There’s some politics involved. Basically, everyone is rallying behind JPEGXL instead of WebP, but Google refuses to support JPEGXL in Chrome. The reasoning they gave is weak, so it’s assumed that they’re just trying to force the format they invented on everyone because they can.

IIRC, performance of the two formats is similar.

Lazy motherfuckers on this site can’t even use proper grammar when being a snarky asshole. That shit you wrote is barely coherent.

Unprivileged users are stuck with cancer. Life ain’t fair.

Using a phone that long is risky due to the lack of security updates, especially if you’re using it for work. People not using phones longer is a problem, but the bigger issue is manufacturers killing support so quickly to force people into upgrading.

I recently upgraded after 5 years on an iPhone because it reached the end of its support cycle. I considered another iPhone because 5 years of support is great, but really didn’t feel like paying another $1000+ for what is essentially the same phone I was already using, just with a different body. So I went with a used Pixel 7 on ebay and installed GrapheneOS on it, and I’m very happy with it. I’m getting the same 5 years of support, a more secure OS, and I’m recycling at the same time!

In the US at least, I think most people get their phones through their carrier and are stuck on a contract paying it off for ~3 years. I think rich people and enthusiasts/fanboys are the only ones who upgrade every year or buy it unlocked at full price from the manufacturer.

data portability is the ultimate right and the key to ensure continuing innovation

Interoperability in general is the solution to walled gardens and monopolies that harm competition, consumers, and innovation.

These types of projects are driven by metrics, and teams have some kind of quota/goal that they need to reach by a certain date to keep the project on schedule. Bonuses or job security may be on the line here, and so you may see some desperate employees “going the extra mile” to reach their goals.

Relatedly, Alexa’s voice activation sensitivity is essentially a tunable number. It can be changed to be more sensitive, so that it will activate more easily (e.g. maybe you say “Alex” instead of “Alexa”). The people who control this are likely on the team with that deadline, so the incentives are there to lower this value in order to collect more data by recording personal conversations “accidentally”. Maybe a bad update goes out that causes Alexa to activate randomly, and they quickly fix it after a few days when they collected all the non-Alexa personal conversations they need for their AI.

That’s maybe a bit too deep into the paranoia/tinfoil hat spectrum for some, but history has shown that you can’t give big tech the benefit of the doubt. Especially when you see some of the documents from the Google trial, where executives discuss rolling back new features to improve arbitrary metrics in the short term so that they can get their bonuses for the quarter, even if it hurts consumers.

It’s for privacy purposes. An online translator requires that all the text you’re reading be sent to a third party, which may or may not use it for nefarious purposes. E.g. maybe you translate your bank account’s web page because there’s a word you don’t know, and now Google knows how much money you have in your bank account.

If you don’t care about that kind of privacy, then there’s no reason you couldn’t use an existing online translator. Firefox has always supported that.

If you want to dig into it, I believe this is the core project for the translations.

A gun owner with a lot of opinions about Mexico. That about tracks.

If you want to use C/C++ you may be more interested in O3DE, although it’s a AAA specialized game engine that’s not very user friendly. If you’re new to game dev in general, then Godot is definitely the easiest to get started with, but you should use GDScript and not C/C++.

EDIT: or just make your own little game engine with OpenGL or Vulkan, That’s probably the most effective way to learn nearly everything…

This is the biggest problem with Valve at the moment. They’re awesome, but only because of the current leadership. Once these guys retire or die, it’s very likely Valve will enshittify like every other business.

Valve needs to be hit by regulators at some point. They just have too much market power.

And Lemmy… stays the same

An optimistic interpretation is that they feel like they can’t stop data collection without being hurt in the marketplace by competitors who will make more money by continuing to collect data, so they want governmentregulations to level the playing field.

That’s being really charitable though…

Computer literacy needs to be a subject treated like math and science in school. It shouldn’t just be one class that older students take one year, but a class that is taken every year and escalates to more advanced topics as they get older.

And if there’s no space in the schedule, then cut back on the science classes. Who even remembers anything they learned in middle school science? Learning about sedimentary rocks and cumulonimbus clouds never helped me, personally.

DDG isn’t the only alternative to Google. I use Kagi and love it. The results IME are definitely better than Google’s.

In the future, Google will create a chatbot doppelganger of you and use it to recommend products to your friends and family.

It’s the least greasy browser that actually works with the modern web.

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Nope. I have some that I used as a kid, and sometimes I reuse them when I can’t think of a new one for some throwaway service.

The idea of having an alternate online persona doesn’t appeal to me at all, nor does the idea of being well known or recognized in general. I don’t go out of my way to remain untraceable or anything cool like that, but switching up usernames every once in a while is easy to do.