Flash was a security nightmare all round, not counting the security flaws. It was just designed without any security features. It was also terribly inefficient at its core job, that was supposedly vector animation. It filled a gap in a time where browser and standards where not that advanced.

Over time, Flash issues where never resolved, but the bloatness of the software kept increasing. Along the way, HTML got better specs, JavaScript got vast improvement, especially in everyone adhering to roughly the same standard (thanks microsoft for finally caving in…), and so the flash interpreter was highly redundant with the browser itself.

For a while flash editors could export in HTML5 and you’d get roughly the same result, but with a fraction of the resources requirements, so naturally there was little incentive to keep the flash player around.

I’m not sure if “killing flash” could be attributed to their author, or to the loss of interest.

Also note that alternative flash players exists to still play older swf files, and some sites uses them alongside with plain video conversion for flash animations that weren’t dynamic.

Yes. But if you live in the future, you have to wait for dozens of dozens of intermediate to do so! Great!

Likely, you’ll see the first frame only on older software. Encoding animation in a dedicated animation chunk and using the base spec for the first keyframe sounds like the sane thing to do, so they likely did that.

I’m not going to look into it now, because I would then have to implement it. :D

The PNG format is made of chunks that have determined roles, and provides provisions for newer “standardized” chunks alongside the custom chunks it had supported until now. It is likely that PNG made with newer software that does not use new features, or uses only additional features, will remain readable by older software to some extent.

I’d rather these laws be against abusing and exploiting child, as well as against ruining their lives. Not only that would be more helpful, it would also work in this case, since actual likeness are involved.

Alas, whether there’s a law against that specific use case or not, it is somewhat difficult to police what people do in their home, without a third party whistleblower. Making more, impossible to apply laws for this specific case does not seem that useful.

In the list of things nobody cares about, you forgot “actually do what’s asked”. Use these tool for a very short while and be amazed at how bad it is to do things that are extremely well known and documented.

It doesn’t detract from the parent’s comment at all.

If there’s two things that have been consistent over time with the recent LLM and AI craze, is that it have some good, helpful applications for people with disabilities, and that none of the big players are looking into them. Some are actively working against them. Probably because it’s harder to monetize “living” from a PR perspective.

Yeah, wayland good, etc etc.

Now we’re at the point where wayland is becoming the only option, while there are still some things that don’t work well, like showing up a modal, opening a context menu in a window that wasn’t in focus, copy/pasting from non foreground UI applications… All this under KDE, which is somewhat large in terms of good DE.

I understand the argument that if we have to move, we have to start the move at some point. But I’m not sure we have to move. People keep telling X is a messy dangerous unmaintained eldritch horror sucking on your souls every seconds, but as a user, if moving back to X fixes all the tiny weird issues and shows no obvious downside, it’s hard to justify the switch.

First, I said “the init process”. The systemd project reinventing the wheel at every occasion is half garbage half “yeah, it’s not horrible, but we’re going to iron it out again for the next decades” level of horror. You won’t have to convince me of that. And don’t get me started on “binary” logs that sometimes takes dozen of seconds to just show up when requested. But the management of services is an overall improvement over scripts stitched together.

I’m well aware of these discussions.

But systemd management, and overall presence, is not something most people would care about. From a user perspective, the system boots, and things works (mostly). To non admin user, running a systemd system or a sysvinit system or whatever is irrelevant.

It’s the first time I hear systemd or wayland were spelling the death of the linux desktop (not even gonna mention gnome, it’s a choice).

There are controversies around these two, some extremely valid, some a bit over the top, but both do work adequately for the vast majority of common use cases. I’d even argue that systemd (the init process) is better as far as being user friendly. And I say “user”, not “poweruser” nor “sysadmin”. And wayland is an opportunity to clear some long-lasting backward stuff, and even though it is possible to find issue today, for regular (and new) users, it has no bearing on the usability of their system.

when directed and used correctly by an expert

They’re also likely to fire the experts.

Things LLM can’t do well without extensive checking on large corpus of data:

• summarizing
• providing informed opinions

What is it they want to make “more efficient” again? Digesting thousands of documents, filter extremely specific subset of data, and shorten the output?

Oh.

That’s the plan. Attack subject that are traditionally seen as taboo/sensitive/whatever, then extend. CSAM content, porn in general, even random bulletin board with cringey content these days, are used as the entrypoint. You target those, people are wary about defending their rights because of the flagship topic, so laws are changed to put some extra layers of tracking, surveillance, etc.

Step two is claim whatever site/service the current government dislike falls under an imaginary category that allows using these layers of surveillance. And these are extra hard to remove once put in place, because nobody wants to break their surveillance toy.

It’s never about the porn, it’s never about the kids, it’s never about our security when a proposal shows up and talks about breaking encryption, privacy, etc.

Stuff we want: protecting kids, having privacy.

Stuff these proposal do: break privacy, don’t care about kids (or anyone else for that matter).

Seems pretty simple to me. Again.

Ah, you used logic. That’s the issue. They don’t do that.

There is nobody with more dedication than IP lawyers and Nintendo.

And where would you download from, that is seen as legal sharing of someone else’s IP?

The closest you could get is by locating the ROM file in some PC remakes, assuming there’s no “protection” on them.

Again, playing around the “legal” way to do things. In reality, it’s different.

People buying the console for the games that are on that console, not generations before, are 100% fine.

Beside, it’s not something you have to fiddle with to get it work. Either a patch come, or you’re on your own.

It is not illegal to emulate a game that you own.

In a lot of place it is illegal to circumvent technical protection measures, which is technically required for almost anything starting from NES era. Making it impossible to “legally” rip your own games (yes, even in places where there IS a tax to allow private copy of content you bought). So the only way you can do that is by downloading it, where there is no “legal” way to distribute it in the first place, so “legally” you can’t download it either.

I’m not defending the practice, I’m saying that if you’re going the “legal” defense, you’re going to have a bad time if it gets attention. Fortunately, suing every single gamer on earth is not an attractive prospect.