Giver of skulls
The 6GHz band was used before it was used for WiFi. Frequencies can be reassigned, and they get reassigned on a regular basis.
It’s a pretty stupid thing to do that has no use other than annoying random people, but it the WiFi equipment industry can’t deal with changes like these, they need to get their act together. Samsung and Comcast will be fine, and grandma just needs to install her updates like she should be doing anyway.
PNGv4/v5 may improve compression but it won’t be backwards compatible. It’ll get stuck in the same kind of limbo JPEG-XL is. Until that gets resolved, we’ll have to stick with AVIF/HEIFF/WebP.
I don’t really see the need for advanced compression in lossless files. You generally don’t download those in bulk without looking at lower quality previews anyway. Would be nice if the real file supports the same colour space the preview file does anyway. I’ll appreciate it when it lands, but I don’t think I’ll spend the hours converting my photo library to save maybe half a gigabyte of space.
What a weird take. Alpha channels are used all the time. A lot of tools use WebP for them, though. Things like stickers and emoji in chat apps often recode into WebP or force you to figure out how to make a WebP with a certain configuration to accept your pack, but from there on out they rely on alpha channels.
MacOS app icons are a collection of layers with alpha channels embedded into them, stacked on top of each other, or themed individually. Unless you’re blind, any iOS or macOS user encounters alpha channels every time they turn on their screen. On Android, those files are even actual PNGs. On Windows, those are .ico resources, and everything larger than 64x64 is guaranteed to be a PNG embedded inside of an .ico (possibly embedded inside of a .exe/.dll/etc.
WebP has replaced jpeg for most web content already when it comes to compression. This just solves things like “how do I save my HDR images without degrading them every time I hit save”.
Alpha channels are also why a lot of Android apps are full of PNGs. Every app you use will be using a PNG somewhere, probably uncrushed, full of Photoshop metadata.
Of course social media is full of lossy images. Websites can be, too. But plenty of web content is lossless PNGs in ARGB format, because that’s what the person making that shit decided to use, and they don’t care about saving a few milliseconds of transfer time every time you download their content.
I don’t think the science is out on that. For instance, your capacity to fall in love with someone is influenced by their smell as it contains information about their immune system (and, by extent, their immunological compatibility with yours).
Most humans have a need for companionship. It’s the reason solitary confinement is considered torture in most cases. Our brains and bodies are rigged to prefer companionship over being alone most of the time. Put a human alone in a room with a plastic ball with a face drawn on it for long enough, and that plastic ball will be given a name, a personality, and that human will get upset if you dare “hurt” the plastic ball. In a much more dystopian twist on that experiment, people have started “befriending” LLMs now that they’ve grown to have the ability to remember a couple hundred keywords about your user account. The human mind craves being around others.
However, I don’t think whether you like someone or not is purely a function of what they provide for you. You can enjoy the presence of your friends even if you’re sitting in a room silently scrolling on your phone, or watching a TV show.
Their opinions and behaviour towards others definitely also matters. Shared experiences also factor into this stuff somewhere; someone you would normally detest who might’ve been with you through bad times/some traumatic event might end up becoming a friend. Years and years of positive experiences can also make you find excuses for things you would reject in others (which is why even the worst people can have their families and friends protect them). Your friends may have turned into terrible people over the years, and you will find ways to defend their behaviour to yourself and others just because they’re your friends. Similarly, someone you know well might do something terrible out of the blue, and you will recognise that as an outlier event (mental health crisis? sign of illness?) rather than distancing yourself from them like they’re some weirdo in the street.
Maybe ask yourself this: if your friends got hit by a car tomorrow, and suddenly lost their ability to hold an interesting conversation, make witty jokes, or play video games with you, would you stop caring about them? If not, then there’s clearly more to your relationship with them than the basic experiences they can provide.
I don’t see why not. Based on the spec, a server submits a request signed by a keyId which the receiving server caches or obtains, but the new server is also queried for the keys belonging to the actor. You cannot reuse the old key IDs (probably) because it’ll stay in the cache, but you can just add new keys of your own.
Step 10 of the key verification algorithm explicitly instruct the server to ignore the old key and fetch a new one, in case the other server has done a blind key rotation.
In other words, the ActivityPub spec only verifies that an account was the source of a message at the time a server submitted or forwarded an event. It does not validate that an Update with new text contents belongs to the same server that once Created the object.
Of course, I expect ActivitiyPub software to (mis)implement this spec in different ways. Some software will be protected against domain hijacking, others will leave domains once registered completely useless in the future for common actor names in ActivityPub.
There is, but the protocol is designed that you can’t buy a domain for a month, set up a server, and then let it expire, leaving it unable to use ActivityPub for decades after because you posted a few things to Mastodon with popular usernames.
There is public/private key authentication, but the server is queried for its current keys when verifying content. This allows lemmy.ml to forward lemmy.dbzer0.com content to any other server without knowing the private key, because the receiving server will call back to the original server (if they key is not already cached) and use the user’s public key to verify the message.
Once the domain expires and a new person buys the domain, that new person is in charge of what keys a domain lists or not. That, combined with the fact blind key rollover is permitted, leaves it up to programmers of individual servers to decide if they accept the new keys or not (the spec says they should).
Note that because of the way federation works, the domain can be bought by someone else who can then use the connections and links to lemm.ee images and posts to peddle spam and other nonsense. It’s not a problem as long as the domain name stays under control of the lemm.ee admins, but if they don’t renew their registration then anyone can pretend to be the old lemm.ee server.
Best for lemm.ee users to delete images from their posts and comments now so whoever grabs the domain in a year or so can’t use it to inject weird shit into your old posts as easily. Of course they still can create new accounts for all.the old account names and post in your name if they want, but the user private keys should prevent that for individual posts if the other server software is smart enough to validate them.
Capsacin is not soluble in water, so water and spicy food don’t really interact. Unless the water is contaminated, chugging water won’t do more than make you pee.
The capsacin applying signals as if your bowels are literally on fire and your body reacting to it as if it’s poisonous will, though. Many people can apply the same trick they can apply when they get the shits from milk: just consume a decent amount of it every day and your body will get used to it eventually. Not recommended if you have roommates or a difficult to reach toilet, though.
Of course it could be that standard Taiwanese drinking water is so contaminated that chugging it does give you mild food poisoning, but that doesn’t change the fact that people not eating large amounts of capsacin still get the shits when they eat spicy food.
So far the only companies making you use one are the multiplayer gaming companies that are using TPMs for hardware IDs to ban cheaters and expensive corporate software using them for remote attestation on hardware the company owns.
If you’re salty about the whole Windows 10 thing, you’ve got until at least October 2027 until Microsoft drops support for it (security beyond the 10 year window announced at the launch of Windows 10 cost like 5 bucks a month though) or you can install an OS from someone who’s still willing to maintain support for old hardware, like Google’s ChromeOS or maybe Linux.
It’s only really a problem if you’re unwilling to pay for (or pirate) updates and are afraid to separate yourself from the large corporations building your current OS.
To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.
Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn’t mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.
There’s no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I’ve written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.
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I think it’s a similar situation to the weather radars and sattelite receivers that are getting broken as more and more components of 5G are rolled out: these industries didn’t think the regulators would be so monumentally stupid as to reassign frequencies like that. Normal politics gives years of heads up before dramatic changes like these take place, but it’s been a while since normal politics have been practiced.
As for unlicensed bands themselves, I believe here in Europe several of them got moved around a bit, though that was mostly small bands that were used for devices that have since (i.e. more than 10 years ago) been altered to use Bluetooth and WiFi and other such technologies, essentially freeing up the spectrum. Someone using their thirty year old room broadcast microphone or wireless handset may be technically committing a crime, but I doubt the impact will ever register on a scale large enough to set off any investigations.
My point is that devices can and should support these kinds of regulation changes. Allowing your customers to comply with the law while using your hardware is part of their corporate responsibility.