but sometimes you have kids online who don’t obviously seem like kids because you can’t see them

Point taken… Altho personally I don’t care about how old someone is. When I game online or just squat on Lemmy/Reddit/forum, I’m fine taking to people whether they’re 13 or 70. If anything, younger people tend to be more open minded, which possibly comes with having access to all the information.

But yea I guess some topics probably hit different when you grow up in a certain style of environment. Still, when I babysit kids, I find they are curious about everything and are willing to change their mind if they get explained something realistically. And I don’t see younger people ask loaded questions as often as older folks do.

I’d imagine if you’re not in tech circles you also don’t find out much about privacy risks.

I don’t begrudge people for not knowing things. What I find interesting is how they react when they learn about something, or their initial train of thought. You probably know the experiment of asking randos “should dihydrohen monoxide be banned?”

I have this hobby almost, I like finding new things, weird and divisive stuff. Oddball topics, weird fetishes, strange habits, crazy hobbies, wild art, whatever. If there’s a community with “weird” in the title, I’ll probably subscribe to it.

And it also gives me some insight into how outsiders react when they stumble upon that stuff. Most people, when confronted with something out of their ordinary, tend to go “damn good thing I’m normal, everyone is weird” or worse. So I guess it is human nature, but you can also imagine how tiring it can get.

I understand and even appreciate that people have different priorities, worries and preferences. Which is why I dislike the attitude some take, “if you don’t care about X, you’re part of the problem”. It may even be true in lots of cases, but we can’t all care about the same things, less we all worry about everything all the time, and that’s not good or realistic.

Funny thing though. I’ve seen people have civil debates about the most sensitive, divisive topics, as long as the initial question or statement comes from a place of genuine curiosity.

But whenever I see people ask the “why is privacy important?” question, it’s never just “am I missing something?” but more of a “gimme all the ads, collect everything about me, I don’t care”, sometimes with the “you conspiracy theorists weirdos, nobody cares about you and you’re probably pedos anyway” sprinkled in.

So it’s a bit tiring to see this over and over, hence my snark at the beginning. And I don’t know where the attitude is coming from. Maybe it’s just a relatively new issue and people aren’t used to constantly being exposed to the debate, like with some other topics?

But in that case I gather that it should be the opposite problem - we used to have much more privacy than we have now, that just has to be obvious (hence the questions in the first place), so the proper question to ask would be “wait, why is everyone so interested in everything I do all of a sudden? Why is every corporation suddenly collecting all my data and giving me free stuff in return while raking in billions of profits? Hm, sus”

Eh maybe I’m missing something.

My point is that if it’s something that clearly lots of people care about, it’s probably a good idea to think a little.

The “why anyone would” part is in the “why people make a fuss”. I don’t wish to be a teacher here picking apart every word, don’t get me wrong, but people get upset if you invalidate what they care about. It’s like telling someone who’s angry to calm down.

Fortunately people here have more patience heh.

Well imagine coming to a vegetarian forum and asking: “Why does everyone make a fuss about killing animals? I eat meat three times every day, go on hunts every month, sometimes just for fun, I don’t even eat those animals. Also I don’t care about cages and all that, animals don’t have souls anyway.”

It may also be a genuine question, but sometimes it’s good to spend 10 seconds before asking, either by just thinking or maybe do a very brief web search.

In general, questions of the “I don’t care about X so I don’t see why anyone else could” kind tend to be like that. You can ask, but you can also expect people won’t want to talk to you.

If you’d phrase this in a less twatty way, you could almost ask this in a “no stupid questions” community.

SF: Europa Report

I find 95% of foss software to be better than the commercial alternatives, and I’m not joking. As for bugs, foss devs are usually faster to respond to bug reports and user requests too, unless it’s some mismanaged behemoth like Mozilla.

Thing is, commercial software can use the money for advertising and marketing. Foss, especially of the free to use kind, usually only spread by word of mouth, and even that only within the foss communities at first.

Let’s not get into examples, because I’m sure we can always find examples for every case and it often comes to specific preferences. My general point is, that people who think free has to be crap, and commercial has to be good, are categorically wrong.

It’s in fact backwards: if you do something only for money, you’re incentivized to do the least amount of work either for maximum effectiveness or to give yourself time to do stuff you actually want to do.

It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software, which resolves a problem the user had.

I don’t know what kind of sw you use, but usually I find Foss software to be sleek, functional, fast with good support and updates, while commercial software is ridden with ads, trackers, bloat and bugs. Exceptions on both sides but the notion that free software is generally worse is categorically incorrect.

Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living?

So first not everyone can contribute. Usually people who also use the software and have personal (or monetary) interest in it, contribute.

And why does everything has to be about monetisation? Yes, both people and gigantic corporations make money off foss in various ways, I’m sure others have explained that already. But people also do things for other reasons than just money.

But I’m just baffled how people so often declare that foss can’t work or that it’s qualitatively worse, even though the entire planet has been dependent on foss for decades.

No, just because someone sells something directly, doesn’t mean it’s inherently better.

Not saying it’s bad, I’m sure it holds up okay as it’s a good game, I just think you can’t enjoy the environment and atmosphere as much.

Ugh, flashbacks to KDE 4…

I only really watch foss stuff, which should be exciting, but I get tired as it’s always much of the same news:

• a new private messenger (like we don’t have 500 of those already)
• a new app/program/distro that does the same thing as 10 other ones
• a “simple” app/program that doesn’t do much of anything, just like 10 other ones of the same kind, will get 3 updates and then die
• something for the terminal for terminal nerds that could really use a gui but shutup you dirty normie
• a library that sounds cool but nobody except maybe some corporation will ever use it
• announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we’ll never hear of the project again

So I’m not exactly thrilled about anything either, tho for every different reasons

I feel like that’s a game that needs a big screen to be enjoyed, can’t imagine playing on a handheld.

It’s one of the few games where I went to collect all the collectibles, because I loved the exploration, environment, atmosphere and mostly the controls too.

It also looked incredible for the time - I first played it on PC when it came out, later on PS3 where it was only fine if quite downgraded. Yea the presentation and sense of wonder are very important for that feel.

Some of the action is way over the top, especially in later parts, and the amount of abuse Lara survives is just stupid. It’s one of those “ludonarrative dissonance” games for sure.

I’m not against gif in general as a format, nor for the specific use case I mentioned. (Even tho afaik webp or others can do animations and transparency too.)

But you know that when people say “gif” they really mean “short video”, and don’t know the difference. And so when they are making a short video and saving it, they see “gif” in export options and choose that, because they think that’s what it is.

A while ago I was debating with someone who was looking for an optimal way to encode gifs - as actual gif the format - of gameplay videos. Like, several minutes of HD gameplay, and they were using gif for that.

Similar problem is with PNG which people use for just about anything, like screenshots of Instagram posts.

If using more modern, better formats means killing old formats but also making the whole internet faster and me needing less storage space or not needing to go through conversion process every time, and maybe even eventually eliminating the ridiculously overcompressed or 100x recompressed or 8-bit dithered crap that are supposedly images and “gifs” these days, then I’m definitely for it.

Oh come on, every cpu in the last 15 years has hardware support for multiple simultaneous playbacks of h264 video, and in the last 10 years x265 too.

1000 gifs on a screen, yea that’s definitely not a page I ever want to see, thanks. Why the hell would I need that?

And yea sure obviously gif is efficient on bare metal cpu, because it’s a format made for 33 MHz CPU without a floating point. It was also made with a handful specific use cases in mind and specced accordingly, so it has absolutely no place in anything else than animated clipart loops. Don’t even argue, please, this is so silly.

I find the usual large and long SNES/PS1 era JRPGs quite bloated and grindy, to be honest. A while ago I played Phantasy Star IV, which is a lot more lightweight, linear and shorter than say, FF6, and I found that quite refreshing. Maybe you can try that as a change of style.

Weird. Did you try through catbox.moe? That’s what I use to post images. I don’t have experience with animated stuff though, sorry.

This animation bugs out even when I just view it in plain browser or in jerboa, looks like a compression problem. Is that a converted gif? The artifacting looks consistent with gif compression rather than webp, so probably the software you’re using to convert it is reading it wrong. Try some of the online converters, maybe this https://cloudconvert.com/gif-to-webp (it’s what I use to convert gifs to mp4)

Nothing except that it’s a horribly obsolete, bloated, barely compressed format with shit quality that’s misused for a completely different purpose than what it’s meant for.

When I download gifs of stuff I can’t find anywhere else, I convert them to mp4. A 50 MB gif turns into a 300 kB mp4.

So… I guess that’s wrong.

Death to gif

The latest SDUC standard allows for up to 128 TB.