That’s the sort of shit I hope they get away from.
Lower taxes and more efficient less intrusive government are good ideas. They’re just too far in the pocket of big business so ‘lower taxes and more efficient government’ often comes off as ‘let’s give the 0.01% more tax breaks and defund the bloated inefficient EPA’.

If the Democrats lose, there is not going to be any soul searching. There is going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame. And most of it is going to be at Republicans, at the media, at Trump idiots, etc.

I am hoping that Trump loses if only because I think they’re actually be some realignment within the GOP. Unlike the Democrats, there is some actual question of direction within the GOP currently from what I’ve seen. Not everybody over there is happy with Trump. Many who just want power see him as too divisive and cultish, a Trump win is a win for Trump not necessarily for the GOP. There are some actual conservatives in the GOP who feel (IMHO correctly) that Trump is more of a cult of personality than a reflection of conservative values.

If nothing else, if Trump loses this time, he is probably finished. At least I hope so and I think there’s a good chance of it. Look at the younger generations, how many people under say 30 do you see waving Trump flags?

At least I really hope that realignment happens. And I also hope it comes with a realignment of message. I think there are a lot of conservative positions that could have mainstream appeal, that deserve a voice in politics, but the GOP has abandoned a great many of them in favor of harassing gay people and immigrants. That’s not a good way for us to go as a country.

Xmpp definitely wins in privacy. What is there to privacy more than message content and metadata? Matrix definitely fails the second one, and is E2E still an issue for public groups? I don’t remember if they fixed that.

XMPP being a protocol built for extensibility means it will be hard for it not to keep up with times.

Okay so how does modern XMPP protect this? When I last used XMPP, some (not all) clients supported OTR-IM, a protocol for end to end encryption. And there wasn’t a function for server stored chat history (either encrypted or plaintext).
Have these issues been fixed?

It’s all good. Like I said, no insult at all. There’s no reason why you would ever have encountered a beeper, it’s one of those things that once SMS came around everybody just collectively decided to move on from. Unlike floppies or rotary phones there wasn’t some continued use for it.

(This is not an insult, I just had a realization that I think might affect you)-- do you know what the name comes from?

Years ago there was a thing called a beeper before everyone had cell phones. It was a one way paging system-- you’d give your friends your beeper number, they’d call it, type in their phone number, and their number (or whatever they dialed in) would appear on your beeper. You’d then use a landline phone to call them back (early versions of the system had no text or reply capability, only numbers and only one-way).

I always thought it was a cool name. But thinking about it I realize someone less than maybe 25-30 years old might literally have never encountered such a device. Much like a 5.25" floppy disk or rotary dial phone, they went out of style years ago and a young person might never have encountered one.

Curious if that’s you?

What’s wrong with Beeper?

This is really not accurate. Matrix is not designed to be a super privacy first protocol. It’s like Lemmy in the it’s designed to solve a problem and be a useful federated collaboration tool. It borrows features from a number of popular messaging platforms. Message history is stored on the server but encrypted client side so privacy is preserved. It supports group chat rooms. It supports voice and video. And most importantly, it supports bridges- you can connect your matrix to other services that are completely incompatible with matrix using a bridge. Perhaps the best example of this is Beeper, which is built on matrix. They are trying to replicate the user experience of the old app Trillian- beeper can link with a number of chat services including Google messages, slack, WhatsApp, telegram, signal, etc. Thus you get all your chats in one place.

Not matrix? XMPP is a good idea, but the wildly different levels of support among clients cause problems even back in its heyday Matrix solves some of that, fully encrypted, chat history stored on the server in encrypted form, supports gateways to other services.

Mainly conflicts with mDNS. However it’s shitty IMHO that the mDNS spec snarfed a domain already in widespread use, should have used .mDNS or similar.

Casey Neistat. Back when he was doing his daily vlog thing a lot of it was really interesting, covering him and his wife trying to make shit happen in the city as he was running and riding his powered skateboard around Manhattan. At some point his audience started drifting younger, way way younger, and I don’t know if it was him or me but I just kind of lost interest. It didn’t feel new anymore.

That might be me to be honest. I actually don’t watch YouTube that much at all anymore, unless I’m looking for something specific. Their recommendation algorithm is garbage and it is so obviously going for raw time suck engagement that it leaves me with a bunch of unfulfilling clickbait / ragebait where I could watch it for an hour and then just want my hour back so I end up not returning. The whole platform used to be more full of interesting genuinely entertaining and educational videos, now it just feels like a giant time sink. And every other video is now some paid sponsorship or plug where the creator is basically just whoring out their own influence. Case in point, look up reviews of laser engravers. Every single one that I could find, especially of a couple major brands, the creator got the laser hardware for free. Some of them are just advertisements that reuse the manufacturer’s own stock footage, and some seem more like real reviews, but for one or two brands I literally could not find one video where the creator wasn’t sponsored by the laser manufacturer.

It’s a very simple answer Apple has guaranteed that your data will stay on your device and stay secure. This is generally trusted because Apple has a track record of keeping user data secure on the device or encrypted in the cloud even in ways Apple cannot access. Point is, when Apple says they are going to do this in a way that respects privacy, and they outline the technical details of how it will work, people trust that because there’s a track record.

Microsoft has no such trust. They have a recent track record of being intrusive and using dark patterns to persuade users to give Microsoft their data, for example in Edge there have been new feature pop-ups that require data sharing with Microsoft and the two options are ‘got it’ and ‘settings’ so accepting requires one click and rejecting requires 4 going into the settings menu and changing a few things. Microsoft is also heavily pushing Copilot which is mostly cloud-based. Furthermore, Microsoft recently showed a system that would basically screenshot your computer at very regular intervals and store them in an insecure manner. Granted it was on the device, but the way they were going to be stored meant they could be stolen with two lines of code. And let’s not forget that Windows 11 cannot be set up without a Microsoft account, so to even use your computer you have to share your email address with Microsoft. In this and many other ways they just do not act like a company that respects privacy at all, they act like the typical big tech give us everything or we will make your life difficult type company that nobody trusts.

Sounds good to me. You should also look into cryonics. Basically you sign up with a company and donate your body to them, when you die they pump you full of antifreeze and then vitrify you in liquid nitrogen. Right now there’s no way to recover from it, the antifreeze is toxic and we don’t yet know how to undo the cell damage from freezing. But the idea is someday in the future we will figure those things out, and then hopefully be able to thaw the frozen dead person, fix the damage caused by the freezing process, fix whatever problem killed them in the first place, and reanimate them.

For a lower fee, they will cut off your head and just freeze that. Idea being that someday in the future they will be able to transplant your brain into an artificially created body.

In fairness, the scan required such astronomical resources because of how they were scanning it. They took the cubic millimeter chunk and cut it into 5,000 super thin flat slices and then did extremely high detail scans of each slice. That’s why they needed AI, to try and piece those flat layers back together into some sort of 3D structure.

Once they have the 3D structure, the scans are useless and can be deleted.

In time it should be possible to scan the tissue and get the 3D structure without such extreme data use.

This 100%>. It’s why Reddit is way more fun than Twitter. Twitter is like yelling into the void and sometimes the void yells back. It’s good for publishers and content creation, bad for real conversation. Reddit supports real threaded conversation with voting to highlight the good parts of the conversation.

The other thing is interest following. Twitter you have to follow people, and a person may be posting on things you have interest in and other things you have no interest in. Reddit you follow subjects, and you see good content regardless of who posts it.

Mastodon and Lemmy are just decentralized Twitter and Reddit.

the top end models of the good brands are just scams, they just look a bit nicer and have some shitty “AI powered” app you’ll never use.

This is literally a scam.
There was an article a while back which I can’t find right now, a few of those product designers were saying that past $100-$150 they really weren’t sure what benefits could be added so they just throw a bunch of useless whiz bang shit in that serves no useful purpose but they sell it for $300 or whatever and enough people buy it to make it worth building another SKU.

In most cases the super top end one has the same motor as the midrange or low-midrange one, and takes the same brush heads, which means it does exactly the same thing. Buy that one for $85 and be done with it.

I don’t know that it’s quite that bad, but there are an increasing number of stories that seem like obvious rage bait. That’s why I would love to see a non-relayed Am I The Asshole community on Lemmy. With a lot less interest in karma and a smaller community, I think it might be pretty cool.

/r/AmITheAsshole There’s a few upstarts that I’ve seen, but they all are just bots that repost Reddit content.

What do you mean? I haven’t followed the development directly, I’ve just been a user and so far things seem to be going pretty well. Curious what shortsightedness you are talking about?

Amen to this. Life’s too short for stupid BS.