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  • It's not really Ext4 doing that, it's a bunch of tricks in the OS layer and the way apps write files to storage that limits it.

    You'll see it if you use something like a BT client without pre-allocation, those files can get heavily fragmented depending on the download speed.

  • The “!=” comes from most programming languages using the “!” character for negation. Negating something is usually read and pronounced “not”. So it literally reads “not equal” if you are reading the symbols.

    And programming languages get it from math, where "inequality" is represented by the symbol "≠", != is the closest you can get with ASCII.

    Now what's more interesting is that math uses "¬" to represent "not", I bet there's a telegraph keyboard from the 1940s that explains the reasons behind all this.

  • On Wednesday, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after Grok began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.

    The special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, told ABC’s RN Breakfast on Friday she had held meetings with a number of social media platforms, including X. “They’re very keen to ensure that hate is not associated with their platform,” she said, adding: “AI is the answer.”

    Ah, this must be a new definition of antisemitism that I'm not familiar with.

  • It's got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it's Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.

    I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.

  • Draw distance sucks for a vast ocean of plants and sealife. Seriously, I have a really good video card, and this fucking Unity engine can’t draw 500 feet in front of me.

    If anything Subnautica lets you see too much.

  • PNG gets you the best compatibility and features, at the expense of file size. But I probably wouldn't use it for uploading photographs to the web of course.

  • WebP is the same, it's got a lossy mode (VP8) and a lossless mode (Which is more limited than PNG, but beats it where it overlaps). But to make it more complicated the lossless mode also has lossy processing modes, where it alters the image first to achieve smaller output sizes.

    And PNG is no different.

    People have a long habit of turning JPEG files into PNG files, the file extension won't help you there. They also could have reduced the colour depth or resized it, all lossy operations. All it really tells you is that it can have an alpha channel.

    As for AVIF, personally I don't like the format, it feels like an "open media" (But still patented) version of HEIF to oppose Apple. Like WebP it makes the (baseless IMO) assumption that a format designed to encode motion data is better at encoding still data than a format designed to encode still data. It's got all the limitations of a video format (It's got a max resolution, only supports 12bit images, and no progressive decoding), and they left out all the enhancements from WebP (The dedicated lossless mode, "lossless AVIF" files are huge and the last I checked badly supported, so nobody actually used them, and they just called very high quality settings "lossless")

    A team inside of Google was working on WebP2 around the same time, that used AV1 but actually added the useful stuff like efficient lossless encoding, it got killed too in favour of AVIF.

  • So it depends on the specific HDR encoding used, Rec2020 is the most common ones you'll see (It's meant for "pure" setups, i.e. where the source and output are tightly linked, e.g. gaming consoles or blu-ray, or so) and the raw data won't look great. While something like HLG (Hybrid-Log Gamma) is designed for better fallback (As it's meant for TV broadcast, where the output device is "whatever TV the user has"), so should just look dimmer.

    This is a HDR screenshot I took of Destiny 2, which uses Rec2020, tone mapped to SDR

    And here's the raw screenshot data from before tonemapping.

    If the second image had all the right HDR metadata, and the viewer supported it properly, then both images would match.

  • AVIF is generally smaller in size than both WebP and PNG. AVIF supports animation while PNG does not.

    The lossless mode in AVIF is so bad that a BMP in a ZIP file produces smaller results.

    Which makes sense, as it doesn't actually have a dedicated lossless mode (like WebP does), the encoder is just to not quantise the video data it produces.

  • JXL can do lossy images (like JPEG) and lossless ones (like PNG), and on average it'll produce smaller file sizes than both (While beating JPEG quality wise). The killer feature is that it can do lossless recompression of existing JPEG files and shave off about 20% of the file size, and it's reversible so you can turn those JXL files back into JPEG images for existing software.

    The downside is that it was created by Google Research (among others), but the Chrome team made AVIF instead and decided that's what they'd support and nothing else.

    At least Safari supports it.

  • Tons of software meant to run on 32-bit hasn’t been updated to run on 64-bit natively.

    32bit only Linux apps are basically non-existent, anything with the source available and maintainers would have been ported at some point in the last 2 decades, otherwise they have very specific technical reasons for being 32bit only (like OBS iiuc), the source has been lost somehow, or it's a proprietary program where the company has no interest (e.g. Valve with Steam)

    In fact I think Steam might really be it.

  • Or Automattic doesn't have enough employees left to implement it

  • For a community called “technology” there’s a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.

    Are you surprised people have opinions about technology, in a community dedicated to discussing technology?

  • If everyone has moved on from 32bit, and the old stuff doesn’t change, where is the maintenance requirement?

    The problem is that it's not old unchanging code, people want the latest supported version so they can still run their 32-bit binaries with the latest supporting libraries.

    And if the upstream developers don't consider 32-bit support important, then it falls on the distro maintainers to patch the code to keep it running in these situations.

  • I always thought it was purely a hardware limitation, but reading up on it I found it's actually just "virtual 8086 mode" that was dropped, 16-bit protected mode is still available even when running the CPU in "long mode".

    So it rules out DOS apps, but 16bit Win 3.x apps should still run. But it's probably a compatibility minefield, and even MS decided it wasn't important (iirc the only thing they kept around was support for 16-bit app installers, but by internally swapping them out with 32-bit versions when run, since it was apparently common for 32-bit 9x apps to still use 16-bit installers so they could show a proper error message when run under Win 3.x)

  • It seems to me that 16-bit applications are already basically broken with 32-bit wine if you're running a 64-bit kernel, by default it places extra restrictions over what the hardware already does to prevent apps from loading 16-bit code entirely.

    https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ#16-bit-applications-fail-to-start

    Guessing that's why they don't feel it's that important to continue supporting, seems a VM is the future for these apps.