My best breakups have been when I didn’t wait for the best or right time to break up. Because once you are there, even if you wait, you know it’s never going to be the right time; it will only fester and fester until your entirety is gradually dragged into an existential sepsis.

That’s absurd coming from the founder of a FOSS messaging app who actively decided not to let Signal federate and rejected any other open source Signal client. Not only that, even now you can’t truly use Signal’s new “username” feature. If any of the recipients have your number stored in their phonebook, irrespective of whether you know them or not, the username goes for a toss. This was/is the problem with Telegram’s username feature. Signal knew this and still decided to go ahead with it. Not to mention never doing anything about completely removing the phone number from the account after its creation. This has been, by design, a privacy and hence safety threat, and even after the username feature was implemented, this not getting implemented is very concerning.

Some companies buy other companies to let them die – strategically, some companies buy other companies to get their features/talents but remove any trace of that company or that design language, or so. Some companies buy other companies to control competition. Apple seems to buy other companies for doing nothing at all. They have so much money that they buy other companies, but they are so bad at software that they can’t figure out what to do with it after that.

It’s sad stating this as an iPhone/Mac user (but not an Apple fan – yes, there’s a distinction), but even if Apple is able to buy Google in its entirety, they will not be able to fix search in any part of the Apple ecosystem.

A lot of these “privacy sensitive” service providers are actually quite user-hostile.

Find a middle ground - get your own domain (pick a good registrar) and find a respectable mail host that has a support team with accountability who don’t treat you like a burden on this planet when you attempt to contact them (i.e not Tuta, not Mailbox-org - nope!!!, not Proton etc.). Do not go overboard with DMARC/etc in the beginning. Go about it slowly.

Also - make sure you use a service that lets you connect via an IMAP/POP client. It pains me to say that, but if you start avoiding services based on “five eyes” and “14 eyes” and “195 eyes”, I’m pretty sure we will be looking at pigeons and corked bottles in the sea. So, if you need E2EE over email - please use E2EE in the email using GPG on your own. I’d highly recommend not falling for the privacy theatre of the likes of Proton.

It’s one of those organic produce items among the Internet things which happens to be in vogue these days.

• By forcing you to use a non-anonymous Google Account.
• Then tying it with Google Play Services on that device.
• Google Play Services are like a combo of arteries and nerves of Android OS.

That’s how.

That’s the opposite of minimalism, I’d argue. I would consider minimalism as: having less, keeping/retaining less, and also, and in my opinion – more important, doing less.

Currently Ente - looking for a replacement. Ente’s apps are non-native and it shows - really sluggish and poor. I wish they would prioritise that, but they don’t. But this is not really a backup - it’s a sync - and like a shadow of iOS Photos app on iOS because, well, those APIs are not natively accessible to other apps on iOS. Ente is more like Google Photos’ FOSS and E2EE alt.

For actually backing up my personal data (including videos and photos) I use:

1. borgbase (with borg’s GUI Vorta; FOSS and E2EE)
2. backblaze b2 (using restic’s GUI backrest; FOSS and E2EE) – these both have exactly the same personal data being backed up.
3. then there’s tarsnap (this is a much smaller - must save at all costs - data set). Tarsnap is very unwieldy (literally stuck in time - not in a good way) but I have been backing up since long and I do not have another reliable solution. Its client code is readable publicly - don’t know it’s FOSS or not; apparently not. But E2EE.

(1 and 2 are really great apps!)

I also use a sync tool with a lifetime plan (but it sucks and I am finding a replacement, so won’t even name it; it says E2EE but they are so irresponsible that I removed anything sensitively personal from sync set). PS. This was my first and last lifetime anything of my life.

Actually people who don’t live outside have those accents as well. His parents actually moved back when he was 1 or 2 years old. This is really on the lines of the typical accent of people from this subcontinent who are highly educated (via English), well travelled, well read etc.

I have a friend who went to UK and came back after 13 years. Spent most of the time at SOAS. Her accent didn’t change at all. It is what it was when she left at the time of her bachelors. She did masters, PhD, and post doc there (the last one is still ongoing - not sure, some people study a lot).

But I see people coming from America in 3 bloody months and speaking English in American accent.

Simplenote, DayOne, Pocket Casts are already ready to challenge this failure - maybe not in terms of money, Matt. So never say never.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4 this is just an example as he is kinda famous. But you can find more. Here’s two seasoned journos talking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4682YUnN_yQ and this https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TXokRjBVSaA (I don’t like this journo to be honest but it’s another example of very common Indian accent - hers is actually less sophisticated as the previous ones have had kinda more “private school” upbringing).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha-LoNqOaEk few examples of subcontinent English

It is actually nice when the person has better language proficiency in English. What people often make fun of on the Internet are many who either don’t know how to speak English or don’t know it well, and that’s pretty common and normal for that country of 1.5 billion. If you listen to any seasoned Indian journalist (especially a bit older), you’d hear that faint old English lilt (from the middle of the start of the last century). You will also find that in the way Pakistanis speak English. It’s very similar.

I like most or all of them when the speaker has at least above-average proficiency. Except American. Esp. the one that rolls a lot and for long (probably from the South of the USA, I am not sure). That’s what makes it very hard for me to watch/hear most of the American content.

My favourite, though, is from my home country, which has a very slight tinge of (old) British accent (colonial leftover/hangover) and also the Middle Eastern accent (it’s close to home), again only if the speaker has very good proficiency.

The thing is most of my gold (i.e. ~20% of my portfolio) is as ETFs. Good luck to me using that when civilisation collapses, if it does (I don’t think that’s happening in the shape and form as it sounds from this article). But then it was not likely at all I would be able to safeguard that in the physical gold form either in that perceived atmosphere of tyranny and mayhem, so that’s there.

One could, however, look to reduce or balance (whatever you wanna call it) USD exposure.

There is too concentrated which is bad (mac, win), and there is too fragmented which is bad (that is your Linux/distro universe). In other words, in one world, a single entity controls and is responsible for everything, and in another world, no one is. I am not getting into what is worse or better, rather what is usable for an end user.

And then there’s the tacit wisdom of the FOSS/Linux world savants: “Uh, if something is not done or not available – you can just fork it or raise a PR, can’t you?” completely escaping the fact that almost the entirety of the users of either world are just end users.

Yeah. And before this the world didn’t only consist of USA but we hinged these conversations on USA. I was commenting in that context.

The number of times I have used TikTok in my life is the integer just below 1.

(And now I am getting a sense of what that “other kind” of echo chamber these platforms are becoming as opposed to that kind of echo chamber Twitter etc are)

I mean the damn thing is banned here.

This is relevant for immigrants who are trying to escape poverty, almost with no future in their own countries either for their personal or professional aspirations. I am not a China fan, but when you look at countries around the world, many of which are very poor and underdeveloped but with lots of brilliant, hard-working people with dreams and potential, they would rather go to a place where they have at least some stability, predicted living and working conditions, and a future, rather than to a place where one doesn’t know whether the potential future mayor of New York City, born and brought up in the USA and hence of course a citizen who happens to be the son of a world-famous filmmaker and a well-known academic, will actually be deported or not. I mean that’s a real possibility at this point - let that sink in. (I am not even going for more extreme examples)

I wish things were better, and I wish we didn’t live in a world where China, yes, China – of all the countries, might become a viable alternative for people from the developing or underdeveloped world compared to the USA.

No, I am afraid it’s not. Just because it has a clear one pricing doesn’t make it cheaper. One barely buys a VPN for one or just seven months or so.

I would assume that they mean ‘VPN not for anonymity’ when they say that. I agree with you though.