Leaving common knowledge undocumented is, in itself, a misguided attempt at DRY.
Your common knowledge isn't necessarily everyone's common knowledge; what you perceive isn't necessarily what it is.
Every day there are many people just starting to code. There are cultural and regional differences. They might not have hit the exact spot in which this information appears.
Knowledge also disappears, fades, gets censored or destroyed, gets mixed up and remembered incorrectly. You might take something as a given and misremember it 20 years from now. You might read your own code 5 years from now and not know why something's there — something that was taken to be obvious.
Brotli has wide browser support (https://caniuse.com/#feat=brotli) and comes closer to zstd in compression ratio and compression speed, but its decompression speed is significantly lower and closer to zlib.
Brotli compresses about 5-10 % more than zstd. Benchmarks showing equal compression performance use different window sizes (smaller window sizes for brotli) or do not run at maximum compression density.
zstd does decompress fast, but this is not free. The cost is the compression density -- and lesser streaming properties than brotli.
For typical linux package use, one could save 5 % more in density by moving from zstd to large window brotli. The decompression speed for a typical package would be slowed down by 1 ms, but the decompression could happen during the transfer or file I/O if that is an issue.
The linked series of comments (which, to be clear, I've only skimmed — there's a ton there) show zstd 22 sometimes coming behind Brotli 11d29, sometimes ahead on compression ratio; usually coming ahead of Brotli 11 on compression ratio; ~5x faster on compression throughput and ~2-2.5x faster on decompress throughput. To cherry-pick some numbers (the table after "259,707,904 bytes long open_watcom_1.9.0-src.tar", dated "TurboBench: - Mon Apr 30 07:51:32 2018"):
So in that particular instance, zstd 22 comes out about 5% worse (+1.1 MB over Brotli 11d29's 20.1 MiB) on compressed size, but 3% better (-640kiB) vs Brotli 11 at 21.8 MiB. So... maximum compression is within a small margin; compression and decompression speeds are much quicker.
I think it's fair to say that zstd struggles the most at the extremes. On the fast extreme it loses (marginally) to lz4; on the slow extreme it (maybe) loses (marginally) to brotli. But it's relatively quick across the spectrum and provides a lot of flexibility.
It may make sense to continue to use Brotli or xz for static assets that are compressed infrequently and read often. But for something like HTTP Content-Encoding, where dynamic pages are compressed on the fly? Zstd would shine here, over both Brotli and (vanilla) zlib. (I know Chrome has some hacked up zlib on the client side, but I do not know too much about it.)
That's interesting. Brotli has wide browser support although its less than 5 years old but webp is reaching a decade and Safari still doesn't support it...
WebP has an excellent lossless image compressor (like PNG just 25-40 % more dense), but the lossy format has weaknesses that people focused on, and slowed down the adoption. The initial lossy encoder had weaknesses in quality -- it had bugs or was a port of a video coder. Nowadays, the quality is much better, but the format forces YUV420 coding (does not allow YUV444 coding) which limits the quality of colors and fine textures.
> but webp is reaching a decade and Safari still doesn't support it...
That’s a philosophical objection. For a long while Mozilla also was of the opinion that WebP is not “better enough” than JPEG/PNG to warrant the addition of another image format which the entire web must support forever using only one available implementation.
Plus I think there are still some unresolved patent claims on the VP8/9 video codec (which are the basis for WebP).
Not to gotcha this, but "I'm someone whose statements should not be taken to heart" is not a message I'd want to convey in an apology.
Then again, corporate communication is often a game of being as cynical as you can get away without getting arrested or having your business shut down, so maybe there's some meta-honesty here.
I would love a customer-company relationship in which the customer gets meaningful information by privately contacting the company with a polite message, but in my experience this is rare. When an answer comes, it tends to misdirect rather than tell the whole truth.
Here you have a bank and a company known for secrecy.
But you acknowledge this;
> random CSRs don't get a pithy explanation
What the throwers of hissy fits are pointing to is that, by building blackboxes, you can get whatever result you want (which doesn't mean all results are expected) with plausible deniability.
To put it shorter, with permission, liability stands with the organization; with forgiveness, liability stands with the individual. At worst, one or two levels up the hierarchy too.
> Both Firefox and Chrome support a common format for defining search engines from add-ons
...which have nothing to do with the Open Web, mentioned in the parent reply. Both require participating in, and consequently adhering to the terms of, stores operated by third parties.
Yes, we, as tech workers. Most people aren't "us".
It's perfectly understandable for places like the android/apple app stores to be heavily moderated.
Same reasoning for forcing people to have their cars serviced by mechanics and not do their own maintenance in their backyards. Otherwise we'd have people driving cars without pipes and DIY break pads. I'd much rather have that enforced by megacorps/govt than by an infinite amount of businesses/individuals trying to game the system.
For most people a smartphone is an entertainment device, a tool at best, they don't give a single fuck about the underlying tech and they should not. Feel free to root your phone and install whatever you want, you can't ask people to become tech literate, it's your hobby/job, not their. Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech. Look at your own life, chances are you don't even have surface knowledge of 99% of the things you use daily, and that's perfectly fine, nobody expects you to be a furniture designer, building safety inspector and car mechanic.
How is that? If more 'ordinary' people understood that the only functional encryption is one that is resistant to MitM etc., and the undesirability of implementing backdoors, even for ostensibly legitimate reasons, there would be far more pressure on legislators to not keep advancing these proposals than there is now.
Again, knowing that privacy is good doesn't have anything to do with the "underlying tech" and doesn't require any technological understanding. You can read a book without knowing how it was printed.
> Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech.
But, you can't really provide them safe tools without fixing some of the behavioral components, can you.
"Don't try to lick the sharp parts, especially when running the machine" is an implicit and important (albeit obscure) part of the safety to operating, let's say, a band saw.
Unfortunately, the intellectual bar seems to be noticeably higher for "When a very urgent and heavily accented Microsoft Support representative calls you out of the blue, don't type into your shiny techno-thingy what they tell you to".
I'm generally all for sane defaults and constructing to make spontaneous use possible too, but a lot of the time there is ultimately no other protection against dangerously wrong use of tools than not using the tools dangerously wrongly.
Too bad that's a tall order for very complicated machines that can do vastly different things depending on configuration.
Yikes. Really? Where do you live? I can’t imagine living someplace where I’m forbidden from picking up a wrench. Heaven forbid I buy some PVC pipe. Who knows what mischief I might get up to!
For the record, I do my own break pads. And have done the master cylinder (thing that powers the breaks) on my cars a couple of times. Not just without formal training. Without any training except what I could quickly Google.
Europe. When I lived in the US I saw cars with bald tires, clearly damaged frames, spewing insane amount of smoke &c. on the road daily, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that over here.
44 states have minimum tread depth specified in the law. Almost nobody has the tool necessary to replace a tire anyway, so nobody does that themselves. So what’s your point?
Not sure why you would assume that prohibiting people from working on their cars would increase the level of maintenance.
The problem is the authoritarianism. You are advocating for totalitarian control as a solution to the possibility that some individuals might misbehave. If there is one thing we should have learned from history by now, it's that that's about the worst solution to a problem ever.
So? I don't understand your point. Authoritarian solutions are good as long as they are not "the Final solution" because ... ? And what does having to follow the law have to do with any of this? Even "the Final solution" was law, and in a developed country at that, so ... yeah, could you explain what your point is there?
If any rule/law = "authoritarian regime" to you I think we can't stop the discussion now and save us both some time.
> And what does having to follow the law have to do with any of this
Google is free to handle its playstore as it please as long as it follow the law, I doubt google will pull a genocide anytime soon. Setting boundaries/rules doesn't make you an authoritarian regime. If you want to pull the "this reminds me of the darkest hours of our history" card you better find something more important than an app removal from a mobile phone app store if you want to be taken seriously. But I guess it's fashionable these days to compare everything to nazi germany/fascism/_insert_bad_people_, no matter how convoluted the comparison is.
> If any rule/law = "authoritarian regime" to you I think we can't stop the discussion now and save us both some time.
Can you quote where I said anything about a "regime"?
> Google is free to handle its playstore as it please as long as it follow the law,
Which is true, but completely besides the point? I am free to call you a clueless asshole. But if the discussion is about how to have a constructive dialog, me pointing out that I am free to call you a clueless asshole contributes exactly nothing to the conversation and at best shows that I have no clue what the discussion is about.
> I doubt google will pull a genocide anytime soon.
Your point being? Authoritarianism is good when it's not a genocide, because ... ?
> Setting boundaries/rules doesn't make you an authoritarian regime.
Again: Where did you pull that "regime" from? And also, no, "setting boundaries/rules" does not make for authoritarianism, that is correct. Why did you assume that I wasn't aware of that?
> If you want to pull the "this reminds me of the darkest hours of our history" card you better find something more important than an app removal from a mobile phone app store if you want to be taken seriously.
Why? And no, simply pointing out that one thing is worse than the other is not a relevant argument, that's simply straw manning, because noone claimed that one was as bad as the other.
Nazi Germany was a pretty developed country, and its companies followed the "law" pretty well ? Imagine how useful an app store would have been to identify the "indesirables" and how long / whether the app store owner would have resisted?
Right. That means you have to pick which domains those are. Picking some to learn about means not picking others, because there's an infinity of domains. Forcing everyone to become a security expert to survive limits all their other options.
I know people are going to quote Heinlein here, but civilisation exists so that not everybody has to be a specialist in everything.
> "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
So true!
My issue here isn't so much the bias but the poor reporting on what the reporter means by terms like "automating poverty". The difference between algorithms, AI and the organizational processes behind them are significant to the discussion.
My view is that tech reporting in the media tends to be so inprecise and unfocused that the quality of discussion suffers as a result.
Your common knowledge isn't necessarily everyone's common knowledge; what you perceive isn't necessarily what it is.
Every day there are many people just starting to code. There are cultural and regional differences. They might not have hit the exact spot in which this information appears.
Knowledge also disappears, fades, gets censored or destroyed, gets mixed up and remembered incorrectly. You might take something as a given and misremember it 20 years from now. You might read your own code 5 years from now and not know why something's there — something that was taken to be obvious.