Is someone actually proposing that we’re simply going to dump would-be colonists on Mars with a shovel and some O2 tanks then wave goodbye? Like, no shit we still need to work things out but that just means it’s unknown, not impossible.

This book seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I don’t know why I would spend money on doomscrolling, Kindle Edition.

That’s not what net neutrality is about. NN is about carriers and ISPs treating all services and websites equally. Don’t feature creep NN. It weakens the arguments for why why we need NN.

You described a straight up better product. That’s not convenience. You said it yourself: alternatives have worse quality.

That’s Matrix. End to end encrypted, decentralized, and open source.

Bridging opens it up to other services as well, like how Pidgin/Adium/Gaim used to work.

Signal is a chat app. It uses phone numbers for identity verification and friend discovery but messages go over an end-to-end encrypted protocol. While open source, it uses a centralized network and a single client.

It’s somewhere between Matrix and WhatsApp. Open Source and friendly, but still centralized and anchored to phone numbers.

You’re demanding to view this as “good team” / “bad team”. Fix that first because it stops any hope for peace.

I must have missed history class where the Warsaw Uprising attacked a peace festival.

Being oppressed is not a license to become a monster yourself. I refuse to condone cold blooded revenge (both Hamas and IDF).

It’s far cheaper than your first car and arguably more important. You find a way when you have to.

Excuse the tangent but you made me look it up. >50% of Americans weren’t eligible to vote in 2000 but apparently I need to answer for the Iraq War for the rest of my friggin’ life like that was my personal decision.

Stupid lizard brains are too easily tricked with tribalism and anger though. It takes a real conscious effort to curate your feed like that.

Any nuanced opinion on Gaza gets trashed because both “teams” view you as the enemy. You’re always pushed towards absolutism.

You can read about it here: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/09/epic-apple-no-imessage-on-android/

Using a dominant market segment to reduce competition in another has always been an antitrust violation. A notable example is MS leveraging their Windows monopoly to force Internet Explorer on people.

Teenagers today suffer unique threats to their health and wellbeing from technology. It may be super easy for you to say “who the fuck cares about the color” but that is far from the case for US teenagers. Willingly setting yourself apart from the group in high school is a precarious move in the best of circumstances.

And for the rest of us, this goes way beyond the color being used. The SMS/MMS fallback in iMessage offers a terrible experience for non-Apple users. Low quality media, inability to manage one’s own memeberships in groups, and no encryption. For those worried about the lack of e2ee: Android users participating in an iMessage conversation don’t have that today. You’re not losing anything from this solution.

Legal disclosures prove that Apple knowingly uses iMessage in an anticompetitive fashion. It’s a moat to keep people from switching away from iPhone. They are leveraging their position in the messaging market to shore up their restrictive phone products. I wish US antitrust enforcement was stronger in this area but until then, I hope Nothing has great success in breaking down this illegal barrier.

Uhh, I dunno how much declassification you’re looking for but here’s the US Navy’s Youtube channel with a video of some test firings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSce3nEY6xk

IIRC, the problem wasn’t that it didn’t work but that the barrels wore out too quickly to be useful. I suppose they could have put this on a Zumwault like originally intended but that would just be a PR stunt when the main problem was throwing the gun away after 10 shots.

What a strange take when a mountain of evidence is right in front of you. China went from “nothing but cheap labor” to the next world superpower because of exactly this kind of exchange. They have modern cities with rapid transit, EVs, and a top tier domestic tech industry.

The privacy thing was always hiding the real truth. Apple will never be able to compete with Google on ads or tracking: they have neither the engineering chops nor the reach. By being “privacy first”, it saves Apple money and cuts off a little of Google’s revenue stream.

The benefit to customers was a secondary effect.

The Nvidia thing was a subtle way to point out that you can’t “brew install” your way out of every bit of missing OS functionality. The subtly was sadly too subtle.

“Posix” is such a trivial set of APIs that until recently Windows claimed to be Posix compatible (and basically still is???). Darwin, the MacOS kernel, lacks pretty much everything above that slim foundation. No user or network namespaces. No capabilities. Even if you switch to GNU coreutils (ls, ps, netstat, etc), you get a reduced featureset because Darwin lacks /proc, /sys, ioctls, and other knobs&levers to make stuff work the way it does on Linux. Xorg works because X11 was common across all Unixen back then. And on the built in BSD utils, stuff gets weird like ls ~/Downloads -l doesn’t work and case insensitivity leads to weird bugs in things like shell wildcards (like ls ~/downlo*/*).

The Linux network stack is complicated because it can do absolutely everything, at insane speeds and scales. MacOS’ network features are geared towards being a laptop and not much else. I won’t defend Linux as user friendly but it’s been my daily desktop for 25 years, I guess I’ve figured it out. I use and appreciate stuff like VLANs, bridging, nftables, ebtables, etc. If you need to change behavior, there’s probably a /proc/net flag that will do it. It’s stuff that MacOS hides or simply doesn’t have.

A public good? Like roads, firefighters, etc? You want the government to pay for your Youtube Premium subscription?

Less snarky, if you’re arguing that Youtube has earned a special legal status, a natural consequence is that Google gets to play by a different rulebook from all other competitors. That’s quite a dangerous direction to take.

Does this mean brew install nvidia-drivers works for you?

“Posix compliant”? I’m not sure you fully understand the gap here. Linux has containers, performant and feature rich virtualization, robust networking, user friendly GNU utils, case sensitive filesystems, etc. It’s not stuff you can duct tape on by recompiling Linux tools and be all set. You’re trying to keep up with a Ferrari using a Fiat.

There’s more to “AI” than ChatGPT. Deepfakes, propaganda swarms, precise tracking of people online across pseudonyms/handles. The power available to malicious organizations and governments is absolutely terrifying. Any social media that doesn’t also have AI-based countermeasures is vulnerable.

Eh, I have a MB from work and I’m still an unrepentant Mac hater. All the badass hardware in the world won’t save you from crippled software. MacOS will never be keyboard friendly and “MacOS UNIX” will never hold a candle to real Linux.