LiDAR in particular actually kinda sucks at those conditions (basically any form of precipitation). It’s really only good in clear environments.

WebP is not proprietary. It’s an open format, is not patent-encumbered, and its reference implementation/libraries are open-source. It is driven mostly by Google, similar to Chromium.

It’s a better format than JPEG, GIF, or PNG, while doing the jobs of all of those, but better (in most cases), and is an open format. It also has wide compatibility nowadays. The only major downside is a lot of social media services don’t even think about it being a potential format due to a lack of awareness/wide usage, leading to a degraded experience when someone shares a WebP somewhere (lack of auto-embedding as an example). I suspect this is why it gets a lot of hate here, which is unfortunate because it’s not at all the fault of the format.

AVIF (based on AV1) is the up-and-coming format that beats WebP in most cases now, but support isn’t quite there yet (mostly due to Apple), and it has the same problems for social media as WebP. However, it doesn’t have any true lossless mode AFAIK. HEIF (based on HEVC) is also good, but is heavily patent-encumbered and not as open. JPEG-XL is dope and potentially even better in some aspects, but has very poor support across the board.

Yeah, interesting, I don’t have that email. I guess I’ll find out if my subscription rate increases in December!

Hmm, what was the subject of that email? I don’t see one like that, but I want to be sure.

I’m still grandfathered in from the Google Play Music days, paying $7.99/mo for YT Music + YT Premium. I will never interrupt that subscription and lose that price, haha.

Telegram does have E2EE, just not in regular chats. Its secret chats are E2EE, as are its voice and video calls.

I also think it has the best UI of any of the messengers, personally. It’s customizable and very polished overall, at least on Android. Very smooth/optimized while having loads of features and lots of little animations to make things flow nicely without getting in the way.

I do like Signal and Matrix clients as well, though I just wish Matrix had more of a user base.