Victor Kropp Modify

2026-09-18 22:47:26

For years, there were just two image formats available on the Web: JPEG and GIF. One for lossy images (e.g. photos), one for lossless (e.g. icons).

Then came PNG. It was lossless, meant to replace GIF. It added transparency and better compression, which lead to smaller size, but dropped animation. (Yes, there was APNG, but it was never properly supported anywhere)

And those three were everywhere for decade or more.

There were multiple attempts to improve compression even further. For example, Google’s Guetzli for JPEG images. But all improvements were still limited by fundamental constraints of those formats, one needed to choose either lossless or lossy compression.

What if we don’t need to choose?

There are now not one, but two formats, that can efficiently handle both 12MP photos and 16×16 icons. WebP is slightly older and supported more widely, AVIF is even more compact, and has wide enough support in modern browsers.

They both support transparency, which previously was limited to lossless formats only.

So, from now on I only use AVIF images on this webpage. And if you, like me missed this silent revolution, you should consider these new formats as well.

2026-09-18 02:12:19

Today’s XKCD is spot-on.

I feel very much the same this days. The time flies fast.

2026-09-17 01:20:57

The internet is full of AI slop nowadays. I’m writing my blog for humans, so I write myself¹. I’d never randomly prompt an agent and copy-paste the output here without reading.

And so it is no surprise, that people want to see AI-generated text clearly marked. Well, it’s quite easy to tell apart written text from AI slop, but why should I spend my time on this? The problem is that most don’t mark their text in any way, either accidentally or deliberately.

That’s why Anthropic is introducing AI text watermarking. Claude will replace some words in generated text by synonyms to make the entire text have a specific checksum. I see a problem here though. Even without it AI texts are disgusting to read, what would be after it is enabled?

I’ve recently stumbled upon an example of such a technique (albeit for a different purpose) in an old game manual. Heavy use of synonyms was made there to justify monospaced text to fill a specific screen width. Although, it is impressive demonstration of writing skills, I doubt that it improves the quality of the text itself. And the same would happen with AI text watermarking as well.

2026-09-15 23:57:15

I updated all my devices to Apple OS 27 yesterday. No issues so far. Except Siri AI is not available in Europe, but that was expected.

There are three main reasons to update sooner, rather than later this time. First, there are numerous security issue fixes. Even if you don’t want to update to 27 just yet, make sure to install 26.7 with (likely) most of these fixes included as well.

Second, performance improvements. They already teased them on WWDC back in June, and so far everything just feels snappier everywhere.

And, last but not least, Liquid Glass improvements. I haven’t had any issues with the new design before, but all tweaks are very welcome anyway. Some macOS specific changes like reverting icons from all menu items are real usability improvements. Also, just look at those traffic lights!

2026-09-11 14:37:34

Meta forced music band Muse to free up the @muse handle on Facebook and Instagram, because they chose the name for their AI agent.

We’ve seen this before, as Twitter after acquisition seized @music handle from the long time owner.

This doesn’t violate their ToS, of course. But it is a reminder, that you don’t own anything on the social networks.

2026-09-11 02:09:17

Gamer Nexus YouTube channel claims that LG Smart TVs are spying on their users even in standby mode. They record audio & video playing on TV, capture ambient sound (e.g. people talking near the TV), scanning Wi-Fi networks, etc. What’s even worse, the system that they have maybe abused by hackers.

Unsurprisingly, LG denies the claims. Who would have thought?

A possible mitigation would be to disable personalized ads and voice control. However, I don’t trust that they respect the setting, so I just disconnected my LG TV from the network completely.

But it’s not all, there was another research some months ago. It reports, that nearly half of the LG TVs are turned to residential proxies.

So I don’t use any TV apps either. Well, at least they can display whatever is plugged in via HDMI and don’t alter it with ads. Oops, I just offered them a business idea.