DigitalJacobin

What's messed up is that, technically, we do. Originally, OpenDocument was the ISO standard document format. But then, baffling everyone, Microsoft got the ISO to also have .docx as an ISO standard. So now we have 2 competing document standards, the second of which is simply worse.

The problem here being that GnuPG does nothing really well.

Could you elaborate? I've never had any issues with gpg before and curious what people are having issues with.

Unfortunately currently there aren’t many options to use AV1 in a very meaningful way; you can encode your own media with it, but that’s about it; you can stream to YouTube, but YouTube will recode to another codec.

AV1 has almost full browser support (iirc) and companies like YouTube, Netflix, and Meta have started moving over to AV1 from VP9 (since AV1 is the successor to VP9). But you're right, it's still working on adoption, but this is moreso just my dreamworld than it is a prediction for future standardization.

Sounds like a Windows problem

AV1 can do lossy video as well as lossless video.

Different ways of compressing the initial .tar archive.

So there's a tool called tar that creates an archive (a .tar file. Then theres a tool called zstd that can be used to compress files, including .tar files, which then becomes a .tar.zst file. And then you can encrypt your .tar.zst file using a tool called gpg, which would leave you with an encrypted, compressed .tar.zst.gpg archive.

Now, most people aren't doing everything in the terminal, so the process for most people would be pretty much the same as creating a ZIP archive.

This is the kind of thing i think about all the time so i have a few.

• Archive files: .tar.zst
  • Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by .zip and gzip/.gz) and does so faster.
  • By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of "Make each program do one thing well.".
  • .tar.xz is also very good and seems more popular (probably since it was released 6 years earlier in 2009), but, when tuned to it's maximum compression level, .tar.zst can achieve a compression ratio pretty close to LZMA (used by .tar.xz and .7z) and do it faster^1.

    zstd and xz trade blows in their compression ratio. Recompressing all packages to zstd with our options yields a total ~0.8% increase in package size on all of our packages combined, but the decompression time for all packages saw a ~1300% speedup.

• Image files: JPEG XL/.jxl
  • "Why JPEG XL"
  • Free and open format.
  • Can handle lossy images, lossless images, images with transparency, images with layers, and animated images, giving it the potential of being a universal image format.
  • Much better quality and compression efficiency than current lossy and lossless image formats (.jpeg, .png, .gif).
  • Produces much smaller files for lossless images than AVIF^2
  • Supports much larger resolutions than AVIF's 9-megapixel limit (important for lossless images).
  • Supports up to 24-bit color depth, much more than AVIF's 12-bit color depth limit (which, to be fair, is probably good enough).
• Videos (Codec): AV1
  • Free and open format.
  • Much more efficient than x264 (used by .mp4) and VP9^3.
• Documents: OpenDocument / ODF / .odt
  • @[email protected] says it best here. .odt is simply a better standard than .docx.

  it’s already a NATO standard for documents Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.

You might like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_b2B5tKBUM

It is extremely simple and easy to change your search engine and disable telemetry in Firefox. I would agree if Mozilla showed any favoritism towards Google, but they don't. Maintaining and developing an entirely independent browser is not cheap.

I really hope you're not about to suggest Brave as an alternative when 100% of their funds come from a dying crypto scam, is for-profit, and is owned by a far-right, anti-gay reactionary. Not to mention that Brave's browser is entirely reliant on Chromium code from Google.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

The US's actions against Cuba are inhumane, illegal, and immoral. President Biden should follow Obama's footsteps and normalize relations with Cuba.

End the blockade. Remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Close Guantánamo Bay.

¡Cuba sí, bloqueo no!

1. The very little, basic telemetry Firefox collects can be easily disabled^1.
2. What alternative do you suggest to Mozilla? Reject the $500M and blowup everything they've worked so hard for decades to build? I feel like users having to click, at most, a whole 5 times to change their search engine (if they want) isn't that big of a sacrifice to have a major privacy-oriented, non-profit player in the tech sphere.

We already know how these models fundamentally work. Why exactly does it matter how a model produced some result? /gen