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
  • @raubarno@lemmy.ml 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.

What in the world would an "uncensored" model even imply? And give me a break, private platforms choosing to not platform something/someone isn't "censorship", you don't have a right to another's platform. Mozilla has always been a principled organization and they have never pretended to be apathetic fence-sitters.

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.

AV1 can do lossy video as well as lossless video.

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.

Feels weird for them to frame this as if the protest has definitively finished and Reddit won. Reddit is bleeding users, many of whom will probably never return.

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.

Google made $7 billion from YouTube in 2021^1, might I remind you by running ads on other peoples's content. Now of course Google does provide the platform for that content, but the point still remains.

Users and content creators are what make YouTube, not the other way around. Companies like Google need to careful not to let their pursuit of profit upset the good thing they have going for them.

is this what you're referring to?

The U.S. National Labor Relations Board on Friday resurrected key elements of a policy it eliminated more than 50 years ago requiring businesses that commit labor law violations to bargain with unions without holding formal elections.

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.

I have. Lemmy is especially good for content geared towards news, tech, FOSS, privacy, memes (if, unlike me, Reddit-style memes are your thing), et cetera. For me, that checks off all the boxes for what i used Reddit for, so when i started using Lemmy, there wasn't really anything i was missing from Reddit. So, while i'm willing to miss out on some content in order to drop Reddit, i haven't really needed to.

However, this definitely isn't the case for most people. If people are just using Reddit for certain things they just don't see on Lemmy, that's totally fine (though i hope they're using an ad blocker or something), especially if they stick around for when Lemmy does start having that kind of content.

Growth isn't a straight line and there will be points of fluctuation, stagnation, and decline.

Different ways of compressing the initial .tar archive.

Sounds like a Windows problem

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.

I get the frustration, but Windows is the one that strayed from convention/standard.

Also, i should've asked this earlier, but doesn't Windows also only look at the characters following the last dot in the filename when determining the file type? If so, then this should be fine for Windows, since there's only one canonical file extension at a time, right?

Getting rid of voting would do nothing to combat spam. There would be plenty of other ways communities could (and would) get spammed, not to mention how impossible interacting with and navigating communities with thousands of users would be even without the spam that would absolutely happen without content ranking.

Spam will happen on large platforms, and thankfully ActivityPub gives instances the ability to defederate/federate however they like to deal with problem instances. Personally, if Lemmy were to get rid of voting, there is no chance that I would use Lemmy whatsoever, and I feel pretty confident that most users wouldn't either.

Unfortunately, adoption has been slow and Alliance for Open Media are pushing back somewhat (especially Google^1, who leads the group) in favor of their inferior .avif format.

For me, it's not really to the point where I would use it as a primary browser, but it's still pretty damn good. Definitely worth a try.

Feel how you want, but Spotify has a very clear policy on hateful content. And sure, maybe you won't listen to it, but do you know who will? Bigoted psychos that will go out and commit a hate crime. Allowing content like this on a popular platform will lead to hate crimes. There is nothing wrong with private platforms choosing to not platform certain kinds of content and it is entirely within their right.

Spotify has the right to deplatfom hateful content and doing so is the ethical thing to do.

That's not what it means

That's because "cancel culture" doesn't actually mean anything.

Awesome to see Google embrace plaintext email! /j

"Legit" instances are able to moderate/control the spam coming from their users.

True, but it offered a much more secure alternative to opening up PDFs locally.

I tend to interpret ‘tankie’ to be people who support Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat or similar ideas

That's just Marxism. That idea started with Marx, not Lenin. He even talks about it in the Communist Manifesto, saying:

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Not even mentioning his Critique of the Gotha Programme where he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition from capitalism to communism extensively. It's okay to not be a Marxist, but it's just factually incorrect to claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat isn't integral to Marx's understanding of the transition to communism.

Do you believe pro-IDF groups should be allowed on campuses despite the fact that they are genocidal collaborators?

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

However, getting people used to double extensions is one quick way of increasing the success rate of attacks such as the infamous “.pdf.exe” invoice from an email attachment.

Very good point. Though, i would argue that this would be much less of a problem if Windows stopped sometimes hiding file extensions.

I can’t see how Windows’ convention is worse

I don't believe what you're referring to is really a Windows versus Linux/Unix thing.

If I zip a file, it doesn’t matter what it was in a previous life, it’s now a zip - this is also how Unix deals with many filetypes, I’ve never seen a .h264.mp4 file, even though the .mp4 container can actually represent different types of encoding.

I disagree, but i do get what you're saying here. I don't think that example really works though, because a .mp4 file isn't derived from a .h264 file. A .mp4 is a container that may include h264-encoded video, but it may also have a channel with Opus-encoded audio or something. It's apples and oranges.

Also, even though there shouldn't be any technical issues with this on Windows, you can still use a typical short filename suffix if you wish, though i would argue that using the long filename suffix is more expressive. From "tar (computing)" on Wikipedia:

You seem to be right. i misunderstood exactly how privacy.resistFingerprinting worked.

The act of book banning itself isn't the real issue. The issue is the homophobia/transphobia motivating the conservative book banning.