Google scholar tried and gave up

Webp is a lot older than jpg xl, right?

It was behind a feature flag and then removed? I guess that's where the skepticism comes from

Good way to teach other members of your house to use VPNs to bypass your censorship regime

I also block Twitter ASN (yes, it is called Twitter ASN), and a whole bunch of IP ranges from not so democratic countries with very bad hostile actors. They don't have rule of law there, so I don't need these.

With regards to X. Blocking it serves as a good reminder to use a proxy, or try and find the source elsewhere (Blue Sky, Mastodon). More often than not, these exist.

Finally, if required I can use Tor Browser. No cookies, no profiling, no ads.

Out of interest, those IP ranges that you’re blocking… is that at DNS level or are you doing some firewall-level blocking too?

And do you use any kind of reference for determining which ranges/countries are wise to block or has this just been something you’ve evolved over time?

Great questions.

Currently, I have IPv4 only (will change end of year to dual stack), and to block AS13414 (NetName TWITTER-NETWORK) blocking 104.244.40.0/21 to block x.com is suffice. However, if you follow [1] you have a more complete blocklist. In a *BSD you can use cron and curl to update these lists based on if a change occurred, OPNsense allows the same in their webUI. In that vein, I also have Tor exit node block list (this is public data), I have a Censys (& Co) blocklist. You name it.

I don't use DNS-based in this instance (I do for example, for porn, cause I have children). I use a firewall-based one in OPNsense. PF (and therefore OPNsense) have a feature called anchors (alias in OPNsense) which basically allows you to use OOP to develop lists.

I'm pretty sure Linux like OpenWrt can do the same, and you can also use DNS-based blocklists. You can even outsource the hosting to e.g. NextDNS. Because these blocklists, whether firewall or DNS-based filtering, they do use some RAM especially. Back when I started w/this in early '00s this was an issue on my Soekris OpenBSD machine. Nowadays, I assign 8 GB RAM to the VM and call it a day.

[1] https://github.com/platformbuilds/TwitterIPLists

Interesting thanks for elaborating. I might need to take a closer look at OPNsense.

“not so democratic countries with very bad hostile actors. They don't have rule of law there, so I don't need these.” Time to add united states to those filters.

meta and X are both heavily censored so I guess it's censors all the way down?

Teenagers know how to use vpns, you know that right?

I'd like to hear more about this. Can you provide an example of censorship on X?

Let me put it another way; can you provide some examples of ideas, topics or opinions that I are likely to be censored if I posted them on X?

How about blocking links to Signal, allegedly since US Government workers are using it to coordinate responses to DOGE requests?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dimitarmixmihov/2025/02/17/x-is...

Lots of screenshots circulating of posting the word "Cisgender" being flagged by Twitter. Not sure if they just flag or remove it though, as I don't use Twitter any more.

This has to be a disingenuous request. X is signaling at free speech, while in practice it amplifies or suppresses content the owner agrees or disagrees with.

His bsky account is not very funny and very political...

You seem to have confused one guy's personal account with the famously apolitical media outlet he runs.

It;s a funny stream, Devin spends one and half hours trying to push to master.

Would you be willing to share the deal with Apple/Khronos relations?

Apple didn't like OpenGL, rightfully, and came up with their own Metal which they released two years before first version of Vulkan was released.

Now people pretend that Apple is bad because it never adopted Vulkan and never implemented the "good modern OpenGL" (which never really existed).

It runs deeper than that, during the development of WebGPU it came to light that Apple was vetoing the use of any Khronos IP whatsoever, due to a private legal dispute between them. That led to WebGPU having to re-invent the wheel with a brand new shader language because Apples lawyers wouldn't sign off on using GLSL or SPIR-V under any circumstances.

The actual details of the dispute never came out, so we don't know if it has been resolved or not.

Apple, refusing to use open standards, and instead demanding everyone else do things their way? Say it’s not so!

The bizarre thing is that Apple did used to cooperate with Khronos, they were involved with OpenGL and even donated the initial version of the OpenCL spec to them. Something dramatic happened behind the scenes at some point.

My absurd pet theory is that this was related to their 2017-2020 dispute with Imagination. Apple started (allegedly) violating Imagination's IP in 2017. They were, at the very least, threatened with a lawsuit, and the threats were compelling enough that they've been paying up since 2020. It could be Apple pulled out of the Khronos IP pool to prepare a lawsuit, or to have better chances of dodging one.

Most likely related to how Khronos managed OpenCL after getting hold of it.

Please, tell us all about how Khronos hurt Apple with free software that Apple had every opportunity to influence. Point to the boo-boo that justifies making things worse for everyone.

My dear Apple has zero influence on Windows, Linux and Android.

Where are those great OpenCL implementations from Intel, AMD and Google?

I can imagine a scenario: Apple donates openCL, then later suggests some changes for the next version. Khronos delays or pushes back and now openCL is stuck from Apple's perspective and they can't do anything about it.

Yep.

I really want them to get it together with OpenCL 3 and especially Vulkan interop but I’m not really holding out hope for it.

OpenCL 3 is OpenCL 1, no one cares, Intel has made extensions on too for DPC++, AMD is pushing Romc or whatever else they think of.

Still not showing that they care.

I don't know why anyone would try to care when Apple announced they were pivoting away from OpenCL half a decade ago. The value prop of a cross-platform GPGPU API died the moment that Apple gave up, and OpenGL's treatment reflects what happens once Apple abandons an open standard.

In Cali isn't now like 0.5 per kWh :P

Wow!

Wasn't it true that for a long time that cheaper cars were just less safe than more expensive cars?

That probably was true... and then we raised the baseline.

Is there no way for you to do the Dallas trial?:(

A mirrorless camera can probably be found used for 200$ so that would be better