Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.

But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.

XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)

Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)

The ones I know of are not really masquerading, but rather, funding themselves and/or directly related services (often hosting) via convenient ways.

• Conversations.im (XMPP/Jabber client) is $8 on Google Play, free on F-Droid and is FOSS. Dev runs their own instance.
• OsmAnd+ costs money on Google Play, is free on F-Droid, provides hosting of gigabytes of map data.
• Beeper (bridges from popular chats to Matrix) costs money (subscription I believe), but can be set up on one’s own (I run two bridges on my chat server).

What I do dislike is companies overusing “Open” or “Free” in their own or their product names, with no implication of Free or Open Source software. Similar to slapping “engineer” on non-engineering roles or “manager” on non-managerial ones.

There are some mathematical models similar to a Voronoi diagram, which would make districts convex polygons.

With the new gerrymandering 2.0 Ohio is proposing, soon all of their cities will be “red” (on paper)

A small town, or a suburb of a city that is described as “a great place to raise a family”. From what I have seen, that usually means one of two things:

1. The town/suburb is closer to the city, but is wealthy, real estate is expensive, usually very car-centric, which excludes anyone poor (or even middle class, sometimes).

2. The town/village is far away from the nearest city, not necessarily wealthy, but usually ran by a group of people that know each other (good old boys club), probably heavy on religion or other “traditional” values.

“Call Message” sounds like something you would see in a horribly translated manual.

Call it “Live Voicemail” or something. And why would it need AI Core? Playing a recorded message is high tech now?

You should still read Ancillary Justice, it’s fantastic and has so many perspectives, details, and world-building. Even better on a re-read somehow.

I thought the same about the second book of Broken Earth. In both Broken Earth and Imperial Radch, it all takes place in one spot and gets more interpersonal. I did like the third book of Broken Earth though.

That is also the premise of one of the stories in Asimov’s I, Robot. Human operator did not say the command with enough emphasis, so the robot went did something incredibly stupid.

Those stories did not age well… Or now I guess they did?

What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.

Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.

You can interact with Matrix server through basic curl commands… and I thought the documentation was pretty good. There are plenty of third-party clients.

Sure, E2EE, keys and cross-signing is not trivial, but I don’t know where it is.

Snikket is the rebranded-dockerized XMPP environment (uses prosody for server, Conversations clone for Android, and Monal clone for iOS).

Worked pretty well for me in the past.

I’ve been hosting a server without much problems for several years now.

Synapse and Riot.im (now Element) became much better around 2019 or 2020. But not too long ago, I also found out that Synapse also bloats the DB with state_groups_state table. There are a handful of commands that come with synapse, but no built-in admin tool or panel, so I wrote my own. Moving server to another host has been seamless for my (few) users. TURN/STUN for calls seems to work okay (I don’t really use it though).

I appreciate Element being uniform across platforms (which I cannot say about XMPP clients), but the sign-in is pretty tedious, and registration with a token is still impossible last time I checked (which is either a hassle for the user to use another client and then their smart device, or a security issue if you open registration to anyone). Most normal people probably don’t care and don’t want to deal with keys, cross-verification, and all that jazz.

The somewhat successful 3D-printing businesses I have read about (reddit, maybe here) are those with a rather specific niche. One that I recall was for reproducing vintage car parts (knobs, levers, decor), modeling, matching color, high resolution prints. Another one, I think, was producing hundreds of very specific part for another company (how they had the connection I do not recall)

Another one that comes to mind is Red Rising, but just for wasted potential. The premise is that miners on Mars, who are told they are working to establish a new colony, are, in reality,

Fantastic premise, author can lean into the entire labor rights history of the early 20th century, worker strikes, revolutions, etc. Nope, the idea goes out of the window about 1/4 of the book through, and you get a really bad ripoff of Hunger Games.

I remember the Ukrainian search engine/portal from early 2000s as well.

Thanks Google for now also taking the term “Gemini Space” away from geminispace.

Quite ironic that both the tech giant’s AI and intentionally-simple internet protocol are both named Gemini.

That’s interesting about Gravity’s Rainbow.

I had the exact opposite reading Cryptonomicon: it was not bad and sometimes rather interesting to read, but looking back, it was 900 pages of wannabe hackers and WWII dudes, tied together with barely 100 pages worth of plot.

I hate to be that guy, but if FairPhone aims to reduce waste, be modular and repairable, why are there 6 models of them? Are they inter-compatible? What hardware (other than 5G antenna) changed since the first/second one? Even if it did, could it have been replaced (upgraded) on the original model?

Not necessarily a dig at the manufacturers, but I wish collectively we would stop chasing more features / CPU / RAM, stuck with something for a decade, and made existing software more efficient instead.

I use it occasionally, when writing lists with lots of detail, or to separate parts of the sentence where I already used multiple commas.

there are many thought-provoking ideas about conscience, the human brain, and alien life; yet it is wrapped in a mediocre sci-fi action movie script

It’s a Librem5 phone with cringe name and 100% markup, but it’s their own product nonetheless. I.e. it is not a generic Android with a custom skin and preinstalled apps like Trump Phone, Freedom Phone, or Quantum Internet box.

You can buy pretty much the same Librem5 assembled in China for ~$700. Take a look at Liberux Nexx Linux phone too (they are just staring out)

(Not sure what you’re calling racist here, appeal to “patriots”?)