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  • 83 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t. It designs part of the chips that go into their phones.

    Google also designs chips that go into its phones, and Microsoft has also designed chips and security co processors that have gone into PCs.

    (Of course, I’d never consider a Microsoft “security co processor” secure, nor an apple or google one).

    [edit] I also do not see your point of apple being better (or more virtuous) than google or microsoft for designing their own hardware, for 2 different reasons:

    • Currently Microsoft and Google have immense control over the software of PCs and phones. Apple wants to have full control of both the software and the hardware, and making their own hardware is a big step towards that goal. It means they’re restricting you (the user) from using the hardware you bought for your own purpose.

    • Making custom hardware does not make a company more or less virtuous. Manufacturing/designing capabilities are just spending money in the respective industry. As I mentioned before, both Google and Microsoft have designed their own chips, and they also have designed chips for their servers. I would also argue that we should stop humanizing companies. They don’t have human traits, they’re not virtuous, they’re just there to take your money and go.




  • Yes, and no. No app will display the image if it wasn’t already capable of displaying webp, period.

    However, there are many places (mainly websites where you can only upload certain formats, but it can also be apps) where the underlying infrastructure supports webp, but they do a simple extension check first with a list of file extensions that doesn’t include .webp. In those cases, changing the extension to .jpg will get the image through the filter, and the underlying system will detect the format using the magic number at the beginning of the file.

    The same thing can happen when your OS has no associated app to open .webp, but the app it uses for .jpg can also display .webp.





  • Client side anti-cheat (the one installed on your PC) will never work, it’s just fundamentally impossible. They can restrict user freedom as much as they want, but the hardware still isn’t under their control.

    The only reason they push for those kinds of anti-cheats is because they don’t have to pay for the extra processing of server side anti-cheat, and they also get the benefit of a backdoor into your computer that you may never fully uninstall without buying a new computer.



  • I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. I’d say you’re wrong, because it’s 10/10 times these things don’t work. I’ve seen many similar projects get proposed, funded and abandoned (even some that really did sound more efficient than this to me). The truth is, standard trains are still the cheapest thing you can put on those rails. They’re simple, repairable, predictable, they don’t break easily, can be easily driven by anyone or automated with standard systems that have been around for decades. Even if a small govt can’t buy a new train, they can get second hand trains from other cities, which will still work perfectly for decades.


  • Minecraft, the game that sold the most copies in history, has a huge infrastructure of community-hosted servers, some with tens of thousands of players playing at the same time. The community has created different flavors of the server software, optimized it, added mod support and even reprogrammed parts of it.

    At this point, it’s hard for me to believe how someone could say a community can’t run game servers with a straight face.


  • Spain used to have a budget of around 1% of their GDP for the military. It was so much that they actually could not spend it. Now that the budget has tripled almost overnight, they are having an internal crisis because there is no way they can use up all that money, even if they overbought 200% of supplies and overpaid for them.

    Increasing military budget is useless, because the service will not improve with it, just the useless spending and inefficiency. And because of the rushed spending, I’m sure the move will increase corruption.




    • Rounded corners. Everywhere. They lose so much space, especially on small screens, and everything feels crammed.

    • No personalization anywhere. You used to be able to completely customize social media profiles, to the point of editing your page’s CSS directly.

    • Modern OSes (except linux or BSD based ones which are not android) also have no color or personalization. You usually have the slabs of white on light mode, or the slabs of blak on dark mode, with only one color you can choose for some details.

    • JavaScript animations on every. Single. Website. I have an old phone (because I don’t like modern stuff), and it struggles with almost every modern, animated site. Is it really necessary to add all that js and animations?

    • No headphone jacks or expandable storage on modern phones. It probably costs cents to add those features. I know phones don’t usually have expandable storage because it makes you buy a new one once you fill all your storage, and I know they don’t have audio jacks because it makes you buy the company’s wireless headphones, but I need those features in my phone.

    • Why does everything have to be a web app now? Have people forgotten about actual softwate, that you own, that doesn’t need internet to work, that uses almost no resources and is faster and has more features than a web app? We got everything backward. Sites that should be webs like reddit will ask you to download their apps, while microsoft will try to code Word in javascript and sell it to you as an “upgrade”.

    • I hate subscriptions with passion, especially for software.


  • Where I live, if a kid jumps in front of your car, even if there is no crossing and you had no visibility, you still have the majority of the fault. The truth is you are the one driving a killing machine, and if you are going at a speed where you can’t ensure, with your currect visibility and road conditions, that an accident won’t happen, it’s you who is at fault.

    Of course that’s different on highways and speedways, where the one crossing would be found at fault. But for all residential areas, drivers need to be careful about pedestrians crossing the road, and especially kids who are unpredictable.