Very nice results, I really like the way it looks like a printed page. Image processing is addictive - once you start playing around it is hard to stop.
Alternative allocators could make a huge difference to the runtime performance. When multithreading on real multiprocessor systems started to become a thing it was common that all your carefully written threads ended up waiting on the allocator mutex. The win32 heap was particularly prone to this.
Third party allocators improved on this as well as usually avoiding the heap fragmentation problems that system heaps often suffered from back then.
These days the system heaps have improved to a point where you really only need to think about a third party heap for very specialized circumstances. They do usually come with nifty debugging tools though.
When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was.
There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.
And link rot. A lot of sites from back when are straight up gone, sadly. Maybe you get lucky on archive.org. Or in your pan case, affiliate farming where the bias or technical expertise is suspect.
(Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?)
Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices change. There’s been like 25 years of standard revisions since I first learned C++.
ha. speaking of the devil. for the "curse of knowledge" mention i made above i had a link that google served me up to a post that was totally rotten now. so i went back in to include the wikipedia version.
What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain?
Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.
You get a reward for being a mining node, not just any node. Even then, do miners have much incentive to share blocks, other than the ones they mine?
I think the incentive is mutual for most nodes (aside from the mining aspect). People will set up a node to accept transactions in an automated manner, or to have higher confidence in the state of their accounts.
It's like being on the floor of the stock market. People participating want to be where all the information is (for their own benefit), and there is incentive to bring others in and share information (because it increases the amount of information you have).
I suppose you could be a "selfish" node. The bitcoin-equivalent of someone who leeches and never seeds. But the advantage is low relative to the amount of money moving around. Most people don't care about the bandwidth of running a bitcoin node, they care about latency. Unlike bittorrent, there isn't a de-facto finished version of the file being synced: it's a constantly-updating list that everyone wants to have the latest version of. I can't find the words, but this seems to be the fundamental difference.
What's the incentive for people to participate in file sharing networks? To some degree it's access to a world of free media (same as access to a world of decentralized identities), but to a large degree it's an interesting hobby/excuse to be interested in tech. Some people have racks of hard drives dedicated to hobbies like this, just because it's interesting and is worthy.
For me the incentive is being able to own an identity that nobody can take away from me. And the assumption is that services will support this type of identity, so I don't have to make accounts on other systems that people can take away and now I've lost all access to any data I had.
I think what you are looking for is something like Mastodon or related activity-pub service. You can run your own instance and nobody can take that away from you. No need to drag a blockchain into it - just host whatever services you need.
You can adjust how much "effort" the avif encoder puts on images.
The default speed in libavif (-s 6 in avifenc) is fast enough, and it has been used by big CDNs to encode AVIFs for years. You can make the encoder as fast or slow as you'd like, depending on your compute/compression efficiency trade-off requirements.
This is pretty neat if all you need is to ping a local server but please use curl (or something equivalent) for contacting remote services. HTTP1.1 seems like such a simple protocol but in the real world you need to deal with proxies, different encodings, and redirects. Curl takes care of that (and a host of other annoying stuff) for you.
I was really just trying to see if intra-container connectivity works, and this ended up being a very quick way of doing so. (The alternative being building and deploying a new image, which would likely take significantly longer.)
Exif is great but here is your obligatory reminder that if you are publishing images you should strip out some of the identifying information that cameras and image editing software likes to embed.
In particular, you probably don’t want the GPS coordinates of your house publicly available on your blog for everyone to see.
Conversely, as a hobbyist photographer, I want to do the exact opposite for most photos I take.
I would like my camera info, especially the body, lens, focal length, and settings in the image. I recently discovered that software like Darktable can even take a gpx file and photo timestamps to add coordinates to photos taken on a camera without a GNSS receiver.
This why I have my phones track themselves (started with Moostrax on the Blackberry then iOS, Moves on iOS until Facebook killed it, now it's OwnTracks on iOS logging to my server + Arc Timeline + Gyroscope + some others, I think) - even without the "where was this photo taken?" helpfulness (for camera shots + phone shots with stripped location), it's also good for "where was that cafe / coffee shop / craft shop / whatever?" kind of questions (obviously assuming you can remember vaguely what date and time...)
I should get better at taking contemporaneous notes, really, but since that hasn't happened in 30+ years, I doubt it's going to stick now.
It's so stupid that we have to do geotagging as a post processing step with separate software. That could be built in to the camera with a GNSS receiver or smartphone Bluetooth link with minimal impact on cost or battery life. And yet even today many high end cameras lack such basic functionality. It's like the camera manufacturers aren't even trying anymore.
Most publication and messaging tools strip exif data, which is incredibly frustrating when friends send you pictures taken together as you no longer have the time stamp, nor GPS coordinate.
On the other hand, the fact that exif is such a widespread standard has been a great tool for photo archaeology.
People who can track down the original exif can recreate when, where and with what equipment the photo was taken. It's been great to identify places and people for posterity.
My static site generator strips out exif data from images and I would expect all sensible sites would do the same. There is a lot of personal information jammed in there - if you post a picture of your dog making a funny face to social media you don’t want the exact GPS coordinates of your house plastered over the internet.
You have to be selective though, some of the EXIF data specifies things like color spaces and orientation that is used by browsers for displaying the image properly.
For my personal website I have a lot of photography-oriented blog posts [1], but I have special code to strip out GPS info from the location if it's close to my home [2].
EDIT: my vibe-coding slop agent put my home GPS lat long in the example config in the README lol. Please don't rob my house; I'll go run git-filter-repo later.
Yeah, if I take a dense grid of photos near my house, it would reveal a 500 m circle. But in practice I don't take _that_ many photos in the neighborhood. Also, the circle isn't perfectly centered on my home.
These were some of the most influential books of my youth, teaching a generation of young kids quite advanced topics. I still picture cartoon robots putting numbers in boxes whenever I write code involving pointers.
But my favourite[0] was Write Your Own Adventure Programs, which taught data driven programming and text parsing.
I copied the code from the book and then did my own mods. I also ended up rewriting the engine with 6502 assembly macros. That made me realize, and appreciate, high level languages that had first order functions and very different approaches to computing and data structures, in contrast with BASIC arrays, gotos and gosubs. At the same time I was learning to program in Logo, which, without being aware of, introduced me to the world of Lispy languages and what computing really is. That tainted me a bit and left me a bit frustrated when I moved on to C and, much later in the 90s, to C++.
reply