I wouldn’t go quite that far. It doesn’t only protect their business interest; it definitely does achieve the goals they claim—like helping non-tech-literate users to avoid getting scammed with malware—it’s just they’re only doing it this way because it also aligns with their business interest.

To that end I’d contest the “Security Theater” label. All security measures are ultimately implemented in a way that defends the interests of the owners. It’s just that people have forgotten or aren’t aware that Proprietary Software means they’re not the owners.

Of course if it was just about users’ safety, the most effective way to help people avoid getting scammed is to educate them, but that would make people less dependent on Google and less susceptible to vendor lock-in, and people may even start having dangerous thoughts like “it sure is weird how many identifying traits of a scam are also just standard business practices for large corporations like Google.”

No thankss, I got tired of being surrounded by people like you

I agree with the sentiment, but I do have to argue with some of his points (because it’s fun, and it’s okay to do things just for the hell of it). Excellent point, ineffectively articulated

I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early… But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first.

You’re your own counterexample. You got to experience the metaverse when it was still alive, which you wouldn’t have if you had waited for just a few years. And you got a Masters Degree out of it, not just bragging rights.

But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money

So you’re not struggling that much if you can start of the next sentence with an example of people who earned more than just bragging rights.

But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money.

This grossly overestimates the ratio of successes to failures. You’re muuuuuuch more likely to lose money on the gamble of The Next Big Thing than win; for every HTTP there’s a Gopher and Usenet and a dozen others that all look the same from the outside looking in.

For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

Flash is a terrible example, it ran its lifecycle already, sure, but it was HUGE back in the day. And people benefited from using it; some of my favorite animators and gamedevs cut their teeth on Flash, people’s work got recognized by a global audience, people landed jobs, Flash made it onto cable TV channels, people still light up at the mention of Homestar Runner to this day. People also made money, sure, but there are more benefits to playing with tech than “it makes money happen.”

Which brings me to my final gripe: this is all framed as if the only benefit of a technology is if it’s productive or profitable. When you discuss your favorite show with friends, are you considering whether the conversation can be converted into capital? When you watch a beautiful sunset, do you fret over whether the clouds will help you achieve your quarterly goals? Out on dates with your SOs, do you have to take a break in the bathroom to worry whether the evening is meeting KPIs?

Sometimes the benefit of things is just having the experience, instead of treating it as a means to an end. Yeah, don’t let the FOMO ruin your day, but maybe take some time to play around with a doomed technology before it becomes abandoned and the community ceases to be. Maybe you’ll become a recognized expert, maybe you’ll learn some valuable lessons you can transfer to tech with more longevity, or maybe you’ll just have fun.

And honestly, whats the fucking point of living, working and grinding and suffering, if not for the fun in between it all?

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-developer-verification.html

De-googled Android ROMs:

• GrapheneOS
• LineageOS
• /e/ OS
• Volla OS

Non-android, non-apple smartphones:

• Pinephone
• Pinephone pro
• Librem 5
• Volla Phone 22
• Jolla Phone
• FuriPhone FLX1s

And pretty much every feature phone out there (way too many to list)

Matrix very recently has had e2ee calling since at least last april

I don’t host a server currently, so I can’t fully recommend it without knowledge of the backend, but i’m liking the experience as a user

Just looked at Session, and holy shit is that a massive downside…

From their own whitepaper:

Through the integration of a blockchain network, Session adds a financial requirement for anyone wishing to host a server on the network, and thus participate in Session’s message storage and routing architecture.

So you have to pay to self-host, and that’s somehow an upside???

This staking system provides a defence against Sybil attacks by limiting attackers based on the amount of financial resources they have available.

Which is a fine explanation in a world where everyone has a relatively equal amount of wealth. This is the epitome of dunning-kruger economics: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Firstly, the need for attackers to buy or control Session Tokens to run Session Nodes creates a market feedback loop which increases the cost of acquiring sufficient tokens to run large portions of the network. That is, as the attacker buys or acquires more tokens and stakes them, removing them from the circulating supply, the supply of the Session Token is decreased while the demand from the attacker must be sustained. This causes the price of any remaining Session Tokens to increase, creating an increasing price feedback loop which correlates with the scale of the attack

So the more nodes a single entity holds, the harder it becomes for other entities to buy nodes and break the monopoly? Did you take 3 seconds to think this through???

Secondly, the staking system binds an attacker to their stake, meaning if they are found to be performing active attacks, the underlying value of their stake is likely to decline as users lose trust in the protocol, or could be slashed by the network, increasing the sunk cost for the attacker.

“Assuming every user is a perfectly rational actor, malicious actors would be shunned. This is somehow due to the economic incentive, and not just how humans operate when they’re assumed to be perfectly rational.”

Also: malicious actors when they find out they might lose their money if they get caught: “welp, I better not do that then. Thanks laissez-faire capitalism!”

Jesus christ fucked on a pike, these dipshits really drank the crypto kool-aid, huh?

If my responses are as stimulating to you as yours are to me, why tf do you keep responding?

I did do the 5 minute search, and found his write-up. I said I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was fabricated, not that it was.

Thank you for proving my point

Nobody wants to point out that Alexey Grigorev changes to being named Gregory after 2 paragraphs?

Slop journalism at its sloppiest. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this story was entorely fabricated.

Podcasts?

If you really want to save some space, you can save a lot by opting to use command-line programs instead of the GUIs that basically just act as front-ends for the command-line programs. E.g. most FOSS audio converters just use ffmpeg behind the scenes, so really they’re a lot of extra libraries and such just to give you a graphical means of building up the CLI command. Same goes for videos. Same for images, though a lot of those might use imagemagick instead (even though ffmpeg also does images).

That being said, I use VLC for converting videos and audio files. I honestly can’t tell the difference between uncompressed (e.g. .wav), lossless (e.g. .flac or .ape), and high-bitrate lossy like mp3 v0 or mp3 320. Heck, I can’t even tell the difference between the aforementioned and mid-bitrate lossy audio like mp3 192 or Vorbis (the .ogg format) 192.

Quality is of course dependent on how sensitive the listener’s ears are, and how quality the equipment you’re listening with is. You’ll want to run some test conversions youraelf before committing to any specific format.

If your files are already in lossy formats, then you really don’t have much choice for compression, outside of bundling them all together in a tarball and compressing them with something like gz or zstd. This is only good for storing them, if you try to listen to them, your system will have to extract them, and that either takes time before it plays, or causes stuttering while it plays.

The good news is that Russia is only evil and fascist and so it’s always bad to be associated with them. Trust me, I’m one of the good Americans

You fool, you absolute bingus. You have fallen for one of the classic blunders, for I, in my infinite wisdom, know that all states are bad. And all equally so at that. 😎

So there are words I can say that get you to immediately stop listening to anything else I say and make broad assumptions about me and my beliefs?

Talk about being trained

Picking apart the single definition used by one entity doesn’t mean the term itself is completely meaningless.

But fine, I’ll bite, just for fun:

the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo

That’s every country

That’s “whataboutism.” Or alternatively, it’s “authoritarian realism”—a term I just made up which refers to any view that assumes a nation has to centralize powers to exist because that’s how the world under capitalism currently operates.

Reductions from what? The USSR was an increase in all of those things from Tsarist Russia.

So 1. You just gave a counterexample to your first point, and 2. I guess the metric depends on who you ask. It could be reductions from a historical state (as we could say of e.g. the current USA compared to North America’s political systems prior to european colonization), or compared to some standard of liberty (e.g. your use of USSR).

I can agree with your first point and still posit that the term is meaningful: e.g. authoritarianism isn’t a binary state of extistence, but rather a spectrum that different states can be compared on; all states can be authoritarian to some degree, but some states are more or less authoritarian than others.

Or to put it another way, saying “authoritarianism” is meaningless because all states exercise authority is like saying “conservativism” is meaningless because all living creatures seek to conserve resources (to some degree).

I agree that language is an imperfect map for the real world we inhabit—and I especially agree that the language (as with any social tool) gets abused to manipulate people—but I don’t agree that those facts make the terms completely useless in communication.

In most instances, “authoritarianism” is a more rigidly defined term than simply meaning “exercises authority.”

E.g. Wikipedia defines it as

a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

It usually is this simple for any distro anymore. My advice is mostly tailored to worst-case scenarios so that people don’t get overly pissy when things don’t Just Work™

There’s nothing I can say to convince you Ubuntu is sucky if you don’t personally experience problems with it/have the occasional “I wish I could do this, but I guess it’s not possible” thoughts—spoiler: it’s usually possible, just not with that distro; this is true for all distros though, there will always be things they cannot do that others can.

That being said, my biggest gripe with Ubuntu, besides canonical’s geologic-paced attempts to make it profit-driven (which was what I was thinking of when I mentioned user-friendliness), is Snaps. I understand the motivation behind them, but the implementation was just sucky for many nitpicky reasons that I don’t really care to enumerate rn.

I also just don’t see much value in downstream for my needs. I can basically turn Debian into a Ubuntu clone if I want to, and my packages will still largely be supported by upstream maintainers. For bespoke distros it makes sense, but those are usually ill-maintained or hobby projects that update at glacial speeds.

I’m not saying that Debian >>>>> Ubuntu. It’s better just enough that I’d recommend Debian before I would recommend Ubuntu.