I don’t know about movies, but have you seen their highly informative and helpful comments on tech and free software? Amazing stuff, could probably make a career out of it.

I’m getting a bit tired of seeing boobs nonsensically attached to concepts/objects. It’s not like female coding characters is a sin per se, but I often find that the material would lose nothing in its absence. Like now—there’s an entire panel dedicated to showing their love. So why bother?

So yeah, I dislike it and also think it’s unnecessarily.

That said, if by “so we know it’s not a gay romance” you mean that to be the artist’s intent, I don’t see why that must be the case. Without looking into them, it seems just as likely that they could’ve simply not thought about it at all. Maybe they’re straight and just drew that. While it wouldn’t be LGBT+ inclusive, it needn’t necessarily be “so that people don’t think it’s gay.”

Hope I didn’t wildly misread or overanalyze your comment. You’re clearly not glad, but I can’t tell if you’re adding the last part for the sake of humor, or if you were bothered by what you believed to be a possible LGBT+ exclusionary depiction of romance.

Darn, today I learned that Mr. Rogers was ready for war.

Were the community rules copied straight out of Reddit or something? 3 and 9 are a bit funny.

Yeah, sorry, that part I didn’t fact check myself so I didn’t even want to mention it. Like I said, many possible reasons.

I think I know what you’re talking about, and I think you might have misunderstood a few things. I’ll explain my point and I’d appreciate it if you could confirm later whether it helped, or if I’m the one who misunderstood you.

“Saving as…” is, usually, just for setting the name of the file. The full filename, extension included. The extension is just another part of the name. It doesn’t define what rules the file’s contents actually follow. They’re for other purposes, such as helping your operating system know which software to use when opening each file. For example:

User double clicks a .pdf System: Oh, I should try opening this in Adobe Acrobat.

But that doesn’t mean the file is actually a PDF. You can change the extension of any file, and it won’t automatically be converted to that extension (unless a specific feature has been added to make that implicit conversion). You could give an executable a .pdf extension and your system might then try opening it in Acrobat. Of course, it won’t work—there’s no way the system could have automatically made that conversion for you.

So you might wonder, why does your (fake) PNG—which is really just a webp with an incorrect extension—still work just fine? You can open it, view it, send it. What’s the trick?

Thing is, the software that actually deals with those files doesn’t even need to care about the extension, it’s a lot smarter than that. These programs will use things like magic bytes to figure out what the file they’re handling really is and deal with it appropriately.

So in this scenario, the user could save a webp file as PNG.

funny cat.png (still a webp!)

Then they might double click to open it.

System: How do I open a .png again?

• .webp -> try the image viewer
• .jpeg -> try the image viewer
• .png -> try the image viewer (there it is)

And finally, the image viewer would correctly identify it as a webp image and display it normally.

Image viewer: reading magic bytes… Image viewer: yeah, that’s a webp alright

The user might then assume that, since everything works as expected, they properly converted their webp to a PNG. In reality, it’s all thanks to these programs, built upon decades of helping users just make things work. Same with Discord, Paint.NET, etc. Any decent software will handle files it’s meant to handle, even if they aren’t properly labeled.

If you were to check the file contents though, using a tool like file, czkawka to find incorrect extensions, or even just checking image properties, it should still be identified as a webp.

I didn’t try it myself as you said because, to my understanding of files and software, doing so made no sense. But again, do tell if I got something wrong or misinterpreted your comment.

Hey, thanks for the input. I’d like to read more about this, but I can’t seem to find anything related online. Anything else you could share?

Just checking, you sure you’re not confusing fallback-to-another-format when the browser doesn’t support webp? Because that’s a bit of separate issue, and not a terribly relevant one since all major browsers have supported webp for a while now.

Sorry, is this comment meant in jest? If not, could you explain what exactly you mean by “no need for a converter?”

I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. No actual file data conversion is happening when you do that unless you’re using additional tools e.g. browser extensions.

We would be happy to connect with your technical team to help them make sure your paywalled content isn’t served to people using Poe.

What a joke, Quora needs to reevaluate whose responsibility that is.

Basic reasoning time: was it an accident?

• If not, then it was at least immoral.
• If so, then it was incompetence.

What a surprise, both possibilities seem to point towards the project being a pile of crap.

Semi-related, I’m still salty about Google’s rejection of JPEG XL. I can’t help but remember this when webp discussion crops up, since Google were the ones who created it.

I still hold hope for JPEG XL and that Google will cave at some point.

We need to get our politicians to do a lot more, a lot faster.

So we’re still doomed, then? I’m sorry, I’m sure lots of this is meant to be incredibly uplifting, but it reads an awful lot like “green is cheaper, trust the market! Numbers go up, up, up!” when you consider that:

• Climate change is impacting countless people in horrible ways
• Climate change is still getting worse

The important thing to note here being that, even if a brighter future awaits beyond, the worst is yet to come. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

Yes, that the science to save the human race exists is nice. Really nice. There was a period in which I genuinely wondered if there was any chance humans wouldn’t extinct themselves. But that was years ago. I’ve since learned that “saving the human species” is a terrible, disgusting metric. The future of what I consider humanity remains grim.

Now, if the worst is yet to come, and we can’t yet even accurately predict how much worse the worst really will be, take a moment to reflect on this: which part of humanity is better prepared to weather the incoming changes, and which part is more likely to be labeled “climate change refugees?”

Humanity isn’t only the richest. It’s not merely the wealthiest and most developed nations. Humanity is also a lot of people who will suffer, people who I’m unconvinced will receive the aid and support they need and deserve.

Because the root cause of these issues, the systems that govern our society, have led us here and are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Because these systems have shown incredible prowess at protecting select groups of people from certain issues, while failing at completely fixing them, despite not struggling due to a lack of resources and continuous technological advances. If the pattern holds…

Then humans will survive. Many will live well.

Humanity is still pretty screwed.

TL;DR:

“The tools are here, we’ll be alright, just need political will!”

Who’s we? And if getting politicians to do what’s right was that simple, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

P.S. I’m not advocating for doom here, I just wish more people understood that Americans buying cheap Chinese electric cars won’t save the people living nearby the mine in Africa where the cobalt for those batteries was extracted.

“The elephant in the room – and the opportunity – is how to solve for the industry-created problem that people don’t like and don’t trust advertising,” said Garcia. “Privacy-enhancing tech doesn’t make creepy and disruptive ads less creepy or disruptive in the eyes of the average user.”

Emphasis mine.

Betting on your reputation that users will trust you to adequately handle an issue that really seems like it’d end up with a conflict of interest seems like a fancier manner of saying you’re risking taking a dump on your reputation.

No way through but forwards now, eh. Not feeling particularly optimistic, but I’m cheering for them all the same. Their concerns and observations about the direction the industry is headed in are valid.

Am I missing something?

Firefox is Mozilla’s most profitable product. Its millions of users enable Mozilla to make deals for sponsored content (e.g. shortcuts), integrations, and biggest of all: the default search option with Google.

ruled that the downstream emissions of fossil fuel extraction projects must be considered in the approvals process

Could anyone who knows more about this chime in to explain what we can expect out of this, considering real world politics?

• How likely is it that projects will be “properly considered” and then approved anyway?
• Do companies currently have to take responsibility in any capacity for the consequences of previously considered emissions?

Not trying to dismiss what’s good here, rather, I’m trying to understand what exactly it means.

I stand corrected, I see your argument about the comparative difficulty and effect of banning a browser vs an extension. The discoverability of the extension alone is a big point.

Not sure I agree with how you seemingly downplay the damage banning the browser could cause and fail to consider consider other ways people could organize to distribute extensions (even as you mention various ways to get Firefox, I’m a bit confused on this one). Others have already talked about this in the thread, so I won’t repeat it here.

With all that said, it appears we were both fools. Mozilla has returned the extensions already. It was neither about protecting Firefox in Russia, nor a case of “Fuck Mozilla.”

Would you be happier if they ignored the demands and possibly got Firefox banned in Russia? Because if so, it’s not that we disagree over our views of the Russian government. Probably neither do Mozilla.

We have different priorities. I want the average Russian to be easily able to use Firefox, even if it takes more work to load some extensions. From where I’m sitting, you seem to want to cut off your nose to spite your face.

I’m genuinely curious why.

You’re right, regarding Mastodon. I won’t edit my other comment, though, both to preserve the original chain of thought and because that brings up another discussion.

To quote the EFF:

We feel that the intended usage of the feature will not determine people’s expectation of privacy while using it.

Offering people a feature with preexisting expectations, similar to other things that fulfill those expectations, then telling people “We know it looks like a duck but don’t expect it to quack!”

…It begs the question: was the feature really a good idea?

And it’s also damming for private messaging on mastodon.

I once read vague complaints about it being a rushed implementation. While I won’t trust those without evidence, I for sure wouldn’t trust mastodon with my PMs. At least, not until how this was allowed to happen is figured out and fixed if necessary.

P.S. I’m still not sure I believe in PMs in the fediverse. If I need to share something and care about keeping it private, I’d rather move the conversation elsewhere.

Wrong Conway.

I won’t know if any of the linked resources are any good until I have time to look them over, but if nothing else I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

Re: whitewashing, fair point. I’d already read about the issue, but maybe I still need to rethink how I look at computing history.