mke

joined 5 months ago
[–] mke 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Darn, today I learned that Mr. Rogers was ready for war.

[–] mke 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Neat, I really like the gray one. Are they comfortable to rest your arms on? As in, does the texture not bother you?

[–] mke 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Were the community rules copied straight out of Reddit or something? 3 and 9 are a bit funny.

[–] mke 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, sorry, that part I didn't fact check myself so I didn't even want to mention it. Like I said, many possible reasons.

[–] mke 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I think I know what you're talking about, and I think you might have misunderstood a few things. I'll explain my point and I'd appreciate it if you could confirm later whether it helped, or if I'm the one who misunderstood you.

"Saving as..." is, usually, just for setting the name of the file. The full filename, extension included. The extension is just another part of the name. It doesn't define what rules the file's contents actually follow. They're for other purposes, such as helping your operating system know which software to use when opening each file. For example:

User double clicks a .pdf System: Oh, I should try opening this in Adobe Acrobat.

But that doesn't mean the file is actually a PDF. You can change the extension of any file, and it won't automatically be converted to that extension (unless a specific feature has been added to make that implicit conversion). You could give an executable a .pdf extension and your system might then try opening it in Acrobat. Of course, it won't work—there's no way the system could have automatically made that conversion for you.

So you might wonder, why does your (fake) PNG—which is really just a webp with an incorrect extension—still work just fine? You can open it, view it, send it. What's the trick?

Thing is, the software that actually deals with those files doesn't even need to care about the extension, it's a lot smarter than that. These programs will use things like magic bytes to figure out what the file they're handling really is and deal with it appropriately.

So in this scenario, the user could save a webp file as PNG.

funny cat.png (still a webp!)

Then they might double click to open it.

System: How do I open a .png again?

  • .webp -> try the image viewer
  • .jpeg -> try the image viewer
  • .png -> try the image viewer (there it is)

And finally, the image viewer would correctly identify it as a webp image and display it normally.

Image viewer: reading magic bytes... Image viewer: yeah, that's a webp alright

The user might then assume that, since everything works as expected, they properly converted their webp to a PNG. In reality, it's all thanks to these programs, built upon decades of helping users just make things work. Same with Discord, Paint.NET, etc. Any decent software will handle files it's meant to handle, even if they aren't properly labeled.

If you were to check the file contents though, using a tool like file, czkawka to find incorrect extensions, or even just checking image properties, it should still be identified as a webp.

I didn't try it myself as you said because, to my understanding of files and software, doing so made no sense. But again, do tell if I got something wrong or misinterpreted your comment.

[–] mke 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

Hey, thanks for the input. I'd like to read more about this, but I can't seem to find anything related online. Anything else you could share?

Just checking, you sure you're not confusing fallback-to-another-format when the browser doesn't support webp? Because that's a bit of separate issue, and not a terribly relevant one since all major browsers have supported webp for a while now.

[–] mke 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

Sorry, is this comment meant in jest? If not, could you explain what exactly you mean by "no need for a converter?"

I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. No actual file data conversion is happening when you do that unless you're using additional tools e.g. browser extensions.

[–] mke 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

We would be happy to connect with your technical team to help them make sure your paywalled content isn’t served to people using Poe.

What a joke, Quora needs to reevaluate whose responsibility that is.

Basic reasoning time: was it an accident?

  • If not, then it was at least immoral.
  • If so, then it was incompetence.

What a surprise, both possibilities seem to point towards the project being a pile of crap.

[–] mke 92 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (9 children)

Semi-related, I'm still salty about Google's rejection of JPEG XL. I can't help but remember this when webp discussion crops up, since Google were the ones who created it.

Why care about JPEG XL?Because it seems very promising. source

Rejection?Google started working on JPEG XL support for chrome, then dropped it despite significant industry support. Apple is also in, by the way.

Why do that?Don't know, many possible reasons. In fairness, even Mozilla hasn't decided to fully invest in it, and libjxl hasn't defined a stable public API yet.

That said, I don't believe that's the kind of issue that'd stop Google if they wanted to push something forward. They'd find a way, funding, helping development, something.

And unfortunately for all of us, Google Chrome sort of... Immensely influences what the web is and will be. They can't excuse themselves saying "they'll work on it, if it gains traction" when them supporting anything is fundamental to it gaining traction in the first place.

You'd have to believe Google is acting in good faith for the sake of the internet and its users. I don't think I need to explain why that's far from guaranteed and in many issues incredibly unlikely.

Useless mini-rantI really need a single page with all this information I can link every time image standards in the web are mentioned. There's stuff I'm leaving out because writing these comments takes some work, especially on a phone, and I'm kinda tired of doing it.

I still hold hope for JPEG XL and that Google will cave at some point.

[–] mke 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Apparently, according to at least one known car wash scare and the user manual, there is risk of damage if you don't set it to car wash mode first. I don't know how this compares to other electric vehicles.

[–] mke 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Unrelated, but I just found out there's a .youtube TLD. Not sure how to feel about this.

Some features of premium actually sound really interesting, but I find myself struggling to reconcile my interest in both those features and the general idea of an internet that isn't built upon ads with my strong dislike of Google and a sincere wish to give them as little money as possible.

[–] mke 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Always nice when a nerd snipe target takes the bullet like a champ and returns to sender with interesting data to share. I can safely tell you at least one person enjoyed reading this :^)

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submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by mke to c/technology
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