demetris

I think the universities themselves are a problem, regardless of the societal aspect.

How I think about it:

Let us say, as a though experiment, that two things are true.

1. Outside of the university orgs, absolutely no one cares if the universities have enough resources to teach the engineers, scientists, teachers, doctors, etc. that society needs.

2. Outside of the university orgs, absolutely no one cares if half the people equipped to be good university teachers cannot find work.

In that hypothetical scenario, would the universities change? Saying no the Chinese etc. means that they would have to downsize.

Thanks for no cap! I looked it up and learned something new today. :-D

No. demetris’ benchmark of lossless image compression is not a sign that the situation may be changing. :-D

That was just the context for some reading I did to understand where we are now.

> BTW, I don't see how Mozilla's interest in a jpegxl _decoder_ (your first link) has anything to do with the performance of jpegxl encoders compared to avif's encoders. In case you're really interested in the former, Firefox now has more than intentions, but it's still not at production level: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1986393

That is one of the links I shared in my comment (along with the bug title in parenthesis). :-)

I did some reading recently, for a benchmark I was setting up, to try and understand what the situation is. It seems things have started changing in the last year or so.

Some links from my notes:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-Interest-JPEG-XL-Rust

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443336 (discussion of the same GitHub comment as in the Phoronix site)

https://github.com/tirr-c/jxl-oxide

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1986393 (land initial jpegxl rust code pref disabled)

In case anyone is curious, here is the benchmark I did my reading for:

https://op111.net/posts/2025/10/png-and-modern-formats-lossl...

The Rust rewrites can become tiresome, they have become a meme at this point, but there are really good tools there too.

An example from my personal experience: I used to think that oxipng was just a faster optipng. I took a closer look recently and saw that it is more than that.

See: https://op111.net/posts/2025/09/png-compression-oxipng-optip...

Many are available on Windows too.

I know I have hyperfine, fd, and eza on my Windows 11, and maybe some more I cannot remember right now.

They are super easy to install too, using winget.

Why is the website antiquated and the URL bizarro?

The homepage and the downloads page both seem fine to me.

(BTW, the collection of one-player puzzle games is super!)

Yep. Apple is a weird organization. scrollend is in Chrome since May 2023 and in Firefox since January 2023.

Another thing to watch for is whether you actually need debouncing.

For example, debouncing is often recommended for handlers of the resize event, but, in most cases, it is not needed for handlers of observations coming from ResizeObserver.

I think this is the case for other modern APIs as well. I know that, for example, you don’t need debouncing for the relatively new scrollend event (it does the debouncing on its own).

Ahahahaha!

The reply writes itself, doesn’t it? :-D

I like GNOME more though, in general. I just want GNOME without some of the unfathomable stuff, and with the progress KDE has made with Wayland.

Trixie is SUPER for desktop use!

I’ve been on sid for the last 10 months for my laptop (old T450s) and my secondary desktop, and it is really fun.

There are annoyances but they are not related to Debian itself.

FIRST

I decided it is time to switch to Wayland. Now my favorite run-or-raise app (Kupfer) cannot do run-or-raise. But there is a really nice extension to do run-or-raise on GNOME without the aggressive disruption of the Activities overview: Switcher. The other thing that is difficult on Wayland is text expansion. I have not found a solution for that part.

SECOND

The annoying to infuriating things that GNOME likes doing sometimes. But that is a constant. Nothing new.

Congrats and thanks to all the Debian people!

> But the points it puts forward are fluff arguments like "it's a breadth of fresh air" or "it loads faster".

Fluff arguments do exist, but you can also measure. The site is static with minimal JS on the one page, and a bit more JS on the other page, so nothing surprising in the numbers, and nothing you can say was achieved thanks to the magic of Astro, but I wanted to shared them:

HOME PAGE

TTFB: .024s

SR: .200s

FCP: .231s

SI: .200s

LCP: .231s

CLS: 0

TBT: .000s

PW: 108KB

DEMOS PAGE

TTFB: .033s

SR: .300s

FCP: .281s

SI: .200s

LCP: .231s

CLS: 0

TBT: .000s

PW: 174KB

I am not saying Astro is innovative and I don’t think I implied that in my reply. I don’t view Astro as innovative and I don’t understand people who view it like that because of, say, its islands. (We knew about islands before Astro.)

As you said, in the example I shared Astro is an SSG. It happens to use server-side JS but this is is irrelevant.

But it is more than that. Astro is an SSG and it is also a *very well made* SSG.

I have used all the usual suspects: Ruby ones, Go ones, Python ones, JS ones. The closest I came to having fun was 11ty, but 11ty is a bit too chaotic for me. Astro is the one that clicked. And the one that was fun to use right from day 1.

I am not a JavaScript person, mind you. JavaScript is not my strongest FE skill. The JS conventions, tricks, and syntaxes of modern FE frameworks, even less so.

So Astro did not click for me because of that. It clicked because of how well it is made and because of how fun it is to use.

Oh! It does this!

Oh! It does that!

Oh! It gives you type safety for your Markdown meta! (What?!)

Oh! It gives you out of the box this optimization I was putting together manually! You just have to say thisOptim: true in the configuration file!

Astro is a very well made tool that improves continually and that aligns with my vision of the platform and of how we should make stuff for the platform.

> I've never used Astro so forgive my ignorance, but isn't that just creating a .html file, a .css file and then optionally provide a .js file? What does Astro give you in this case? You'd get the same experience with a directory of files + Notepad basically. It's also even more optimized for speed, since there is no overhead/bloat at all, including at dev-time, just pure files, sent over HTTP.

Astro is super for completely static stuff too. Sometimes static stuff can be complex and there a modern framework like Astro shines.

I will share a couple of files to explain.

The site is almost completely static. It serves minimal JS for:

(1) Prefetching (you can block that and nothing will break)

(2) Mobile menu (you cannot make an accessible mobile menu without JS)

The site is for the docs and demos of a JS library. I want many demos on it, to be able to see what patterns the lib can handle and where things break down. I want to be able to add/remove demos quickly to try ideas. Straight HTML written in index.html files would not allow me to do that (but it is fine for the site where I have my CV, so I just use that there).

This is the Astro component I made that makes it super easy for me to try whatever idea I come up with:

https://github.com/demetris/omni-carousel/blob/main/site/com...

Here is one page with demos that use the component:

https://github.com/demetris/omni-carousel/blob/main/site/pag...

Basically, without a setup like this, I would publish the site with 3 or 4 demos, and I would maybe add 1 or 2 more after a few months.

Cheers!

I don't think he claims to be a corporation here.

What he says is that, because wordpress[dot]org is his personal site, telling him what to do with it would violate his First Amendment rights.

The Mullenweg/WPE thing is the one I recommend:

https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

It is a chronology published as a GitHub gist.

Ongoing discussion on the WordPress subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1glejno/wp_engin...

> I've seen some other examples of him mischaracterizing insults (including milder ones than this) as threats, but I wasn't able to find them in my timebox. These were screenshots from Twitter and possibly Slack, presumably I could find them if I had accounts on those platforms.

A recent one, from 9 Oct 2024: https://x.com/kellie/status/1844007729284923901

@kellie (Kellie Peterson) asks:

Has anyone tried turning @photomatt off and restarting him?

@photomatt (Matt Mullenweg) replies:

By “turning off” do you mean my life should end?

For those who don’t have a Twitter account, here is the whole thread on Threadreader:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1843963052183433331.html

Update: The Automattic tweet (the one announcing that Automattic “responsibly disclosed” a vulnerability to WP Engine) has now disappeared.

For those who can’t see the tweet:

“Automattic has responsibly disclosed a vulnerability in ACF but breached the @Intigriti Code of Conduct by irresponsibly announcing it publicly. I am going to work my damned hardest to ensure that the fix gets shipped to dotorg if it affects the free version of ACF.”

The tweet author is @johnbillion who, among other things, is a member of the WordPress core team and lead of the WordPress core security team.

Context for the “I am going to work my damned hardest...”: WP Engine, who own ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) are currently blocked from the official plugin repo so, I would imagine, they would not be able to push the update on their own.

For frequently used apps, I do what eviks says.

It’s a solution that annoys me as an idea, but it’s the only thing I have found that works for me. I have about 20 individual AutoHotkey scripts that are named GO TO <application name> and that go like this:

  SetTitleMatchMode 2

  if (not WinExist("Mozilla Firefox ahk_class MozillaWindowClass")) {
    Run A_ProgramFiles . "\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
  } else {
    WinActivate
  }

  Return

I also have individual LNK files that target the AutoHotkey scripts, so that you can run the scripts from any launcher. Here is how it looks in PowerToys Run:

https://op111.net/images/20240117-powertoys-run-autohotkey-s...

I don’t think it is possible to get the consumption of T450s on X220.

The T450s generation (and the generation before it) use ULV processors (ultra low voltage).

The processors used in the T450s generation have a TLP of 15W.

The processors used in the X220 generation have a TLP of 35W.

On the flip side, the processors in the X220 generation (and in the next generation) are powerful, which is a good thing if you need the power and if you have the laptop plugged most of the time.

A SASS API just for the grid system or for all elements?

Do you know where we can learn more about this?

I read that the following works:

1. Sign up for the Android beta programme: g.co/androidbeta

2. Enroll your Nexus

3. Unenroll after you have been updated to Android 7

Make sure you are actually on Android 7 before unenrolling. Going out of a regular beta will wipe your phone!

Cheers

Edit: Copy/Paste sandGorgon’s warning from below.

In addition to what magicalist said, here is some more information:

The Firefox Search widget is indeed installed by default but not activated by default. You can use it either by adding it to the home screen or via the “swipeup” gesture.

A problem is that it seems to have its own “Clear search history” and does not obey the one from the Firefox privacy settings.

Another problem is that you may activate it and set it as permanent default for the “swipeup” gesture by accident, and then there seems to be no way to change it to something else unless you install some other application that provides a “swipeup” action, in which case you are presented again with the interface to choose your default swipeup action.

This is a general problem in Android. An app that can help you change easily the default swipeup action is the Swipeup Utility:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.AdrianCamp...

You can use Swipeup Utility to set the default swipeup action to Nothing, or you can use it to clear the default of the swipeup gesture, so that you are a presented with the interface to chose a default again.

Last, the Firefox Search widget does not allow only Google Search. It is set to whatever your default search provider is in Firefox.

That is not the Google Search app. It is the search interface you get when you use the Firefox Search homescreen widget.

(This is on Android, BTW.)

I love forecast.io and I was happy when I finally found a good Android forecast.io app, Weather Timeline: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....

Three things I’d like to comment on after reading the post:

1. The post title confuses me: Looking at the content of the post, I understand that Dark Sky has a new co-owner rather than a new owner.

2. I enjoyed the openness and directness of the last paragraph.

3. I did not enjoy the language at a couple of places. :-)

Congratulations and best wishes for the future of the company, its services and its apps!

Maybe contacting their hosting provider could be an additional way to approach the problem, since, from what I can tell, the messages they send to contributors are spam.

There is a setting that can help with the scrolling:

"scroll_speed": 0

I have it in my user preferences (on Debian Sid) and it works well for me.