Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

WebP has flaws as a format – don’t we all – but I think the commentary should be putting more blame on (1) the industry’s failure to standardize on (and rigorously reviews the implementations of) a single JPEG successor format, given the obvious hunger, and (2) the practice of implementing anything that reads nontrivial untrusted data in a programming language that is not memory-safe.

When people and ideas I thought were cool in 2015 turn out to be wrong or tiresome: Everything changes. I have grown since then; also, some things that were once good are now bad.

When people or ideas I irrationally disliked in 2015 are now recognized as bad: I was right all along, as I always am.

Gently closing the Desmos tab where I’ve been trying to build some kind of trigonometric intuitions about … ah … circles, maybe?

@tim The only way to ensure total forward privacy!

@tim Or the complete destruction of academia so that future grad student working on a paper about early internet social norms never exists

You ever think about how we have the both-sides view of a lot of important personal correspondences, even state-of-the-art-ly–encrypted correspondences, from like the early modern era and such? Or like we have Pepys’s diary, which (if I recall) he assumed that only he could read? It comes to mind a lot when I write a personal e-mail or make a new notes.md or whatever.

@bcamper Literally thousands, even in a single handful.

@kylebarron Seems immoderate. Maybe walk it back to half that before releasing it?

@kjhealy Did you know: the checksum algorithm used for the IDs on shipping containers also yields one of 11 states, but instead of using X they simply declare IDs that would check to 11 invalid. Nevertheless you can occasionally find a shipping container using one of these IDs (always, so far as I know, wrapping around to 0).

Lots of tinkering left to do on both the hardware and software sides, but I think my indoor GNSS setup is already picking up tidal signals on its test run.

@llimllib @nelson Snitch-tagging @kjhealy.

@hannah Not surprising; you don’t see a lot of people with the last name Mix.

I’m against this. https://mastodon.social/@weatherwest/111098709498989880

Having worked around some very good programmers over the years (@sgillies, for example) means that sometimes when I write unwise code there’s a little voice saying “Wait, do it the better way! Save yourself the pain!” and I ignore it.

A freshly popular thing seems to be “I tried one X (film, meal, biography, …) from every country in the world!” and that’s cool in some ways, but in other ways, please stop reifying or familiarizing or practicing the country as the natural unit of humanity.

@ingrid ♥