’re not.)
Sorry what? Biological weapons are absolutely an extinction level threat. If you haven't watched the spread of the flu and covid every year and quickly realized that in the modern day a properly engineered bio-weapon would functionally end the human race, I'd like some of what you're having.
>We banned them because they’re only useful asymmetrically.
That's simply not true and shows either a lack of understanding of history, or an intentional perversion. The Taliban don't care about the Geneva convention, but is functionally incapable of utilizing chemical warfare to any significant degree despite the fact I'm sure they'd have loved to use it to wipe out the US military in Afghanistan for the last 20 years and the Russians before that. On the flip side, their deployment in WWI wasn't asymmetrical, both sides used the weapons and both sides agreed after watching the end result that nobody should be using them.
*If anything, drones are far, far more useful for asymmetric warfare. They can be easily acquired for cheap, there are no export controls, there's very little expertise required, and you can attach something as basic as a pipe bomb to them to do significant damage.
The contemporaneous sources are vast and point in one direction: these weapons aren’t useful for the winners of wars, are annoying to deal with, have a bit of a notion of novel horror to them, and so were bannable. Nobody was talking about extinction.
> their deployment in WWI wasn't asymmetrical, both sides used the weapons
Not what asymmetric warfare means.
> drones are far, far more useful for asymmetric warfare
Sure. But they’re also useful for large military states. So not going to be banned.
Like, someone is free to cosplay a ban. But the incentives to circumvent it are too great. There are no incentives to make illegal chemical or biological weapons because they’re just not that great as weapons.
(I’ll note that your reading of history, while wrong, is far from unique. It’s unfortunately counterproductive as it implies a moral crusade against a category of weapon can get it banned. It might be able to. But chemicals and biological arms aren’t a precedent for it.)
These kind of policies and that amortization tax law for software development will probably encourage quite some exodus of talent. Would it be to Europe or South East Asia, though?
A large part of our talent acquisition would stay home, as the Asian countries, especially China, are expanding their investments. American students would go to work in European universities due to the lesser language barrier. When the US was a developing country a large number of children of wealthy families were sent to study in Europe.
I don't think the idea of looking outside the US for knowledge would be natural to many people of this generation. I wonder what the effects on our culture will be - it would certainly reduce the pride.
I think at least some of them will come up to Canada. No language barrier, and close enough geographically and culturally to keep most of your connections. We pay less but live longer on average.
Seeing all this unfold is doing amazing things for our national pride, ironically.
The US still has the best researchers today too, we're talking about the longer-term effects of anti-science policy in the face of continued development around the world.
A boring mansion, with a boring lawn, in a boring, gated community? -- and all that while the other neighbourhoods are on fire.
But at least you can buy $700 sneakers and leave the big garage in style, to work your ass off with a job pretending to "better the world" -- maybe have one or two weeks to fill your social media account with pictures already taken by the millions (you might as well use generative AI).
That’s certainly one way to live life, although certainly not the only way. Many people use tech as a path to financial independence. There’s a running joke/groan that the FIRE sub is filled with software engineers making 6 figures.
For engineers, maybe. But with immigration restrictions, employers can no longer create a workplace where "work with the best in the world" is an attraction.
Because, and I say this as one who already decided against the USA in response to Trump's first election, I rather doubt that the new policy of getting in the news for systematically deporting migrants for even minor things — not even offences, theoretically protected things like blogging — is going to put a rather big dent on people willing to go. I mean, right now, I don't even want to visit the US on a holiday, much less live there.
And that's without all the people saying "sure, you get paid 3x on paper, but all of it goes on rent and health insurance that doesn't actually pay out when you need it" that also makes it seem a lot less interesting.
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