The_Decryptor
@The_Decryptor@aussie.zone
- Comment on Australian government not suspending ads or posts on X amid antisemitic Grok chatbot incident 1 day ago:
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.
- Comment on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not 4 days ago:
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.
- Comment on BREAKING: X CEO Linda Yaccarino Steps Down One Day After Elon Musk’s Grok AI Bot Went Full Hitler 4 days ago:
She used all the code words and dog whistles from the start.
- Comment on BREAKING: X CEO Linda Yaccarino Steps Down One Day After Elon Musk’s Grok AI Bot Went Full Hitler 4 days ago:
The dog?
- Comment on Subnautica 2 studio begs rioting fans for benefit of the doubt after leadership axed by owner Krafton: 'The team that has been working on the game day-to-day ... remains completely unchanged' 6 days ago:
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.
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 1 week ago:
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.
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.
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Why there are a lot of people migrating from Windows to Linux these days? 1 week ago:
I switched a year ago, after trying and failing multiple times over the years whenever I gave it a try.
- Linux has massively improved, systemd is a lot cleaner than the mess of disparate shell scripts it displaced. Network Manager is also a lot nicer now than I remember it being when it was first introduced into Red Hat.
- Windows hasn’t, in a lot of ways it was actually regressing. I used to get multiple shell crashes a week with no insight as to why, friends would claim it was just me but then receive an update and start having similar crashes. Also noticeable UI issues that went unfixed for multiple revisions, made it felt cheap.
- MS went all in on AI garbage and was jamming it into everything, kept getting popup notifications and the like to try Copilot, notifications went from being useful to just being an ad delivery mechanism.
- Gaming on Linux massively improved, last time I tried it OpenGL support was a mess. Now OpenGL is very mature, and all the D3D translation stuff uses Vulkan which has been rock solid for me. I’ve found games run better than they did on Windows on the same hardware, and the only game I’ve had an issue with was Destiny 2, which is intentional on the devs behalf (Luckily the game’s boring now)
I find I’m a lot more willing to let issues slide though, like I’ve had some Thunar crashes which I’m cool with since there’s like 4 devs maintaining it, vs. the multi-billion dollar company working on Explorer which I expect better from. Also unsurprisingly the only actual shop-stopper issue I’ve had was with a memory leak in the Nvidia drivers, the actual FLOSS stuff has been great.
- Comment on Tumblr’s move to WordPress and fediverse integration is ‘on hold’ 1 week ago:
Or Automattic doesn’t have enough employees left to implement it
- Comment on No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites 2 weeks ago:
Use Zola or Hugo then
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 3 weeks ago:
Yeah this is a perfect use case for torrents, could go a step further and keep track of a downloader’s ratio to stop people leaching.
- Comment on I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days 3 weeks ago:
Tizen (resting place of Meego)
I’d say SailfishOS is the final resting place of Meego, especially since it’s maintained by ex-Nokia devs.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 4 weeks ago:
I’m not convinced LLMs as they exist today don’t prioritize sources – if trained naively, sure, but these days they can, for instance, integrate search results, and can update on new information.
Well, it includes the text from the search results in the prompt, it’s not actually updating any internal state (the network weights), a new “conversation” starts from scratch.
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 1 month ago:
If these AI researchers really have no idea how these things work, then how can they possibly improve the models or techniques?
Like how they now claim all that after upgrades that now these LLMs can “reason” about problems, how did they actually go and add that if it’s a black box?
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 1 month ago:
Yeah, there’s a mysticism that’s sprung up around LLMs as if they’re some magic blackbox, rather than a well understood construct to the point where you can buy books from Amazon on how to write one from scratch.
It’s not like ChatGPT or Claude appeared from nowhere, the people who built them do talks about them all the time.
- Comment on Google is Using AI to Censor Independent Websites 1 month ago:
And there’s still web directories hanging around, similar to the now dead dmoz site.
url.town and curlie.org for example
- Comment on [Open question] Why are so many open-source projects, particularly projects written in Rust, MIT licensed? 1 month ago:
True, that’d definitely make it a lot more viable to hold corporations to account.
- Comment on [Open question] Why are so many open-source projects, particularly projects written in Rust, MIT licensed? 1 month ago:
It’s an easy license to reason about, allows for basically any project to use it, and you don’t need to worry about trying to enforce it (Because the GPL is only as good as your lawyers are)
- Comment on Floods in Australia 1 month ago:
Bugs crawling into his underpants and having a nibble.
- Comment on OpenBSD 7.7 released with updated hardware support, 9Front ships second update of 2025 1 month ago:
Plan 9 is inspired by UNIX (Helps that it had the same devs), but it’s not a direct continuation.
UnixWare is I think the only direct continuation of the original AT&T UNIX. The various BSDs are close enough but were re-written entirely in the late 80s/early 90s so there’s nothing original remaining.
- Comment on The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. 1 month ago:
Should be possible, as it’s a normal VM you can already install flatpak apps in said VM as normal, you’d just need a Windows side bit to invoke the install within WSL when you opened the flatpak bundle, and then something to add a start menu shortcut from the app inside the VM (Which I actually assume already exists, I never actually ran WSL2 when I was on Windows)
- Comment on The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. 1 month ago:
Why have a laptop or a dual boot with Linux when you can now more easily stay on the proprietary OS ?
This is called market retention.
Preventing migration to another OS, another software ecosystem.
The ‘Embrace’ and ‘Extend’ parts of EEE.
That’s stretching the definition to the point it’s nearly unrecognisable.
What the term meant was for things like Internet Explorer, where MS adopted an existing standard (Embrace), started changing it in incompatible ways (Extend), while using their market power to lock out competitors (Extinguish)
e.g. IE used an incompatible method for sizing and laying out elements than any other browser, so a site that laid out properly in NN4 looked broken in IE6, and vise versa. So most devs targeted IE6 as it was more popular, and NN4 users got more and more broken sites.
ACPI was similar, Windows had an extremely lax implementation of it, so motherboards often shipped with bugs that Windows would ignore but would stop anything else from booting. Intentional? Doesn’t really matter, since it sure was helpful in slowing the adoption of things like Linux, that had to come up with workarounds for all the broken hardware.
- Comment on The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. 1 month ago:
Not like you can fork it to run on a different OS.
For WSL1? yep that’s effectively impossible.
WSL2 is effectively just a wrapper around the kernel virtualization support and a bundling format, as long as whatever image you run talks to the host properly (like any other virtualised OS would) it’d run.
- Comment on Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model 2 months ago:
Web rings may make a big comeback.
I’ve got great news for you
- Comment on Indian Government orders censoring of accounts on X 2 months ago:
He could have tried to fight the order, that’s what the previous management used to do.
- Comment on Indian Government orders censoring of accounts on X 2 months ago:
- Comment on Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered 2 months ago:
I remember one of the modders behind a UI overhaul talking about the response to paid mods, when users kept saying that a donation system was better, that in the entire time they’d been making the mod they’d only gotten like $50 in donations total.
- Comment on TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days 2 months ago:
Yeah I think they’re generally regarded as a mistake, browsers have removed all the UI signifying an EV cert these days.