Every community I care about is dead

  • 12 Posts
  • 372 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that’s not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it’s served as WebP it’s 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It’s a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that’s used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can’t tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people’s data for no reason.




  • You can change the background color by changing the ["cre_background_color"] key in settings.reader.lua (again, I dislike needing to configure it like this). On my Android and desktop I set it to ["cre_background_color"] = "0xECECEC",, which inverts into a nice gray when I set it to night mode, then I invert all the image colors so they’re a normal color. Font color can’t be changed though, TMK. You can change font color with custom CSS snippets.



  • Have you tried KOReader yet? It’s not Material UI and doesn’t have any sort of “theme”, since it’s very focused on just showing your text, but it lets you extensively pick fonts and styles for your books, has dictionary lookups (tap and hold), page view, and it can sync with itself (available on the desktop and many physical ereaders). My main gripe is that it’s very configurable, and I don’t personally like many of the defaults. After setting it all up it’s quite powerful, and I use it on my physical ereader, Android phone, and desktop PC in roughly the same configuration.


  • You’re right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of “we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don’t because we’re frozen in place by greed” instead of “this is something we could do with infrastructure today”. If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we’re stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.






  • JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.

    Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.