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Cake day: January 23rd, 2024

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  • I don’t think that’s the kind of watermark being talked about here, Kol.

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology would be called upon to, quoted from the COPIED ACT Summary, facilitate development of guidelines for voluntary, consensus-based standards and for detection of synthetic content, watermarking and content provenance information, including evaluation, testing and cybersecurity protection. I believe we’re talking about the unseen, math-y, certification and (I imagine) cryptography kind of digital watermark, not the crappy visual edits made by iFunny and co.

    In fact, since it also says:

    Prohibits removing, altering, tampering with, or disabling content provenance information, with a limited exception for security research purposes.

    The content in question might reach e.g. iFunny already “signed” and they wouldn’t be able to remove that.

    Of course, I’m saying this without actually fully understanding what fits under covered content (digital representations of copyrighted works). Does my OC on deviantart count as covered content? I think so, but I couldn’t tell you for certain. If anyone can help me understand this, please, that’d be really nice.

    And finally, as was already said by others, I think this does nothing about all the crap companies already did to artists, since the law can’t affect them retroactively. It’s not that cool for small artists, since they’ll still be abused, except big tech would have the legal monopoly on abuse.

    I mean no disrespect by this: did you read the article? I’m genuinely curious how you got the iFunny idea.


  • You know that it’s not a new concept, right? Just a new word for a specific type of rent seeking that has plagued capitalism forever.

    Any pre-existing name for this specific type of rent seeking you’d rather people used instead? For what it’s worth, I believe enshittification has its own benefits.

    It’s nice to see people learning economics from YA fiction authors, but read some books man

    There are better ways to express yourself than this.

    Being a YA fiction author does not diminish the worth of one’s ideas or their other works. Cory also worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is absolutely a position that, coupled with his many years of studying the digital landscape, gives him a level of insight into it that makes people interested in what he has to say about it, and for good reason. It’s not merely about economics.

    If you think people could do the subject, themselves, or others better in this regard by consuming better material, you could point a better direction than “read some books”




  • Enshittification will often involve doing things like this, yes. But as the link itself states, the actual meaning—per Doctorow’s original definition—is an entire process, and a little more descriptive. These things are not the same, one is just frequently a symptom of the other.

    Sorry if this comes across as pedantic, I’m in a personal quest, of sorts, to protect the original meaning because I think it’s too important to lose. To anyone else reading this: please, don’t use enshittification when you really only mean “the platform is doing something bad.”

    For the quoted behavior, I’m a big proponent of “asshole design.”


  • I had already seen this design a few weeks back and was then, as I am now, not very excited about it :^(

    It’s possible they’re trying to address the issue of the old toolbar being too crowded, and that’s neat, but I don’t think this is the right way to go about it:

    • Many people don’t use visual back and forward buttons, me included. And I don’t intend to use them anytime soon—my phone already has a back button, and I genuinely can’t remember when I last wanted to go forwards.
    • The “new tab” button is an interesting shortcut, but the functionality was already there in the long-press action of the tabs button. I’m sure this will be useful to some people, but again, not me. That’s 3 useless buttons on my screen, now.
    • If you change the address bar location to top in the customization settings, this design starts making a bit more sense, but that’s not exactly reassuring. I put the address bar on the bottom because I like it there, I like being able to quickly change or edit the URL without reaching for the top of my phone screen.
    • When they eventually implement tab grouping, assuming users get a quick tab group nav bar near the bottom, this toolbar will look ridiculous. With that height, it’ll be less like a toolbar and more like an entire mission control center eating up your screen.

    So…

    It seems like they had the right intentions, but somehow chose a really weird direction to go in. I don’t like that the way to disable this is hidden in the secret settings, it doesn’t exactly give off the impression that it’ll remain an option in the long-term. I’m going to try sharing my feedback with Mozilla, hopefully it’ll be useful.

    P.S. it’s far from all bad. I’m actually really interested in the new three-dot menu design, and there’s a lot I could write on why. It’s just that the toolbar is the most used and seen part of the browser; is it really asking for much to have it be closer to my ideal instead of an abstract generic user’s?

    P.P.S. upon further thought, large parts of this comment are just plain silly. Come on, I trust they’ll add a toggle as the feature leaves nightly, it’s clearly not ready yet. This is what happens when you forget nightly is for testing, you make a fool of yourself on lemmy. Some concerns remain (e.g. tab grouping), but again, that’s what constructive feedback is for. I’ve already seen multiple people very happy about the navbar, to the point that I almost feel bad for not liking it haha


  • If I was one of your readers, I’d much rather read on your self-hosted blog (bonus points if there’s RSS)… But I’m not. Since I’m neither a reader, nor the one who defines what fun means to you, I’m not sure my—and other commenters’—words should have too much bearing in your decision.

    I say, do what makes you (and your readers) happiest. Even if medium is by some measure bad, I’d guess it’s “only” about as bad as every other closed-up commercial option—I think they all suck. Look into what you actually care about, though, e.g. privacy, then make your own call.

    For what it’s worth, I agree with people saying medium is almost inexplicably annoying. I consider myself a patient person most of the time, yet nothing kills my interest in an article faster than seeing websites like medium full of dark-patterned cookie banners and popups and newsletters and signups on the other side of a link.

    But maybe we’re simply the wrong crowd to ask.







  • mke@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldgoddamnit
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    7 days ago

    I think I know what you’re talking about, and I think you might have misunderstood a few things. I’ll explain my point and I’d appreciate it if you could confirm later whether it helped, or if I’m the one who misunderstood you.

    “Saving as…” is, usually, just for setting the name of the file. The full filename, extension included. The extension is just another part of the name. It doesn’t define what rules the file’s contents actually follow. They’re for other purposes, such as helping your operating system know which software to use when opening each file. For example:

    User double clicks a .pdf System: Oh, I should try opening this in Adobe Acrobat.

    But that doesn’t mean the file is actually a PDF. You can change the extension of any file, and it won’t automatically be converted to that extension (unless a specific feature has been added to make that implicit conversion). You could give an executable a .pdf extension and your system might then try opening it in Acrobat. Of course, it won’t work—there’s no way the system could have automatically made that conversion for you.

    So you might wonder, why does your (fake) PNG—which is really just a webp with an incorrect extension—still work just fine? You can open it, view it, send it. What’s the trick?

    Thing is, the software that actually deals with those files doesn’t even need to care about the extension, it’s a lot smarter than that. These programs will use things like magic bytes to figure out what the file they’re handling really is and deal with it appropriately.

    So in this scenario, the user could save a webp file as PNG.

    funny cat.png (still a webp!)

    Then they might double click to open it.

    System: How do I open a .png again?

    • .webp -> try the image viewer
    • .jpeg -> try the image viewer
    • .png -> try the image viewer (there it is)

    And finally, the image viewer would correctly identify it as a webp image and display it normally.

    Image viewer: reading magic bytes… Image viewer: yeah, that’s a webp alright

    The user might then assume that, since everything works as expected, they properly converted their webp to a PNG. In reality, it’s all thanks to these programs, built upon decades of helping users just make things work. Same with Discord, Paint.NET, etc. Any decent software will handle files it’s meant to handle, even if they aren’t properly labeled.

    If you were to check the file contents though, using a tool like file, czkawka to find incorrect extensions, or even just checking image properties, it should still be identified as a webp.

    I didn’t try it myself as you said because, to my understanding of files and software, doing so made no sense. But again, do tell if I got something wrong or misunderstood your comment.


  • mke@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldgoddamnit
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    16 days ago

    Hey, thanks for the input. I’d like to read more about this, but I can’t seem to find anything related online. Anything else you could share?

    Just checking, you sure you’re not confusing fallback-to-another-format when the browser doesn’t support webp? Because that’s a bit of separate issue, and not a terribly relevant one since all major browsers have supported webp for a while now.