Green washed. If they cared about sustainability they wouldn’t have removed the headphone jack for longer-lived headphones—and instead started selling their own branded Bluetooth earbuds like the rest of the manufacturers.

I would like to lose the Android phone soon. Signal will not work without an Android/iOS primary device.

But also… Signal requires a phone number for signup where a lot of countries require a passport to get a SIM (unique identifier that is easy to track you). The service is centralized so there is no sort of self-hosting option. There really aren’t alternative clients (not counting mere forks) you can rely on (this helps with the double ratchet encryption of clients with XMPP & Matrix losing keys) unless you go the gateway/bridge route—where the Electron desktop client is pure ass cheeks. Historically they have a big gap in commit history—we can assume there was some sort of CIA/FBI plant. They refuse to use a self-hostable MQTT/XMPP/UnifiedPush option for notifications meaning that the notification data timestamps always flow thru Google & Apple servers. And I am still salty the mobile clients removed SMS support which made it so easy to recommend to family in the first place.

Mumble is perfectly fine for low-latency VoIP for gaming—I think it was the first to even use the Opus codec everyone uses now. Mumble uses a ton less resources than an Electron app. You will want your main chat on another protocol, but this is hardly a barrier.

I use XMPP whenever possible. Requires many fewer resources to run on just about any hardware & I can hand out accounts if needed.

I don’t care for the centralized or de facto centralized alternatives. I regret along with my uncle convincing family onto Signal several years ago.

Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality, but just that more authenticated Microsoft accounts, real or fake, have pressed a button—where the more popular/normie/maintstream languages/frameworks get the most signal. You can also read anecdotes thah some folks use this as a bookmark to look at later rather than actually using or enjoying a project.

Free software doesn’t need to rely on a dubious value signal on a proprietary social media platform like MS Github.

No it doesn’t. You can resale GPL & you can even ask money just to get access to the source code & still comply with the license. You can host it without sharing anything (AGPL), & apparently you can train a LLM model on it which can then regurgitate the code which also apparently seems like it will be legal.

I would like to see what would happen if copyfarleft & post-open source licenses had more uptake.

It’s tangential, but Mumble is still good for voice only chat. Rarely do we find video to be useful or necessary with a lot of collaborative tools showing multiple cursors per users & programs like Upterm that allow sharing a terminal session.

The generation where I did not have adult responsibilities to prioritize

Do not assume contemporary low-end quality would the flagship quality. Flagships like LG when they had jacks had high quality DACs—even current Sony phones are good. Adding a jack to the device means less things to dangle & put stress on the already kinda weak charging port; this takes up little room & does not affect waterproofing. Almost all other gear for consuming media has a jack, it is pretty much a conspiracy to push folks into perpetually buying Bluetooth earbuds when the batteries die.

How is the headphone jack?

Big compromises. Only 90% sRGB? Last decade has been making shifts towards DCI-P3 & they can’t even cover sRGB?

Matrix is defacto centralized around Matrix.org & servers they provide (where the cost of hosting makes it largely inaccessible to low-spec & medium-sized servers causing them to inevitably shut down & recommending users back to Matrix.org). All the metadata gets synced back to the mothership that was funded by Israeli intelligence. Avoid it.

Cloudflare is a CIA front. They offer “free” DDoS protection + static proxy thereby giving Cloudflare the ability to MitM all TLS connections thru their servers. They convinced so many ‘developers’ via ‘influencers’ that every tiny site needs Cloudflare in front of it as a precaution/optimization, but it is an entirely premature optimization that doesn’t need to so widely deployed, but it is. 🤔

Microsoft has always been an enemy but somehow managed to Trojan horse their way into the minds of developers again (neo-EEE) trying to centralize how software is created. Like we avoid Microsoft Windows, the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem should equally be avoided: Copilot, LinkedIn, Outlook, Exchange, Office, Teams, Azure, VSCode, npm, GitHub (Sponsors, Codespaces, Copilot). Literally none of these projects/services can’t be replaced to help protect the privacy of your clients, coworkers, contributors.

How dare you‽ 😂

Overstreet needs to hire someone to do all of his communications + public relations + LKML patches/pull requests. The behavior is going to get one of the most exciting filesystems in a long time yanked & momentum die just from the we he handles conflict.

When other, non-native English speakers were invited to hangouts they were even more confused—asking me what he meant & I would have to look it up. In casual speech or storytelling these things don’t matter but when planning events & meetings they do. I have seen so many confusing scheduling issues in work & life that can be solved by just communicating clearly & precisely. I have seen meetings missed for time zones & ambiguous phrases like “biweekly”. You know what I do? I send an clear date & timestamp + *.ics iCalender file since I try to put events in my calendar since I can be forgetful, & it is almost no effort to forward it to the other interested parties. The other end then has a precise reminder that can be localized/translated however is clear to them in their calendar—& as a result no one has mistaken an event.

Yes, the “obvious poor social skills” of being clear with folks when their time is involved. As well, trying to get someone else to give up their speech oddity in planning for the sake of everyone else, myself included, by explaining that others are confused & it not being worth it. Do you have experience working in international groups?

Firefox can’t load HTML pages? Huh?

I hope the rubber or whatever on the sticks doesn’t turn gross & sticky with time like the original.

I have one from Morefine. It works, but I hate the way these Chinese sellers put firmware on Google Drive as it feels super sketchy & lacks the source code (luckily this one doesn’t require exclusively Microsoft Windows executables unlike some other products I own).

When you do not include a preposition like til or past or before or after there is no way to underestand relative to which side of the hour. This is why it is interpreted differently in some cultures. This is also why no one I grew up with ever said anything other than 5:30, 6:30 PM, or 17:3:0 since—aside from the 12-hour Anglophone clock thing—you can remove both ambiguity & doing mental math (also typing less characters).

Funny when I first read about it: https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/English_language_varieties#Date_and_time

Which had explicit instructions

Some of these can be made less ambiguous (for example, Americans usually say “quarter past eight” or “quarter till eight”) but others will always have the potential for confusion. Be prepared to clarify, or simply use explicit dates and times.