Why Some Avatar: Fire and Ash Scenes Look So Smooth, and Others Don’t
If you watched Avatar: Fire and Ash in James Cameron’s preferred high frame rate 3D format and noticed certain sequences appearing unusually smooth while others had the traditional cinematic look, that visual inconsistency is entirely intentional. The third Avatar film continues Cameron’s frame rate experimentation from The Way of … ⌘ Read more

Cryptsetup 2.8.2 Released With BitLocker Clear Key Support
Cryptsetup 2.8.2 released on Thursday for this open-source utility used for setting up disk encryption with dm-crypt on Linux systems, including for LUKS volumes, TrueCrypt, BitLocker, and other formats… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Changes How Copyright Protection is Applied To Kindle Direct’s Self-Published Ebooks
Amazon says it will allow authors to offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through its self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. Starting on January 20, 2026, authors who set their titles as DRM-free will see their books made available in these more open formats. Fro … ⌘ Read more

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats have been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

Fragile, inconvenient and low quality: Why are cassettes back in vogue?
For a supposedly obsolete music format, audio cassette sales seem to be set on fast forward at the moment. ⌘ Read more

QuickTime Turns 34
On Dec. 2, QuickTime turned 34, and despite its origins in Apple’s chaotic 1990s (1991 to be exact), “it’s still the backbone of video on our devices,” writes Macworld’s Jason Snell. That includes MP4 and Apple’s immersive video formats for Vision Pro. From the report: By the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, digital audio had been thoroughly integrated into Macs. (PCs needed add-on cards to do much more than issue beeps.) The next frontier was … ⌘ Read more

AV1 Open Video Codec Now Powers 30% of Netflix Streaming
Netflix says its open AV1 video codec now powers about 30% of all streaming on the platform and is rapidly becoming its primary delivery format thanks to major gains in compression, bandwidth efficiency, HDR support, and film-grain rendering. TVTechnology reports: The blog by Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford and Jeff Watts comes at a time when AV2 is on the hor … ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: Stop Telling Us XMPP Should Use JSON

Image

We hear this too often: “XMPP uses XML. It should use JSON—it’s more modern.”

The logic seems straightforward: JSON came later, so it must be better. But better for what, exactly?

JSON became successful because it’s the standard serialization format for JavaScript. That made it convenient for browser-based applications.

Does that m … ⌘ Read more

Google Looks To Bring JPEG-XL Support Back To Chrome / Chromium
Back in 2022 was the surprising decision by Google that they were going to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in Chrome. By the end of 2022 they went ahead and removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium to the frustration of many web developers and end-users interested in this image format. Now though as we get ready to roll into 2026, Google engineers are looking at bringing back JPEG-XL support to the Chrome web browser… ⌘ Read more

Sam Altman Celebrates ChatGPT Finally Following Em Dash Formatting Rules
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that ChatGPT has started following custom instructions to avoid using em dashes. “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!” he wrote.

… ⌘ Read more

Slovensko bez hraníc č. 8
Úrad pre Slovákov žijúcich v zahraničí (ÚSŽZ) predstavil nové, novembrové vydanie spravodajcu Slovensko bez hraníc, ktoré prináša aktuálne informácie o činnosti úradu, významných udalostiach a aktivitách krajanov na všetkých kontinentoch. Najnovšie číslo (8/2025) je dostupné vo formáte pdf na webovej stránke ÚSŽZ. ⌘ Read more

Deutsch-österreichischer Doppelgänger: Der falsche Kurz
Für ein neues Talk-Format hat Welt-TV Sebastian Kurz eingeladen – den falschen. Der ist zwar auch Politiker, aber nicht „Austrias Next-Top-Kanzler“. mehr… ⌘ Read more

PDF Will Support JPEG XL Format As ‘Preferred Solution’
The PDF Association is adding JPEG XL (JXL) support to the PDF specification, giving the advanced image format a new path to relevance despite Google’s decision to declare it obsolete and remove it from Chromium. The Register reports: Peter Wyatt, CTO of the PDF Association, said: “We need to adopt a new image [format] that can support HDR [High Dynamic Range] c … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Actually, @threatcat@tilde.club popped up in my own access log first. That’s how I discovered the feed. :-) So I figured that this feed author actually sees my reply. The hope is that with the next mention of my feed in threatcat’s feed, the other tilde users, who are following threatcat, are then also informed of my existence. :-)

I don’t know how tilde.club is set up. But it should be relatively easy to give all users access to their nginx access logs. Not sure if somebody already requested that or not. But I’d encourage tilde users to ask for that. Maybe also just for twtxt.txt and/or in a custom, reduced log format.

Tim Berners-Lee Says AI Will Not Destroy the Web
Tim Berners-Lee thinks AI will help the web, not destroy it. The inventor of the World Wide Web has spent years warning about platform concentration and social media’s corrosive effects, but he views AI differently. AI has accomplished what his Semantic Web project could not. The technology extracts structured data from websites regardless of how the information was formatted. … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s formatted just fine 🤟

This is formatted poorly on twtxt.net, so here’s a plain text file: https://movq.de/v/971c5a125d/wall-of-text.txt

Magika 1.0 Goes Stable As Google Rebuilds Its File Detection Tool In Rust
BrianFagioli writes: Google has released Magika 1.0, a stable version of its AI-based file type detection tool, and rebuilt the entire engine in Rust for speed and memory safety. The system now recognizes more than 200 file types, up from about 100, and is better at distinguishing look-alike formats such as JSON vs JSONL, TS … ⌘ Read more

A File Format Uncracked for 20 Years
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iLabs Challenger+ RP2040 LoRa Mk II Adds Upgraded Power Architecture and BConnect Expansion
iLabs has released the Challenger+ RP2040 LoRa Mk II, an upgraded Feather-format microcontroller board that combines the Raspberry Pi RP2040 with an RFM95W LoRa radio module. The new revision refines the original design with improved noise isolation, enhanced power distribution, and added modular connectivity options. The board features a redesigned power supply … ⌘ Read more

Use gq to format code ⌘ Read more

The Apple Compact Unwinding Format: Documented and Explained - Faultlore
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New OSM file format: 30% smaller than PBF, 5x faster to import
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VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT
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VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT
Article URL: https://forums.steinberg.net/t/vst-3-8-0-sdk-released/1011988

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45678549

Points: 502

# Comments: 118 ⌘ Read more

Beyond Indexes: How Open Table Formats Optimize Query Performance
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Linus Says Rust Formatting is “Bass-Ackwards Garbage”
“[Rustfmtcheck] is just ANNOYING. ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net the second format (the one you think should be changed to), is it backwards compatible to what’s currently in place? I believe the first one would be.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, I couldn’t trick yt-dlp into downloading the correct format. Works in the browser, though. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I know we won’t ever convince each other of the other’s favorite addressing scheme. :-D But I wanna address (haha) your concerns:

1. I don’t see any difference between the two schemes regarding link rot and migration. If the URL changes, both approaches are equally terrible as the feed URL is part of the hashed value and reference of some sort in the location-based scheme. It doesn’t matter.

2. The same is true for duplication and forks. Even today, the “cannonical URL” has to be chosen to build the hash. That’s exactly the same with location-based addressing. Why would a mirror only duplicate stuff with location- but not content-based addressing? I really fail to see that. Also, who is using mirrors or relays anyway? I don’t know of any such software to be honest.

3. If there is a spam feed, I just unfollow it. Done. Not a concern for me at all. Not the slightest bit. And the byte verification is THE source of all broken threads when the conversation start is edited. Yes, this can be viewed as a feature, but how many times was it actually a feature and not more behaving as an anti-feature in terms of user experience?

4. I don’t get your argument. If the feed in question is offline, one can simply look in local caches and see if there is a message at that particular time, just like looking up a hash. Where’s the difference? Except that the lookup key is longer or compound or whatever depending on the cache format.

5. Even a new hashing algorithm requires work on clients etc. It’s not that you get some backwards-compatibility for free. It just cannot be backwards-compatible in my opinion, no matter which approach we take. That’s why I believe some magic time for the switch causes the least amount of trouble. You leave the old world untouched and working.

If these are general concerns, I’m completely with you. But I don’t think that they only apply to location-based addressing. That’s how I interpreted your message. I could be wrong. Happy to read your explanations. :-)

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Personally, I find the reversed order of URL first and then timestamp more natural to reference something. Granted, URL last would be kinda consistent with the mention format. However, the timestamp doesn’t act as a link text or display text like in a mention, so, it’s some different in my opinion. But yeah.

@zvava@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m not entirely sure about the spaces, but maybe they were omitted to simplify parsing of mentions in the form of @<nick url>. If the next token after the @<nick does not look like a URL, it’s not a mention but regular text. This is just wild guessing, though.

Looking at the regex and tests in the original twtxt reference implementation seems to confirm that theory in the sense as it relies on whitespace as the delimiter:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-30-25.png

Another thing about nicks is that the original twtxt reference implementation converts nicks to all lowercase:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-20-39.png

You probably know this already, the original twtxt file format specification can be found here: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html

As for extensions, I don’t know of anything outside of twtxt.dev that has actually been (partially) implemented. However, there is also the issue tracker of the official reference implementation. You might wanna dig through that. For example, there is an alternative suggestions of multiline messages: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/issues/157

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz all @prologic@twtxt.net has to do is to allow <details> and the subset under it. Granted, it could be implemented on the formatting toolbar too…

@zvava@twtxt.net may I recommend to change the mention format upon hitting reply to something similar to what it’s used in Yarn, and perhaps hiding the hash on the post too? Looking good!

Haha, fun! I browsed your gopher hole a little bit. I noticed some entries are fully justified (formatting), while others are not. I didn’t notice a pattern, though it makes sense not to use justification on entries with code. Yet, some prose entries are, and some are not. A mystery. :-)

Prosodical Thoughts: Debian repository key change
We have been working on some changes to our Debian/Ubuntu package repository.
If you use our repository to keep up to date with new Prosody packages, you
need to take action before 4th August 2025 to continue receiving updates
smoothly.

The ‘apt’ utility has been moving towards a new format for specifying package
repositories. If you are familiar with putting deb lines in a sources.list
file, [that method is changing](ht … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing … a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. 😢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that it’s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and you’re done.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yeah same YAML over XML forever bc at least one is more readable lmfao!! doesn’t forgive YAML’s crimes though… cursed formats

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Any text format beats a binary configuration format. However, YAML and XML are both terrible choices in my opinion. I’d prefer YAML over XML if I had to.

Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

(Unlike GNOME’s dconf, which uses some binary file format. Fun fact: The older and now deprecated gconf also used XML files.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

The DuckLake Manifesto: SQL as a Lakehouse Format
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Flatpak “not being actively developed anymore”
At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, a … ⌘ Read more

Paste Without Formatting Should be the Default
Software needs to stop trying to be so dang fancy. ⌘ Read more

NATO announces new Ramstein format meeting next week ⌘ Read more

One of the Last Linux Magazines Ends Print Publication
Linux Format Magazine ends publication after 25 years - joining Linux Journal, Ubuntu User, Maximum Linux and many other now-dead Linux publications. ⌘ Read more

Genode OS Framework 25.05 released
It’s been 9 years since we disrupted Genode’s API. Back then, we changed the execution model of components, consistently applied the dependency-injection pattern to shun global side effects, and largely removed C-isms like format strings and pointers. These changes ultimately paved the ground for sophisticated systems like Sculpt OS. Since then, we identified several potential areas for further safety improvements, unlocked by the evolution of the C++ core langu … ⌘ Read more

DWARF as a shared reverse engineering format
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LILYGO T-Embed SI4732 Combines ESP32 S3 with All Band Radio Tuning
LILYGO has introduced a new version of its T-Embed series that incorporates the SI4732 A10 tuner module. This version supports AM, FM, shortwave, and longwave radio bands in a handheld format that visually resembles devices like the Flipper Zero. The T-Embed SI4732 uses the ESP32 S3 microcontroller with a dual-core LX7 processor clocked at 240 […] ⌘ Read more