admiralteal

Nah bro, you are.

It’s ALSO possible to generate virtual phone numbers for a small cost.

Using a cryptographic PoW is a different small cost.

Either way, it only takes a small cost to prevent mass bot registration.

You’re treating processing power and time as if it is 100% free just because it can be done in a VM. But it doesn’t matter if it is a VM. It is still going to require at least some certain threshold of processor time, and that processor time has a real cost. For the kind of place that can just spin up thousands of VMs and use it to do massive bot registration… they could just be mining bitcoins instead.

It’s not just whether you can do this. It’s how much value it has vs what ELSE you could be doing with the time and energy. A Signal account is already worth vanishingly little as a spam tool, they just need to give it enough of a cost to make it not worthwhile.

I still cannot comprehend their logic for why having full SMS integration would be such a disaster. It just makes no sense and I wish they’d admit that it isn’t a security concern but is just that they don’t want to do it. They just don’t want to, and don’t care that this policy makes it harder for users to adopt and use their service.

I know that SMS is a US-specific thing. But at least in the US, most people regularly interact with SMS. Having a platform that supports SMS means you can basically live in that platform – this is a major part of the success of iMessage.

The idea that it would create huge security gaps… I just don’t believe. I think the kind of user who wants to be on Signal clearly understands that SMS is not secure. All they need to do is have a clear visual indication when you are texting instead of using Signal, which isn’t that complex.

Instead, people like me who might try using it as their primary platform just see no point. None of my friends use it. So why should I even have it installed? And none of my friends see a reason to install it because I and everyone else don’t have it installed. If I could use it as my SMS app I might have it installed and lived-in, which greatly lowers that barrier.

You’re talking about a device which is a full-color high-definition surveillance camera that works at night and can be viewed from literally anywhere in the world and can be configured to send you alerts based on seeing people/animals/packages/whatever. That only costs them an inflation adjusted $13.

I don’t really think the “they wouldn’t believe this shit” argument really applies with how rapidly tech has changed.

If the data were properly encrypted and could only be decrypted by the client on their own device

Yeah, but part of Wyze’s sales pitch is their AI image recognition features, and they’d lose all training data by doing that and would force it to be processed locally, both of which would be a dead end.

I realize these might not be features you want nor care about… but those are the features they want to offer.

And that the thing they are most concerned with is labor organization.

Enshitification doesn’t really apply to GitHub because you aren’t really locked into GitHub. At least you aren’t so long as you consider the git part of it to be more important than the social media platform part of it. Repositories are totally interoperable with other services so the cost to jump platform is fairly low. At least so long as you aren’t relying on curling stuff directly from GitHub, which everyone knows is a terrible idea and very bad practice yet happens all the time anyway.

The template and framework of this idea requires social media platforms be finger traps, with way higher costs to leave than enter.

Doctrow himself is pretty clear about this. Interoperability is the way you fight back against enshitification.

Why? Conservatism is about preserving traditional values and traditional power structures not the economy.

If you actually care about the economy that means you care about progressing a more effective and efficient state for the benefit of the people. Afraid that makes you a progressive which the conservatives assure us they aren’t.

Not much more meaningful there than here. It’s not like this link is to anything official. Just a user post on the forums… from June.

deleted by creator

Wouldn’t filing for nomad residence when you have an actual residence be fraud?

Places your bets, which is it:

• He isn’t a credible ‘threat’ to Putin, and the state media is letting him get away with some visibility so that he can be crushed in the definitely-not-completely-fake polls in order to preserve the democracy kayfabe. Possibly to achieve a domestic policy goal like getting out of the Ukraine war without losing as much face for Putin.

• He is a credible threat and will be dealt with brutally and violently.

• He is a sockpuppet. Either of Putin or the next generation of Russian leaders who, in proud Soviet tradition, are going to honor and glorify Putin in his retirement then quietly delete and replace his history and influence with their own.

The idea that DNA is extremely predictive of phenotype is already kind of… ehh.

There may be some very large feature predictions you can mostly make, but something as specific as recognizing a person? No way in hell. Far too many environmental factors for appearance.

“Smart Features” in the Messages app have always been explicitly processed only on-device. This is a big change if it is different than that.

I’m betting they’ll make this opt-out, which is fucking shady as hell. And worse, I bet opting out your own messages doesn’t stop someone else that is opted in from unknowingly/unintentionally transmitting all your messages that they received. Ugh.

I mean, give it a try. Easiest way is to just open a new mpv window and drag from the url bar into it. There’s also a lua script that allows mpv to still make use of sponsorblock, but I haven’t ever tried it. Youtube-DL is part of a standard mpv install unless you disabled it.

You can also just mpv ‘youtubeurl’ from terminal.

Yeah the Google News app too. It’s fucking useless – any time you click something on it you get served up a page of nothing but ads, modals, autoplays, and other unusable crap. Bouncing around as it loads. I had to finally uninstall it and switch to just a bookmark on the homescreen instead.

Way faster when you consider time spent loading and navigating around all the fucking ads. The mobile web without adblock is a dumpster fire of the highest order.

A super lightweight option for viewing videos that I don’t see mentioned often is drag and dropping the link into MPV.

By that same line of argument, there are myriad ways to be progressive but only a single way to be conservative. Which is really only true theoretically. In practice, most people who identify as conservative actually have very specific policy preferences for how they want their society to evolve. But at least the way the word is used it has an intended meaning like this.

I mean heck, with the right parameters and conditions doing things like rolling back regulations and appealing to traditional values is progressive. For example look at the advocacy of Strong Towns, who in (very) broad strokes are pushing for a return to more traditional urban development patterns in order to help cities return to safer and more financially sustainable models. If you had a mind to do so you might define this as conservative progressivism, which isn’t really a contradiction at all.

Traditionally left and right were not “economic” terms. They were the revolutionaries and the monarchists. And the idea that economic politics as separate from other kinds of politics I kind of reject too.

Well, just know that as bad as it is, you can always look south for a worse solution.

“Left” isn’t really much of an identity definition anyway.

Right is clearly aligned with the greater political body of the small-c conservative movement. Preserve existing power structures, resist social progress, prop up ‘traditional’ values (i.e., the values that match the preferences of your tribe justified by whatever histrionic nonsense you can think of).

The left is really only defined in opposition to the right these days. Liberals, socialists, progressives, Marxists, anarchists, you name it and all the shades in between. The common identity of “the left” is just… not conservative.

Which means I agree with you. Leaning left just means leaning away from right. It doesn’t really tell you what specific policies the person wants, just what policies they reject. And center/middle/“moderate” has no particular meaning in this day and age.