Snot Flickerman

There’s also SimpleX chat and Briar, but I’ve used both of those less than Matrix. They seem to be aiming to solve the last few issues that Matrix has, like usernames and metadata leakage.

I consider Matrix to be closer to an “Enterprise” solution, like what a business or government or non-profit would use for secure communications (literally both French and German governments use Matrix), while SimpleX/Briar seem much more aimed at individuals just wanting control over their personal conversations.

Spin up your own server for best results.

Then you only have to worry about minor metadata leakage.

And if they had implented that to begin with and used servers that kept no logs he wouldn’t have had anything of value to hand over and they would have had to release him since he physically could not provide those things.

He built the damn situation for himself, and the fact that such issues weren’t considered practically screams “honeypot.”

Tenacious P

He cares more about being allowed to shit his worthless opinion all over the world than he does the idiots he was forced to block.

“Okay Brazil, I’ll block them as long as you let me continue to spout racist horseshit daily.”

It’s never about the free speech of anyone but Musk.

Harvey Birdman 'members.

Well for one, change will never come from waiting for “leadership” to take control.

Change will only ever come from the workers organizing together from the ground up, waiting for someone else to give you the framework will always result in a framework that binds you.

I mean, I agree with your assessment, but I personally don’t classify “hearing what someone says, but dismissing it outright” as “listening.” Semantics, I suppose.

That’s fair, but he has indeed been around a long time, and is even portrayed as wearing goggles and a hero-cape in tech-comic XKCD.

He was the main editor at zine-turned-blog BoingBoing in the early 2000’s. I hope you enjoy finding out more about him, he’s got good tech philosophies.

Great talk, but I’m getting a little tired of Doctorow’s calls to action that result in nothing but crickets from the community at large. He’s written/spoken numerous calls to action for various issues since the early 2000’s.

It’s not Doctorow’s fault, I think it’s rather that the majority of the tech community isn’t listening. Doctorow can talk until he’s blue in the face and it won’t matter if the larger community doesn’t actually give a shit about his ideas.

I am altering the design. Pray I do not alter it any further.

Jony “It Doesn’t Need To Work, It Just Needs To Look Cool” Ive strikes again.

I’m not sure I really buy the argument that this could be better for several reasons.

1. The implicit guardrails these companies are going to add which will complicate things.

2. Numerous game-breaking states because you’re risking a more traditional Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master problem where your party somehow has failed to ask an NPC the right kind of questions or even consider that they might have information relevant to the campaign. How do you get this information across if the player isn’t somehow prompted to attempt it?

3. Baldur’s Gate 3 only came out about 4 months before this article. It exists as a counterpoint to the idea that pre-scripted dialogue can reduce replayability. Only if you approach it like Bethesda and you refuse to block your players off from content. I don’t think Todd Howard realizes how that philosophy hurts replayability because you can always complete every questline every playthrough. While in a game like BG3, large amounts of the game are locked off based on your character, class, party and choices you make. Certain things you have to replay the whole game to access. There’s mountains of replayability in their world of pre-scripted dialogue. It’s rather no other company has been willing to put the kind of time, money, effort, and production quality that something like BG3 demands.

I think this AI stuff is a cheap cop-out that uses way too much energy for a weak result. Instead of making better games the system spec requirements will either become insane or all games will be delivered via streaming platforms. They’ve maxed out graphical fidelity but still need excuses to use “better” hardware. Better game design achieves the same result without the vendor lock-in and absurd hardware/power demands.

In a world that loves to tout “efficiency” sprawling GUIs and mouse-click-everything has drastically reduced efficiency when a keyboard + shortcuts + macros are far more efficient.

The further we stray from the CLI the further we stray from God. CLI-nliness is next to Godliness.

To be fair to the Open Source community, Canonical is a private company, and so it’s not really a shocker that they keep promoting bullshit tied to their own ecosystem. Especially with someone like Mark Shuttleworth involved, he was one of the early rich out of touch space tourists, long before Bezos looked like an idiot coming back from space. The profit motive always infects everything it touches.

Reading Ed Zitron’s coverage of the Google antitrust cases is pretty eye opening.

Mostly because it says basically what you just said: we’ve already reached pretty much peak efficiency in these forms, and since they can’t bleed out more money via “efficiency” they’re now leaning towards “How many customers can I piss off while increasing ad interactions by 1%?” As Zitron points out, they’re literally chasing tiny percentage points of growth through “how many people can we piss off and still grow?” instead of offering anything new and useful. It’s just “we’re entrenched, so why would we try anything risky at all ever?” all the way down.

Why did this happen?

The cynical but probably truer than we’d like to admit answer is “middle managers who bring nothing to the table but need to ‘make big changes’ to justify that promotion they’ve been chasing.”

Source: Pretty much all corporations at this point have these people, my sister’s ex-husband is one at Google.

Those moments when you can’t decide if someone’s username means they’re a science nerd or a Venture Bros. fan.

Me_irl:

That won’t push me to use yt-dlp to just download the fucking video and watch it locally or anything, completely giving up on using their shitty fucking site. VLC has no ads on pause.

The audit details and whitepaper details are far beyond my capabilities to understand. Can anyone with knowledge of the field tell us about the findings? If you would be so kind, please and thank you.

Good on them for getting an audit and making the code publicly auditable, but I really would like to hear an opinion from some folks who are more involved in cryptography on whether this is Discord being genuine and doing the right thing, or is it Discord trying to use Public Relations and weasel words to make it seem like they’re doing the right thing.

It’s just hard to trust a private company’s motives sometimes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not capable of doing the right thing. Thanks to anyone who can give some input on this.