lucgommans (u/lucgommans)

lucgommans commented on Europe's first geostationary sounder satellite is launched eumetsat.int/europes-firs... · Posted by u/diggan

lutoma · 2 months ago

Other notable .int domains:

• World Health Organization - https://who.int

• NATO - https://nato.int

• Council of Europe - https://coe.int

• Mercosur - https://mercosur.int

• African Union - https://au.int

• EFTA - https://efta.int

lucgommans · 2 months ago

List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_.in...

(Not real affiliation but still: I added a domain to that page at some point)

lucgommans commented on Why JPEGs still rule the web (2024) spectrum.ieee.org/jpeg-im... · Posted by u/purpleko

lucgommans · 2 months ago

> It’s been difficult to remove [old JPEG] from its perch. [...] the formats AVIF and HEIC, each developed by standards bodies, have largely outpaced [JPEG]

I'm currently sticking to JPEG because, last time I tried, JPEG came out as the best format. Referencing my memory at https://chaos.social/@luc/113615076328300784

- JPEG has two advantages on slow connections: the dimensions are either stored up front so the layout doesn't jump, or maybe the renderer is better; and it loads a less-sharp version first and progressively gets sharper

- JPEG was way faster when compressing and decompressing

- on the particular photo I wanted to optimise in this instance, JPEG was also simply the best quality for a given filesize which really surprised me after 32 years of potential innovation

Regarding AVIF, my n=1 experience was that it "makes smooth gradients where jpeg degrades to blotchy pixels, but at decent quality levels, jpeg preserves the grain that makes the photo look real". Gradients instead of ugliness at really small sizes can be perfect for your use-case, but note that it's also ~80 times slower at compression (80s vs. <1s)

JpegXL isn't widely in browsers yet so I couldn't use it

> These days, the [JPEG] format is similar to MP3

The difference with mp3 is that Opus is either a bit better or much better, but it's always noticeably better.

You can save ~half the storage space. For speech (audio books) I use 40kbps, and for music maybe 128kbps which is probably overkill. And I delete the originals without even checking anymore if it really sounds the same, I noticed that I simply can't tell the original apart in a blind test, no matter what expensive headset setup I try

TFA attributes it to a simple "they were first" advantage, but I think this is why "Why JPEGs still rule the web": no file format is better than JPEG in the same way as Opus is better than MP3; in that you don't have to think about it anymore and it's always a win in either filesize or quality

That said, Opus is also annoyingly hard to get into people's minds, but I've done it and you also see major platforms from compress-once-serve-continuously video (e.g. Youtube) to VoIP (e.g. Whatsapp) switching over for all their audio applications

lucgommans commented on Plain Vanilla Web plainvanillaweb.com/index... · Posted by u/andrewrn

wewewedxfgdf · 4 months ago

Is there any clean solution to the innerhtml problem in plain JavaScript applications, that does not require a virtual DOM or component lifecycle AND has Jetbrains IDE support?

I'd like to use lit-html but Jetbrains does not support it - very annoying.

lucgommans · 4 months ago

Was wondering what you meant so I looked up "the innerhtml problem" and the top result indeed does list quite a few issues with appending to innerHTML that can be easily avoided. For anyone else interested: https://stackoverflow.com/a/33995479/1201863

lucgommans commented on Why is appending to the innerHTML property bad? stackoverflow.com/a/33995... · Posted by u/lucgommans

lucgommans · 4 months ago

I knew changing innerHTML had some side effects, but this answer shows just how many corner cases it causes and offers a drop-in replacement at least for appending. Thought other developers on this site would also be interested to learn this

lucgommans commented on How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) merriam-webster.com/gramm... · Posted by u/Stratoscope

crazygringo · 5 months ago

I think you're just not used to it.

Quick, tell me how wide this range is, just as an order of magnitude:

285368737954–285368783645

Would be a lot easier if I only included the range at the end which had actually changed, wouldn't it?

That's why it's clearer. Now obviously that was an extreme example, but it's also easier to see at a glance that 1,387–9 is just three pages, as opposed to 1,387–1,389.

lucgommans · 5 months ago

Taken to an extreme without formatting, sure, but what ranges have that many digits in human-readable situations? And if there are those exception situations, you can word around it for that case ("285368760800±45691" or "45'691 years after 285'368'737'954")

Genuinely trying to think of an examples, since e.g. books aren't ever that long and search results don't have that many pages (that you'd all read and refer back to). A salary range, perhaps, can get into the seven digits in extreme cases (not that you care about any individual digit when you make a lifetime's worth of money in a bit more than a year): "Prospective salary is 2'423'000 to 2'432'000" seems to convey the relevant info as well as "Prospective salary is 2'423'000 to 9'000" does (except that I wouldn't understand the latter and ask what this second number means, but that's plausibly attributable to me as an individual not being used to it)

lucgommans commented on Most promoted and blocked domains on Kagi kagi.com/stats?stat=leade... · Posted by u/lucgommans

bcoates · 5 months ago

Looks like alternativeto.net wins the most divisive prize, for being on the top boosted list but also heavily banned/demoted.

Runner up to the NYT

lucgommans · 5 months ago

I really like alternativeto. It's not always good: sometimes there are simply no good alternatives, or the community hasn't voted for the ones I'd have voted for and so a good option is way, way down. But if I want to know alternatives, I go there directly, so I guess that's maybe why people block it from appearing in random search results? I found it puzzling to see a useful site blocked (especially when I haven't seen it appear much in search results, but then, I've also been using DDG primarily, which ranks things rather differently)

lucgommans commented on Most promoted and blocked domains on Kagi kagi.com/stats?stat=leade... · Posted by u/lucgommans

Brajeshwar · 5 months ago

Two different views for logged-in users and public. I realize that it has a different view from a different non-logged-in browser (or incognito).

I stopped wearing T-Shirt swags from companies quite a while back. Recently, I thought of promoting Kagi and wore the T-Shirt they sent at a few meet-ups, office spaces with lots of tech-people and no-one recognize it. A few of them thought, when we talked, if the logo is for a Golfing group/community!

Personally, I was thinking I’m proudly promoting something akin to ‘Wearing Google T-Shirt in 1999’ but this time, “Humanize the Web.”

lucgommans · 5 months ago

I don't understand. Opening the page in a logged-out state, it looks the same to me (just that there are not buttons to pick whether you want to raise/lower/block a domain when you're logged out). What's the different view you mean?

lucgommans commented on Most promoted and blocked domains on Kagi kagi.com/stats?stat=leade... · Posted by u/lucgommans

0xTJ · 5 months ago

I'm not surprised to see w3schools.com up there. I haven't come across it recently because of shifts in what I do, but it used to come up so often when I was looking for coding documentation. It was almost always useless.

lucgommans · 5 months ago

If only it was merely useless. I know its reputation but it had some information that MDN did not have, so I used it this once in recent years. Turned out, the information was simply wrong and so I made a wrong decision based on that. (It might have been about favicon format support in different browsers. Presumably it was Safari that never had support for vector graphics whereas w3schools listed it as such, and it's not like you can just download Safari to double check.) Regardless, what I'm sure about is that I alerted them to whatever the problem was, but for me it was the last nail in that coffin

lucgommans commented on How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-) merriam-webster.com/gramm... · Posted by u/Stratoscope

zahlman · 5 months ago

  $ python -m this | grep '--' -

lucgommans · 5 months ago

Is this meaning to grep for a double hyphen from standard in, or to mark the start of positional arguments and then grep for a hyphen? If you want both, it should be:

    $ python -m this | grep -- -- -

Which is just beautiful

(Your example causes the last hyphen to be grepped for, which happens to only match doubled-up ones because single ones don't occur in that text. The quotes/apostrophes do nothing because they're parsed by (ba)sh and so only the hyphens are passed to grep, not the quotes. The last hyphen can be omitted because reading from stdin is the default if neither filenames nor recursion options are passed.)