Skull giver

In a way LinkedIn is federated. You create a profile or post, and within minutes hundreds of shady data brokers and contact details resellers have a copy of your post available for their customers!

I don’t really see the benefit, though. LinkedIn is functionally almost the same as Facebook, and can be replicated by adding a theme to a Friendica instance with a few custom fields. The biggest difference is that LinkedIn allows recruiters to spam and stalk youoffer you jobs, other than that it’s just Facebook where most adults have decided to only talk about work stuff.

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.

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 most Europeans would think their royals are classy at all. Even if we stripped them of their power now they’d just be rich people living in large houses their family could already afford anyway. They’re basically government pawns we keep around for tradition and to make deals with vain foreign leaders. China does something similar, but they used pandas. If you’re a good little friend of the totalitarians, you get to have a panda in your zoo.

You think the leaders of shit holes are going to be interested in presidents? Nah, they meet presidents every day. If you want to placate them, you take our the big guns. You go “Who’s a big boy president? That’s right, it’s you! You can have a sleepover in a real palace just like in the Disney movies! Everyone thinks you’re such an important big boy!” These leaders aren’t rational-thinking, they’re coming from (sub)cultures where displays of wealth and status mean something, and I bet nothing makes a vain guy happier than to say they made a king entertain them. They feel like they’re such big shits pushing around our stage puppets.

You’d think those foreign leaders would feel belittled but sending royalty to shitholes works great, politically. The national news broadcaster has this trick where they’re officially “royal Dutch news” (because of weird laws, you don’t need to be related to royalty in any way to be granted that title as a company) and yelling “royal Dutch news” instead of “Dutch news” when trying to ask questions actually works. Even in countries with presidents. It’s extremely stupid but it’s been proven to work.

I don’t think the royals are anything special but I also don’t think the political circus around electing a president and the endless drama that follows will be any cheaper (or better, for that matter). With the way things are going in this country, I’ll take King Wimlex over President Wilders, thank you very much.

Kids shouldn’t even be on social media, but at least the corporate ones are covering their ass against lawsuits well enough that they try to moderate content.

The Fediverse is not a place for kids. Servers catering especially towards kids are DEFINITELY not for kids, because that’s exactly the kind of server I would build if I were a pedo.

The legal requirements for hosting content for kids are a massive headache that you definitely don’t want to take on as a volunteer. The Fediverse can’t even comply with the GDPR, let alone COPPA and its many international alternatives that actually see enforcement.

Of course I was a kid on the internet too and very few websites care about lying about your age, but if you do that and see the occasional dick, fetish porn or gore, you’ve only got yourself to blame. Plus, the Fediverse is full of misinformation, lies, and propaganda, from every side of the spectrum. Moderators can only do so much, and some moderators straight-up post misinformation and propaganda themselves. Best not to expose kids to any it that shit until their brains have developed a bit more.

Oracle has a generous free server offering. You will need to trust Oracle not to turn off your server because a business customer needs it, though. Availability of their good free tier also fluctuates and you need to figure out their weird IP/firewall/security config.

You need a domain name to effectively federate, too. There are free options available for those too, but they’re not very reliable.

We pretty much had this when the first reliable Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge came online. The Fediverse side protested and made the entire system opt-in, making it practically unusable because people that don’t have a favourite Linux distro don’t know what a fedi is and why they should bridge to it.

When this goes live, I expect people to treat it the same as every other sizeable social media joining the Fediverse, with outrange and block lists.

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