The FTC has implemented a rule banning hidden fees in hotel and event ticket prices, requiring sellers to disclose total costs upfront.
This initiative is part of President Biden's broader effort to eliminate junk fees that unnecessarily increase consumer costs.
The rule mandates that service and resort fees be included in advertised prices, potentially saving consumers significant time, though it may face challenges from future administrations and Congress.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has prohibited hidden junk fees in hotel and event ticket pricing, mandating that all fees be disclosed upfront to consumers.- This regulation is intended to enhance price transparency and shield consumers from misleading practices by merchants.- The decision has initiated conversations about the necessity for regulations to promote fair competition and prevent consumer exploitation through concealed costs.
Ergo, previously known as Oragono, is a modern Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server developed in the Go programming language, offering ease of setup and use.
It integrates features of an IRC daemon (ircd), services framework, and bouncer, with support for IRCv3, and is customizable through a YAML configuration file.
Ergo is a fork of the Ergonomadic IRC daemon and includes contributions from developers like Jeremy Latt, Edmund Huber, Daniel Oaks, and Shivaram Lingamneni.
Ergo Chat is a contemporary IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server developed in Go, known for its simplicity in hosting, minimal resource usage, and advanced features like v3 chathistory and always-on multi-client support.
It includes built-in websocket support, facilitating easy web client access, and offers a modern chat experience that users may not recognize as IRC.
Discussions highlight IRC's open protocol and flexibility compared to platforms like Discord, and the debate over IRC's lack of persistent chat history, which some see as a feature for maintaining ephemeral conversations.
A silver amulet discovered in Frankfurt is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps, dating back to 230-270 CE.
The amulet features a Latin inscription with Christian elements, including a reference to the New Testament and the Trisagion, a liturgical hymn.
This discovery is significant for understanding the early spread and influence of Christianity in the region, highlighting its integration with local traditions.
XOR textures are generated by applying the XOR operation on the x and y coordinates of a pixel, making them simple to create and useful for testing texture mappers.- While XOR textures are not suitable for demos or games due to their overuse, they can be adjusted using different RGB values or converted from HSV to RGB for varied color effects.- Similar textures can be created using AND and OR operations, with XOR returning 1 if bits differ, AND if both bits are 1, and OR if any bit is 1.
A user described creating an XOR texture using x86 assembly, resulting in a distinctive visual effect, sparking interest in similar techniques.
The discussion referenced "munching squares," a visual effect from the 1960s PDP-1 computer, highlighting the historical context of such graphics.
Participants exchanged resources and experiences, including Lode's Computer Graphics Tutorial, and explored related topics like Hamming distance textures and glitching algorithms for creative projects.
The maintainer of the Ruby json gem has focused on enhancing its performance, aiming to make it the fastest JSON parser and generator for Ruby.- The improvements aim to reduce reliance on alternatives like oj, which, although faster, have issues with monkey patching and instability.- Optimizations include avoiding redundant checks, prioritizing likely conditions, reducing setup costs, and using lookup tables, resulting in up to a 30% increase in speed.
The article explores performance improvements in Ruby's JSON handling, addressing parsing times and comparisons with other libraries such as simdjson.
It highlights the challenges of optimizing JSON in Ruby, including the use of lookup tables, SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instructions, and the constraints of using C99 instead of C++.
The discussion also covers naming conventions in JSON and Ruby, offering suggestions for handling camelCase and snake_case transformations, and is part of a series with further insights available in a subsequent article.