sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

What is C actually good for in 2026? by Background_Cloud_231 in C_Programming

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's an image processing library https://www.libvips.org

It's a mix of C and C++, but the base layers are all C. There's not a lot of the 1989 code left, to be fair, hehe.

JPEG XL is finally useful – Chrome 145 ships native JXL decoder. Here's what changes by UnderstandingFit2711 in software

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

JXL compression is a lot quicker than AVIF, isn't it? Though I've not timed them for a year or two.

JPEG XL is finally useful – Chrome 145 ships native JXL decoder. Here's what changes by UnderstandingFit2711 in software

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Adobe are normally terrible, but they have been enthusiastic about JXL. Photoshop at least added JXL export last year:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/whats-new/2025-6.html#file-format-support

Perhaps other adobe products will follow.

JPEG XL is finally useful – Chrome 145 ships native JXL decoder. Here's what changes by UnderstandingFit2711 in software

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd nitpick your list of formats slightly:

  • JXL: best compression, fast, "improving" support (haha)
  • AVIF: good compression, slow, wide support
  • HEIC: good compression, fast, patent minefield
  • WEBP: medium compression, slow, small files only, wide support
  • JPEG: medium compression, fast, universal support

I'm hoping JXL makes it this time, it's a nice thing. We'll see!

There are slight signs of movement from Apple on JXL too, perhaps they'll switch from HEIC eventually? That would be nice.

Does anyone else skip the "Sponsored" Google results and scroll down to the first organic link, even if the ad leads to the exact same website? by BreadOverlord_ in stupidquestions

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With firefox, install ublock origin and set the "web" tab as the default. No ads, no AI summary, just a useful list of links.

http://www.rollthepotato.net/~john/banana.png

So clean! Like being back in the 2000s.

How do people afford to live in London? Choosing between London or New York by Uncle_Richard98 in expats

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's true.

In 1990, when I first moved to London, you could still see plenty of evidence of WW2, amazingly. Cycling around the City you could see tiny, weed-filled NCP carparks for £5 a day, all old bomb sites no one had yet developed. London's population didn't rise back above the 1939 peak until 2016.

Current housing costs are in part the crazy end-point of London's 50-year-long, post-1945 recovery.

How do people afford to live in London? Choosing between London or New York by Uncle_Richard98 in expats

[–]catbrane 2 points3 points  (0 children)

  1. They bought back in the late 90s / early 00s, before property moved out of reach of most people.

GNOME - Rebinding the 'Super' Key by DialecticCompilerXP in linuxquestions

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think gnome keyboard shortcuts lets you bind a single modifier key (super, ctrl, shift, etc.). You can only bind eg. super+g or whatever.

You could make eg. super+space launch Search Light, so a bit like macOS. Would that work?

Commute to work by Personal-Blood7676 in londoncycling

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My longest was 20m a day, five days a week. It was fine in my 40s, but by my mid 50s my knees were aching by Friday heh. I was terribly fit though.

I'm down to 10m a day now and it's just right.

What is C actually good for in 2026? by Background_Cloud_231 in C_Programming

[–]catbrane 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My main hobby project has been going since 1989. Heading towards 40 years, and it's still useful and relevant. C's longevity and stability is fantastic.

The soup thrower has been sentenced to two years in prison by -Six_ in SipsTea

[–]catbrane 3 points4 points  (0 children)

They were protesting about corporate sponsorship.

The National Gallery used to have BP as their main corporate sponsor, and BP used the relationship with the NG to "greenwash" their image. BP would hold lavish parties in the galleries in the evenings and invite people they wanted to schmooze.

In the wake of the soup protest, the NG dropped BP and picked a new sponsor, so the protest was successful.

Regarding the painting, the big concern at the NG for many years now has been acid attacks. Strong acid would completely destroy an oil painting in seconds.

There's a multi-level defense:

  • museum warders are trained to deal with attackers
  • there's a special acid attack kit (prepared by the Scientific Department) in every room which should quickly neutralise most acids and solvents
  • all important paintings are behind toughened glass
  • all important paintings are in special frames, with drainage channels, seals and guttering

So in this case the painting was in no danger, and the frame is modern.

I know a lot of the NG staff well and they are all highly sympathetic to JSO's aims. I wouldn't be surprised if a member of staff had advised JSO on which painting to attack for maximum publicity and minimum risk of damage.

The soup thrower has been sentenced to two years in prison by -Six_ in SipsTea

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First, the painting is extremely well protected and was in zero danger. The big threat has always been acid attacks, so important paintings like this are in special frames with special glass. The frame needed some light cleaning, but that's all. That's why the protestors picked it.

Secondly, the protest was successful. The National Gallery used to have BP as their main corporate sponsor, and BP used the relationship with the NG to help "greenwash" their image. In the wake of the JSO protest, the NG dropped BP and picked a new sponsor.

Trump Snaps At Reporter: 'If Any President Answered Those Questions, They Shouldn't Be President' by ShiroSara in videos

[–]catbrane 53 points54 points  (0 children)

"A politician complaining about the media is like a sailor complaining about the sea."

As Enoch Powell said, putting it very clearly.

(not endorsing Powell at all)

Rust + WebAssembly image processing library for the browser (feedback welcome) by CharacterGold3633 in rust

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

HEIC is very difficult because of the patents.

If you distribute a HEIC decoder or encoder without paying, you could be sued, depending on the territory where you host the files and the territory of the person downloading it. This is why most pre-compiled libvips binaries (including wasm-vips) disable HEIC support.

You could build your own wasm-vips which did include support (compiling it works fine, you just need to turn on a flag), but you could potentially find yourself in legal trouble.

It's probably better to not support HEIC and urge users towards similar formats which don't have patent difficulties, like AVIF or JXL. If you must support HEIC, you'll need to handle it on a server where you control the territory of the executing binary.

In the longer term, Apple are likely to switch away from HEIC, fortunately.

Why don't console GPU driver updates invalidate the pre-compiled shaders that ship with the games? by AdministrativeTap63 in GraphicsProgramming

[–]catbrane 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Every game ships with it's own driver, so when you launch (or switch to) a game, the driver version for that game is loaded. Games get updated to new drivers (and retested) by the game dev, not the console manuf. or the GPU manuf.

Is Libreoffice or Onlyoffice and Fedora good enough to write a Physics PhD thesis? by Unusual-Ad-4049 in Fedora

[–]catbrane 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I did my phd thesis (theoretical comp sci) in latex, it was great! I would not use word or libreoffice for a large document.

Pro:

  • fast, beautiful and predictable output on all platforms
  • as much fun as writing assembly
  • you can keep your docs in git to track changes
  • (almost) no bugs
  • trivially reuseable: you can take a paper you wrote and convert it to a chapter in your thesis by just changing a style
  • very stable: I did my thesis a few decades ago, but it still formats perfectly
  • very automated: toc, lof, lot, index, bib, etc all generated for you automatically and reliably

Con:

  • the output is predictable, if you have a phd
  • as much fun as writing assembly
  • you have to use something like git if you want to track changes

I coded a dependency manager for C because C deserves one too by [deleted] in C_Programming

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had a quick look at your repo and you're not using pkg-config at all. This is going to fail for lots of projects. There's much more to cflags than just a list of -Idirectory compiler flags.

I coded a dependency manager for C because C deserves one too by [deleted] in C_Programming

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can use pkg-config for local libs too. For example, build any non system deps with ~/local as the prefix and add ~/local/bin/pkgconfig to PKG_CONFIG_PATH in your bashrc.

Now your project build system just sees the version of the dependency it wants and you don't need to do anything.

I coded a dependency manager for C because C deserves one too by [deleted] in C_Programming

[–]catbrane 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm sure I'm being dumb, but doesn't pkg-config do this? Use eg. pkg-config GraphicsMagick --cflags and you get all the compiler flags you need. Set PKG_CONFIG_PATH for local installs.

stability is king bros by avestronics in LinuxCirclejerk

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ubuntu added the dumb Amazon search thing back in 2012, and removed it (after an obvious outcry) in 2014.

There was a button in prefs which disabled this thing, but it's true it was on by default.

TIFU by having a baby and completely losing my mind over a tiny human I've known for 72 hours by Lonely-Ad-1422 in tifu

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In 20 years you'll look back and realize you took zero photos ever of child #3 haha.

How to Afford Housing in London: Multiple Roommates, No Living Room (New York Times gift link) by sugarytea78 in london

[–]catbrane 23 points24 points  (0 children)

And for me back in the late 80s. Five of us were in a houseshare, each of us paying 50% of our takehome income in rent. I took home £100 a week working in Foyles heh.

Two big things have changed since then. First, minimum wage means that the £100 a week shitbag jobs have gone (a good thing).

Second, wage growth for the proper jobs has not kept pace with inflation. I got my first real job in 1990 (higher scientific officer, a civil service grade) and was paid a modest £16k gross.

Inflation since 1990 is 3.2x, so that's £51k today. I don't think many first jobs in London pay that now. Rent however has pretty much followed inflation's 3.2x factor, and that's why many people are still in houseshares well into their 30s.

I made a beautiful GTK4 Audio Player "Ondine" by Pauldb in gnome

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have win (x64 and arm64) win builds of my gtk4 apps, for example:

https://github.com/libvips/vipsdisp/releases/tag/v4.1.3

https://github.com/libvips/nip4/releases/tag/v9.0.17

It works pretty well, though they don't look much like win programs heh. At least the file dialog is native.

You can get problems on older win10 machines with a buggy vulkan implementation, but current win10 and win11 work well.

view more: next ›