Currently studying CS and some other stuff. Best known for previously being top 50 (OCE) in LoL, expert RoN modder, and creator of RoN:EE’s community patch (CBP). He/him.

(header photo by Brian Maffitt)

  • 5 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 17th, 2023
  • MHLoppy@fedia.iotoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•this post is just 42kib
    15·
    2 months ago

    the atrocious webp format

    I continue to be confused by the level of widespread hate WebP still gets. It’s old enough to be widely (albeit not universally) supported in software like web browsers, but new enough to provide similar-or-better (usually better) lossless compression than PNG (21,578 bytes for the original image) and typically better lossy compression than JPEG at comparable perceived quality, especially for the types of images typically shared on the internet (rather than say, images saved directly from a DLSR camera). It’s why servers bother to re-encode JPEG images to WebP for delivery - they wouldn’t bother wasting the compute time to re-compress if it wasn’t generally worth doing.

    I can understand it if we were, say, 10-15 years ago when the format was still not super widely supported yet, but that’s basically where we are with JPEG XL and AVIF support right now too. If one of these two had exactly the level of support that WebP does right now then yes, of course we should probably use one of them instead - but we’re not there yet. Until we are, WebP often has the best compromise between compatibility and compression efficiency as far as image formats go, and that’s why a lot of sites do this re-compression thing using WebP. I gave some examples using digital art (one of the things I was compressing a lot at the time) a year ago in a related discussion: https://lemmy.world/post/6665251/4462007

    A news website local to me recently-ish started choosing to deliver AVIF-compressed (or probably re-compressed) images the same way a lot of sites currently do it for WebP because my browser supports AVIF, so at least we are starting to see a token amount of uptake on the next-gen formats in the wild.

  • MHLoppy@fedia.iotoGames@lemmy.world•'Oh god': There's a buried Steam help page that shows how much money you've ever spent on the platform, and you may not want to know
    241·
    3 months ago

    After many years of selectively evaluating and purchasing bundles as my main source of new games, I’ve come to wonder if it would’ve been better to just buy the individual games when I wanted to play them at whatever the available price was - the rate at which I get through games is far lower than the rate at which games are available in “good” bundles. In the end I’m not even sure if I’ve saved money (because of how many games have been bought but are as-of-yet unplayed) and it does take more time to evaluate whether something’s a good deal or not.

    The upside is way more potential variety of games to pull from in my library, but if I only play at most like 1-2 dozen new games a year then I’m not sure that counts for much 🫠

  • MHLoppy@fedia.iotoGames@lemmy.world•The struggle is real
    1·
    3 months ago

    Eh, I think that one’s mostly on the community / players giving up games as soon as anything bad happens (making the 30-70 and 40-60 games where you still have decent odds of winning more like 5-95 games which become a self-fulfilling prophecy), plus regular players getting better over time (mistakes and misplays are more likely to be punished and leads are more likely to be capitalized on).

    The give-up culture wasn’t as bad much earlier in the game’s life, at least in my NA-centric exposure to solo queue.

  • MHLoppy@fedia.iotoFediverse@lemmy.world•How do you not feel overwhelmed using Mastodon?
    6·
    3 months ago

    Definitely agree that the the common-with-Mastodon viewpoint of exclusively using chronological feeds seems to have over-corrected too far. Can you imagine if the threadiverse was sorted that way? It would be insane and essentially unusable at scale - so we can at least acknowledge that sorting algorithms have a useful place and are not some unsalvageable, irredeemable evil. I wish there was something like a bunch of open source algorithms which the user could choose between in whatever UI they’re using. At the very least there should be some acknowledgement that I, the user, don’t have an identical level of interest in every account I follow, or even in every topic which the same account posts about.

    And while microblogging platforms seem to have it worst, there have also been times in the threadiverse where I’ve subscribed to a community/magazine only to later unsubscribe because the activity levels it produces in my feed are much higher than my interest levels in it. So even here (where we have sorting by “hot” etc), some kind of user-configurable weighting would be nice to better match how I actually want my feed to work!

    edit: typo