I once played around with having a very large switch statement (all mac address manufactors in one switch) and in LLVM it would compile fine without optimizations, but if I turned optimizations on it would just spend around half an hour compiling it. I think GCC did it faster, but its been some time ago since I did it. In the Rust crate that was the reasons for all this I just ended up doing perfect hashing which compiled much much faster.
Anyone who has a PSP laying around somewhere should go have a look at it because the battery in them consistently turn into a rather spicy pillow. Which I guess makes mod like this more interesting.
I did that two weeks ago and it turns out that it still works wonders. Granted, mine has a third-party battery in it. It's also a larger capacity one, so you need to run it without the battery cover.
Yep, I was surprised to find this as well. Though my Nintendo DS Lite seems fine. I have a first run PSP (complete with dead pixels when it was brand new). Apparently a screen upgrade is cheap and easy.
Somebody could think of the web as primarily a platform for consumption, in which case it is OK for it to support a limited number of formats, actually desirable because it reduces the attack area.
Another is that the web is connected to general purpose computing in which that case the web browser competes with GUI shells (e.g. explorer, finder) and should be able to support every image format that is commonly used on the platform.
Back in the 1990s most platform supported a lot of file formats that weren't JPEG or GIF but browsers didn't support them and only a small set of formats have been added since then.
A long time ago I ran some sites that hosted large image collections and I struggled with costs so I did a lot of thinking about how to optimize storage and transfer. I came to the conclusion about 5 years ago that WebP is consistently a win over Jpeg, but I've never been a fan of AVIF. Yeah, it does great for big blog hero images that people don't look at closely, but it makes my mirrorless shots look like they were shot on a cheap Android. Yeah, I've seen that picture of the F1 car and it is superficially impressive but if you look closely at the highlights you can see that it erased the real highlights and replaced them with something plausible but... different.
I'm on the other side, I hate webp because if I download such an image a lot of apps don't support it. So typically I need to screenshot it instead to get a usable jpg/png.
Now one more format to hate.
I would say webp/jxl/avif is anti-general compute, since they require very recent software.
Some people get mad at this reason for hating WebP, but it's so true. The main way in which most people's lives are affected by WebP is that images they download from the web no longer work.
So true. If browsers would just allow users to save images from the web in the user's choice of original, PNG or JPEG format, this would be a huge win. I recall 25 years ago that Internet Explorer, when right-clicking and saving an image, allowed me to save it as whatever it was, or as a .BMP. Somehow that's impossible today??
I know that end-users making memes or whatever aren't a demographic that will matter for adoption, but it seems really weird that this is still a problem on Windows and Mac in 2026. I've searched for browser extensions to no avail.
You don't need to bloat any menu. There's already a "Save image as..." context menu option which opens a save dialog. This dialog could have a way to select format.
I just tried it out now, using Waterfox on macOS 27. The save image dialog literally already has a Format dropdown. But I'm guessing it's just a weird part of some native dialog, it lets me select between "WebP Image" and "All Files". This kind of design could've been used to allow the user to save it as a different format than what it was served as.
Yup. That's what the native Save dialog in Windows does. And on Mac too. Hit Command-S right now and you can choose what flavor to save the webpage as (Webpage, Complete; Webpage, Single File; or HTML Only).
I'm also mad at anyone that linked to only libpng.
If you have support for multiple file types, you're already using multiple libraries or you're using a library that handles several kinds of file, either way you can and should update that.
For the hundredth time, I miss Amiga’s “datatypes” system. You’d download a sound or image or video or compression library and drop it in the right place to register it with the OS. Then any app which used the OS’s built-in system for opening media files automatically got support for that format, without changing a line of code.
Imagine if installing libzstd meant that every program on your computer suddenly knew how to use ZSTD compression, or adding libjpegxl added support to every browser, word processor, and age editor you’d already installed.
Some parts of AmigaOS were wonky, like lack of memory protection. Others would still be phenomenally useful today.
Lots of OS have something that is supposed to work like that except it really doesn't or it becomes a reason why "it just doesn't work". Like I remember there was a time that MacOS shipped drivers for WebP that worked with newer macs but didn't work with my 2013 Mac Mini until a few versions later they really fixed it.
Greenland is much better logistically in some ways (I work on experiments both in Greenland and in Antarctica), but the ice in Greenland is unlikely to be as good for IceCube as in Antarctica, due to a presumed larger number of dust layers from dry periods in Europe.
The US has a research station at Summit Station Greenland but compared to South Pole, it's spartan (like, the first time I went there, I slept in a tent because of lack of hard-sided berthing, but then a Polar bear came a few years later and now hard-sided berthing is required). There are longer-term plans to improve the station in Greenland but we'll see.
There's a weird overlap in engineering and physics disciplines between the hard engineering/business practices of the mining industry, and particle physics.
Right, but for those they need to make/move/collect a large amount of transparent material, like heavy water etc for the particles to interact with. But they get that 'for free' with the ice.
Interestingly IBM have made LEGO sets of various mainframes. I believe that they have been giving them away as prizes and such, there is also a few other companies with LEGO sets listed on the page as well: https://domjant.hu/bricks/
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