Lammy

Rather than AVIF or JPEG XL or WebP or HEIF or any of that stuff, my actual ideal choice that I wish everyone used is just good ol' JFIF. I like that I can take a file downloaded from the modern Web and open it on my '90s and 2000s computers. I emphatically do not care that it's some marginal percentage “““more efficient””” — more efficient for Google and Apple and Amazon and all the other silo providers who are moving more data every day than I will produce in my entire life. But why should I have to suffer backwards-incompatibility for their sake?

Backwards compatibility is cool; stop the fucking churn! I have done this just within this past week, in fact, when I moved a JPG over to my Mac OS 7.6.1 machine (PowerBook 2400c!) to use as a new desktop wallpaper†.

† Via Décor https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/decor

Or a projector, which is a way better experience anyway if you can stand having a curtained room.

These days they call it Cloudflare and make you pay for it lol

In the future, people willingly surveil themselves 24/7 with cryptographic proof, because fake images and video will be so good that it will be the only way to prove what one didn't do. Total Information Awareness achieved :D

Why would you help build Google's place-database moat for them for free?

The System loves leaning on the Cult of Safety to justify taking away people's autonomy and freedom of movement

How could I know? He literally said it's a secret.

> Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich, the epitome of "both sides are the same."

idk I feel like an election boiling down to “Which Bonesman would you like?” is a valid thing to question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones#Notable_member...

> In the 2004 presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members of Skull and Bones. When asked what it meant that both he and George W. Bush were Bonesmen, former presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."[46][47]

> Let's say you want to go back to 2001 and experience the glorious days of the early forum-sphere.

‘Peak’ would have been Invision Power Board 1.3 IMO, but still cool archaeology project :)

And lo:

- https://github.com/ernestbuffington/IPB-1.3.1-LegacyArchive

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Community#Version_1.x...

Getting code to re-compile byte-for-byte into the original game is the first step to being able to clean up that code to be human-readable.

> Have the creators ever reconned with their role in normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation?

For just one of them, ‘it never happened’ :p https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-a...

If something is technically possible, one should act as though it is already happening and hope to be wrong rather than refusing to consider the issue until sufficient “proof” is given, by which it will be too late. Doubly so when advertisers are involved, who as a group are economically-incentivized to not care about consent.

> we were sat in a room thinking 'How do we design this to be different, so we don't get sued by Apple?' The Mac had a menu bar of text across the top, so we thought 'we can't go across the top, we'll have to go across the bottom

Funnily enough, a few of the Windows Chicago/94/95 builds do come with the taskbar set to top of screen by default: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_build_90c

> 20k films at let's say 30m average is 400+ continuous, unbroken days worth of content

You are making the mistake of assuming someone can only have one monitor displaying porn at once. Have you never seen a real gooncave?

The System economically rewards those who successfully build Room-641A-as-a-Service

I host my own email and I think this change sucks

Even though I've never been to Japan I have one of these loaded onto my phone so I can use it to sign in to beatmaniaⅡᴅx arcade machines lol

Reject ‘manlet’ — RETVRN to ‘bantam’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantam_(military)

> One of the miners, rejected on account of his size, offered to fight any man there as proof of his suitability as a soldier, and six men were eventually called upon to remove him.

I was meaning to re-play Brütal Legend anyway :/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF0x5qFwEp4

My feed is mostly people petting rabbits

> a wider trend to avoid showing the user any error at all costs

And in fact you can see the degradation of software over the previous decade-plus via Google Trends search for ‘something went wrong’ lol: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%22Somet...

It's also a funny sentence to read when you're familiar with Jobs' close personal relationship with Larry Ellison: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a...

Fun fact: Ellison was the one who orchestrated Jobs' late-'90s return to Apple (after failing to purchase Apple outright) as part of a decades-long campaign of trying to help the spy sector take General Purpose Computing away from people. In the '90s their preferred approach to this was ‘Network Computing’, and Apple almost shipped a ‘Macintosh NC’ that would have connected to Oracle software on its backend, but that project turned into the iMac instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_NC

“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?

A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.

Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”

―― Larry Ellison, 1997, https://youtu.be/qriZvWzNPho?t=420

They were finally able to do it with the iPhone by leveraging nerds' well-intentioned-but-naïve weakness to the fallacy that More Encryption == Better Than, so now we all have what could be General Purpose Computers in our pockets that just refuse to run any software that The System doesn't want us to have.

The moral of the story is don't trust anybody who expresses too much interest in putting things inside Black Cubes :p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE

Hype. Love my OG Framework 12. I never minded the lack of keyboard backlight since I can touch-type, but having programmable keyboard firmware will be a must so I can kill the Airplane Mode key that is interpreted by the EC instead of by the OS. It's the “lose your match” button if I ever accidentally press it :p

Make sure that it isn't a case of the software you're using to inspect the disc intentionally looking the other way with regard to that flag.

> Quake has the pre-emphasis metadata flagged in the subcodes but not flagged in the TOC, so some software players/rippers like (annoyingly) Exact Audio Copy won't heed it

I learned that this is an intentional deficiency in EAC: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/eac-not-detecting-pre...

> For a short while, up to version 0.95b3 [in 2004], Exact Audio Copy had a manual function to actually scan the audio area of the disc also [talking about subcode channel Q versus the TOC] to find if tracks used pre-emphasis. This was removed due to some perceived legal threat. Now, basically, a standards-compliant disc that doesn't use the TOC kludge won't show "pre-emphasis"

And sure enough, the Red Book standard mentions usage of the other three flag bits alongside the pre-emphasis flag: https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...

The adjacent bit is “copy prohibited” versus “copy permitted”, which is not a piece of metadata I knew Compact Disc had. Makes a lot more sense why EAC would remove that feature in the legal climate of the P2P era, because to look for one flag also must look for the other, and this way it's out of sight and out of mind and Gee Your Honor We Didn't Know You Couldn't Do That if someone uses EAC to rip a “copy prohibited” disc. I wish I could get this feature back in 2026 though :p

> Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

There is very slightly more to it than just the mixed-mode sessions: the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis, so your ripper or player needs to apply corresponding de-emphasis EQ in order for them to sound correct. 1996 was actually a strangely late year to find any CD mastered with pre-emph; it was mostly an '80s thing: https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasi...

On top of being a technique that had fallen out of common use by that time, Quake has the pre-emphasis metadata flagged in the subcodes but not flagged in the TOC, so some software players/rippers like (annoyingly) Exact Audio Copy won't heed it: https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Comparison_of...

Here's a side-by-side comparison — my EAC rip of my MacSoft version of Quake (left) alongside the output of `sox_ng deemph` for the same file (right): https://i.ibb.co/9m18CSsk/Emi-2026-08-17-18-52-48.png

And if you're curious, here's the pre-emphasis subcode channel Q flag and pre-emphasis frequency response as described in the Red Book standard, and sox_ng's code for undoing it:

― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...

― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...

― https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/src/branch/main/src/deemp...

Although if someone has been unknowingly listening to the pre-emphasized tracks for thirty years, maybe the ‘incorrect’ one is what sounds right to them? :)

So do all four tires on your car: https://dspace.networks.imdea.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12...

I feel like it would have though if Glimpse had managed to become the default image editor on at least one major distro, just by virtue of people stumbling in to contributing some fix or addition to ‘the thing that came with my OS’ without necessarily being aware of the history.

Like the FFmpeg/libav fork that eventually got back together. Or Compiz/Beryl, or Emacs/XEmacs, or GCC/EGCS, or whatever :)

I don't want to revel in the fork's demise for any reason besides relief that it didn't end up splitting GIMP's contributors and community in a way that would have harmed both projects.

> we could not find contributors willing to step up and help with non-code tasks like moderating communication channels

Gotta say though it feels ironic that they couldn't find enough people to be comment janitors considering the whole thing was based on wanting people to stop saying a particular word.

> As a result, we struggled to scale the project to match increasing demand.

‘Glimpse didn't fail; it was actually too popular’?

Personally I just prefer to avoid the debate and call it “GNU IMP” v(._. )v