That’s fair, sometimes people seem to think any amount of effort or understanding is pretentious.

You are correct that they are ignoring ð. I just saw they already said that they were using HeliBoard with accent characters turned on, holding t to get þ. It seems like while it’s possible with the keyboard set to English, they are ignoring the ð that appears over d. I just downloaded it to check, setting “Show more letters with diacritics in popup” to “Add common variants”.

Their use of þ is inconsistent with any orthography in modern use for any language, and it can be obnoxious. However, I would hesitate to say it’s wrong, especially given this context, where we aren’t talking about borrowed words, and it looks like they’re not using an Icelandic keyboard. They’re reviving an old grapheme in the way it was last used in English, even if it was used differently before. Obnoxious, but I wouldn’t say incorrect.

Also, you reminded me of something, what do you think about people saying Mexico with an English ks for x? I can agree that it’s a reminder that English speakers happily ignore other languages to an offensive degree, but do you argue this way whenever somebody says it that way?

Understandable, but are they specifically claiming to be inspired by Old English? If they’re inspired by how it was sometimes used in Middle English, it sounds like you’re upset they were inspired by the wrong time period.

Þatt wass full wel, forr itt wass don

All all se Drihhtin wollde.

Forr he comm dun wiþþ Godess word,

To kiþenn it onn eorþe

An excerpt from The Ormalum, from Early Middle English.

Yes, eth (ð) was used as a voiced counterpart of thorn (þ) for some time between Old and Middle English, but as this isn’t important for distinguishing words, people eventually stopped using eth in favour of thorn for voiced dental fricatives at some point in Middle English. Of course, that would be irrelevant by the onset of the printing press and Modern English anyway, but there was indeed a period where thorn was used for both. It’s not incorrect.

Y2.1K, assuming Ubuntu lasts that long.

I think they’d just roll over to 100.04

As far as I’m aware, contributor license agreements can include a clause stating that you agree to hand over copyright on submission of code. If every contributor has signed the CLA, there is only only one copyright holder, making relicensing easy.

However, successfully using this to relicense to something less open is extremely rare, and this isn’t a concern anyway as they don’t have a CLA.

I should probably add: if it becomes proprietary, the remaining soft fork will likely die. Turns out very few people have the technical knowledge for Audacity.

If you want to read the telemetry controversy/drama, I found this one I’d read years ago: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

I remember feeling a bit bad for the maintainers. There’s a lot of complaining for a minor and optional change, but at the same time it’s interesting that they added telemetry anyway. (Not unmodified however)

As far as I remember, Audacity’s maintainers, previously just some volunteers with no organisation, decided to sell the ownership of the project to a company with some guitar platform. Nothing changed at first, they employed the maintainers to work on the same project they were already working on.

Then they started adding controversial telemetry and some soft forks appeared. I vaguely also remember hearing that there’s some contract that the company owns the source code, so relicensing to a proprietary licence is easy and possible in future. All the new software the company launches is proprietary, and there’s signs they want to tie it all together into a single suite.

Nothing majorly bad has happened to Audacity, yet. But decisions are no longer community driven, as shown by the telemetry drama. I fear it’s a matter of time.

What stops those open source projects having that same rugpull? AOSP was open source and for a long time could be installed on one’s phone indefinitely.

You could argue ownership, but if Audacity can be bought then so can nearly anything.

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I remember being a big fan of FLIF when it came out. I remember it had come out of nowhere to steal PNG’s crown, and then the author suddenly disappeared before finishing it. I soon learned they had been picked up by a company to work on a successor named FUIF and then some time after that FUIF was merged into JPEG XL.

Because of this, I was really excited when JPEG XL came out. An obscure but brilliant format had essentially been merged into the successor to JPEG, and I thought it was really going to take off. It had support from many major tech companies including Google. Browsers quickly started adding experimental support and then… nothing.

Soon after JPEG XL was finalised, AVIF was too, and AVIF was essentially Google’s attempt at making a successor to WebP, by using much the same technology as AV1. So the question was, which one to support? Google made a comparison between image formats, focusing almost exclusively on lossy compression ratios (which I think isn’t entirely fair, considering they both have a lossless mode to compete with PNG) and AVIF won. So they dropped JPEG XL from Chromium, claiming lack of interest or something (which was wild, I’d never heard of a faster uptake of an image format). Soon after, Firefox was talking about removing it too, but ended up deciding to wait and see.

Things looked bleak until Apple picked it up, and then things have just stalled since. I’m happy there’s still interest in JPEG XL, its FLIF/FUIF derived lossless encoding produces smaller files than both AVIF’s lossless encoding and PNG, while having features neither could dream of.

PNG only supports 4 colour channels, RGBA. JPEG XL supports up to 4099… In case you ever needed that for depth or thermal data or something.

PNG only supports 8 and 16 bits for each colour channel, JPEG XL supports up to 32 bits for each colour channel. In case you have something physically capable of displaying the difference.

I’d talk about HDR support, but PNG added that recently when it also made animation support official, rather than an extension. Which JPEG XL also supports.

To be fair, I still use PNG out of habit, and because I can’t show anybody .jxl files over the internet like I can .png files. Also I mentally associate PNG with quality, while JPEG XL sounds like a big JPEG, which it can also be if you switch it to lossy mode.

JPEG XL is partially based on FLIF/FUIF, which boasted/claimed the best lossless image compression on the planet.

WebP and AVIF are good at what they do, it’s just that Google insists on them being the only modern formats people should ever use, despite different formats being better in specific contexts.

I don’t think people would be as upset if Google gave people the choice to use other formats. The standards aren’t the problem, the monopoly is.

They’re modified grey wolves, Colossal Biosciences had a separate project on red wolves.

Pretty sure it’s 3, they have a history of claiming to resurrect extinct species when they’re just modifying existing species to be a little more similar to the extinct one.

They claimed to bring back dire wolves but they’re more similar to grey wolves. They make the argument that the genes they used are what most makes a dire wolf a dire wolf, but it’s controversial.

I also remember hearing they said they would bring back a population of red wolves by extracting red wolf DNA that had been absorbed into a coyote population, but seemed to ignore the existing red wolves (which could do with extra genetic diversity) and worked using coyotes as a base.

Fortunately cash is still a common option in Australia (and I’m here), and likely will remain so for a long time. However, I’m increasingly hearing that other countries are increasingly refusing to accept cash.

It’s probably best to get something working on Linux phones before it’s too late, but as you said Google is worse than a thief, so whatever is made should not use it. Best to maximise the freedom for people in a horrible future, lest Android or iOS ever become the only viable options. Problem being I don’t know how that would work, especially since banks would probably hate freedom respecting systems.

I agree basic functionality is higher priority, but I fear tap to pay will reach basic functionality status in some other countries when their banks phase out any alternative. (I don’t think cryptocurrencies will ever become common). It may not directly impact me that other countries phase them out, but it will gradually kill the Linux phone ecosystem.

That’s fair, I’m quite happy on Graphene OS.

I feel like you’re conflating some things here. Tap to pay is more private and secure than a bank card, and is more private than most cryptocurrencies. Cash is obviously better, but it is increasingly looking like it might be phased out of some places eventually (I really hope not, but is a legitimate concern). However, you are right that it’s not open source and relies on trusting big companies that don’t like user freedom.

So I would say that some of the people using tap to pay don’t necessarily not care about privacy more than convenience. Some of them just want to be able to use money in places where cash is dying out.

I don’t use tap to pay personally.