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the_third_wave

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- Rate limited 2023-05-22 for pointing out that Wikipedia is biased [1]. Limit removed 2023-05-23.

- Comment [2] shadowbanned 2023-05-27, this comment expressed the hope that a given project would avoid taking or drop a politicised/activist stance to avoid repeating the mistakes made by its parent project.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36028049

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36093788

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36241247

<!-- Last 2 accounts were shadowbanned for what appears to be ideological reasons - first one for pointing out Twitter did not ban a host of vile characters, second one for just not toeing the party line. -->

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"The cause of the recent crash of flight ADZRUS-666 has been determined to be a badly scheduled ad impression which covered all screens in the glass cockpit to show aan ad of a dancing hippopotamus in a tutu selling skin care products while the plane was on final approach in IFR conditions."

Matrix is overly complicated for the purpose and XMPP/OMEMO already are interoperable between many different clients. Just like all other communication systems it is the network effect which makes them usable. Tell your friends to install a client of choice and - for those so inclined - run a server or create an account on one. Keep your current W/app or Telegram or whatever active for now while you slowly move more communications to XMPP. Once you have contact with most of your friends and family via XMPP make it your default wat to communicatie, i.e. do not start conversations over the legacy apps and answer those who contact you over them through XMPP. You'll find that you'll end up using those legacy apps less and less. Keep them active if you want but don't initiate conversations over them and you'll be set for the moment using those services becomes untenable.

This is not just fiction, it is what I have done and am still in the process of doing, in my case moving from Telegram - I never used nor will I ever use things which requires accounts run by metafacebook or Google or Microsoft or any of the others.

Just run your own XMPP server in your own domain, use OMEMO for encryption and you're set. You can communicate with others on other servers, none of them 'publically available' and the TLA's can stare at all that encrypted gibberish 'till the cows come home. Even if they break into a single server they won't get access to the cleartext, for that they'll need to access the terminal devices - phones, browsers, etc.

This is how I've been communicating for years now, it works fine and does not feed any of the data parasites out there.

Time to change your laws and/or prosecutors I'd say so those 'minor thefts' can and will be prosecuted resulting in fines which need to be paid - no ifs and buts. Get them early and get them (hopefully not that) often and you may be able to keep the majority of 'proletarian shoppers' on a somewhat less crooked path. If crime pays more people commit crimes, if shoplifting is not dealt with more people shoplift.

Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet! Wie trösten wir uns, die Mörder aller Mörder? Das Heiligste und Mächtigste, was die Welt bisher besaß, es ist unter unseren Messern verblutet.

The average teenager who reads Nietzsches proclamation on the death of God thinks of this as an accomplishment, finally we got rid of those thousands of years old and thereby severely outdated ideas and rules. Somewhere along the march to maturity they may start to wonder whether that which has replaced those old rules and ideas were good replacements but most of them never come to the realisation that there were rebellious teenagers during all those centuries when the idea of a supreme being to which or whom even the mightiest were to answer to still held sway. Nietzsche saw the peril in letting go off that cultural safety valve and warned for what might come next.

We are currently living in the world he warned us about and for that I, atheist as I am, am partly responsible. The question to be answered here is whether it is possible to regain the benefits of the old order without getting back the obvious excesses, the abuse, the sanctimoniousness and all the other abuses of power and privilege which were responsible for turning people away from that path.

Certainly XMPP is not perfect but then again, nothing is. The extensibility does make it a bit of a gamble whether any specific server - which can be used for all kinds of purposes, many of which not related to human communication - offers everything a client program expects it to. Then again if your communication/discussion partners all make sure to use servers which support the essentials for the type of use you want to make of it - usually that'll mean those XEPs need for OMEMO, muc and maybe Jingle, the Conversations project publishes a list of what is needed [1] - things work just fine and you'll be communicating without the need for centralised (monetised, censored, monitored, ...) services. I've been running it for decades now, first as a backup "just in case" communication channel but for the last 7 years or so as my main channel to family and friends. We're using mostly the Conversations (-derived) client(s) on mobile, Gajim on desktop and Converse.js on web with servers running on different types of hardware ranging from SBCs (RasPi etc) to ex-lease enterprise hardware. The maintenance burden on the server software is close to zero with Prosody, it hardly takes any resources and has never crashed on me.

[1] https://codeberg.org/inputmice/Conversations#xmpp-features

A lot of that time was spent chasing the ever-changing "standards" which describe what a browser is supposed to do. It is easier for a new project to implement the distilled essence of those "standards" than it was to try to keep up with the house-of-cards-built-on-quicksand while its "architects" kept on changing and expanding its "design". This means Ladybird should be able to reach parity in a much shorter timeframe, it is the slog which comes after which decides whether they can keep up with whatever Blink does (which more or less is what those "standards" end up describing).

It is both fruit factory fanboyism as well as anti-EU sentiment and it has nothing to do with 'capitalists' not liking 'consumers' having choices. Without capitalism the problem would not exist, so much is true. It would not exist because there wouldn't be anything to choose from: no browser market, no mobile devices, no choice. This tired anti-capitalism rhetoric needs to be shelved with the other books from the 60's and 70's.

Repair your current device? If that is really not possible get a "smart" one and dumb it down - don't allow any network access or - if it insists on being connected or you want to get some use out of its "smart" functions - put it on a separate network which has no access to the internet. Of and when I'm "forced" to get a new "smart" piece of equipment this is what I do if I can not change the firmware on the thing to something under my own control. I never let any "smart" device access the internet because of a host of reasons ranging from security and privacy to the risks of the thing "upgrading" itself without my approval.

Approval poll numbers seem to indicate a plurality of US voters agree with much of what the current government is implementing and for the first time in a very long period the majority of US voters seems to think the country is on the right track. You may not like what Trump and his crew are doing but most people did not like what your preferred candidates were doing and planning to do. Given these numbers I'd say "your democracy" (which is a constitutional republic but I'll just borrow some of the oft-heard rhetoric from the "democratic" party) seems to be functioning quite well and certainly a lot better than under the previous regime when approval numbers were abysmal.

You don't need GrapheneOS or any other specific AOSP derivative for that, any of them will do. Just don't install any Google-specific bits on the device - use microG if you need to have something resembling Google services - and you're there. Even on stock devices with Google services you can get partly there by disabling anything you don't need, only enabling it when you happen upon some app which absolutely won't run without them but first check if you can replace that app with another or - better still - a web app which can replace it. How to disable Google services you asked? Why, using a script of course, launched from a Termux widget. Here's one way to do this, using a disable/enable script (one script, two hardlinked names) on a rooted device running some stock distribution. If you try this and your phone breaks you get to keep both pieces without extra cost - in other words this works for me but might not work for you:

   ~ $ cat .shortcuts/Google_Services\:enable
   #!/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/bash

   PACKAGE="com.google.android.gms com.google.android.gms.policy_sidecar_aps com.google.android.gsf com.android.vending"
   PATH="/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin:$PATH"

   command=$(echo "$0"|cut -d: -f2)

   pman () {
           action=$1
           shift
           for package in $@; do
                   sudo pm $action $package
           done
   }

   case $command in
   disable|enable)
           pman $command $PACKAGE
           ;;
   *)
           echo "command '$command' not supported"
           ;;
   esac
   exit 0

One thing seems odd: it takes an 800W LED to double the light output of a 250W halogen bulb. Normally LED is far more efficient than halogen so I wonder why the opposite is true for this project.

There is so much scaremongering about running mail servers that it almost looks as if interested parties are trying to dissuade people from running servers using this well-known open protocol and instead tell them to use whatever proprietary or single-sourced product. In reality running a mail server is not difficult at all, it hardly takes resources and once configured it tends to run fine without needing much in the way of maintenance. The main pain points seem to be the need to configure a bunch of DNS records for things like SPF and DKIM. Spam is solved using a filter like Spamassassin and possibly a graylist so that boogeyman is vanquished for now - I'm still waiting for the next wave of LLM-generated spam which is less easily recognised for what it is, this far is has not shown up yet. You may need to add some exceptions to the graylist for some of the bigger, non-standards-compliant services like anything run by Microsoft and you may need to use a "smart server" - an SMTP proxy for outgoing mail - if port 25 is blocked on your connection but these are not hard to configure.

I've been running my own mail services for close to 30 years now starting with handcrafted Sendmail configurations, now running Exim and Postfix. Running your own mail services isn't the scary problem it is made out to be.

Does anybody knows why Google and Microsoft constantly shuffle their communication apps?

They do this to give you an incentive to look for alternatives which you can run yourself. Jitsi Meet for video conferences, XMPP + WebRTC for video calling, something like Nextcloud Talk (i.e. Spreed) for both, etc.

And? Just because you're using a rusty language does not mean you can produce sloppy code. Those design patterns were designed by design experts to expertly design expert designs, using code factory factories factoring in factors your newly hired team has not factored in. That is time tested battle ready insert-rocket-emoji wisdom which you better use if you want to survive the next right-sizing after the next code spurt.

Nicely done but not enterprise ready if you ask me (which you did not but let's assume you did). Where is the 'y' factory factory factory method? Do you really think I can present this code as being ready for company-wide deployment (me and my virtual friends) without the solid foundation of all 26 design patterns clearly being implemented? Where is the code diversity statement, where is the code code of code coding conduct code code? How can I justify a team lead and product manager for a code base which fits in a thimble?

MAHA - Make Android Holo Again because screen space is an awful thing to waste, because the 'trans pride colour scheme' is unappealing (I assume the colour scheme is configurable, yes?), because mobile devices are not soft fluffy baby toys, because it just looks better - probably subjective but so be it. Just like Fisher-Z declared in "One Voice" there's a new generation that's sick of (the UI equivalent of) "Blowing in the wind". Be gone, squircly bubbles, you're not welcome anymore.