Snitch-Thursday

Not to be dumb - but I don't want my car to have cellular connectivity, so this opens up more car purchase options for me once 3G goes dark. Granted, that's a tiny influx of new customers, but still, there's at least 1 new customer as result of their decision to still use 3G.

Think Ricochet got replaced by cwtch.im correct? At least the binaries I can find of Ricochet are super stale.

Whether it be this or project Silica, I want my digital permanent storage. Write it in glass, treat it nicely, and yes, you may end up with digital bitrot or whatever, but I want media that stores digital data that cannot physically degrade for hundreds of years, kind of like paper does.

Paperbak being forked and made mainstream, I can accept that. Provided I can also do an automated book printing.

I will also accept holographic stick gum storage a la isolinear chips.

But there has to be more than just tape and blu rays.

I think parent is advocating doing folding@home over stuff like PoW crypto since the former advances science and the latter (handwaves vaguely) doesn't.

I know it's just boilerplate that probably goes on a lot of news articles, but I find it so ironic that they are releasing a press release about ongoing legal action against Facebook, yet include the below call to action to 'like' them on that very same website!

> The Federal Trade Commission works to promote competition, and protect and educate consumers. You can learn more about how competition benefits consumers or file an antitrust complaint. Like the FTC on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, read our blogs, and subscribe to press releases for the latest FTC news and resources.

Possibly. For those who clung to Windows XP or 7, it was because the alternative was relatively unappealing (Vista, later 8 or 10, respectively).

For those who are on Windows 10 because they made a pragmatic choice to keep compatibility with their back catalog of Windows-only software and get the latest security but pay for it in the form of nags, schizophrenic control panels, and forced updates, Windows 11 has an opportunity to take over fast.

How? By removing one or more of the above pain points (and others I haven't listed). I'm not that hopeful that MS would reverse course on these user-hostile things, but I guess I am slightly hopeful for a scrap or two could potentially be thrown my way.

What if Windows 11 was just Windows a repackaged Windows 10 LTSC 2021? By most rumors, it's more different than WIndows 10 than that, but even if it was only a reboxed SKU that consumers would buy, it would sell like hotcakes.

I agree. Knowing that I can buy up to a 2017 model without easy mass surveillance means I no longer have to stop shopping for vehicles until whatever year they first introduced those 'features'.

The less touchscreen, computerized fussy equipment in my off-roaders, the better. The fact that Toyota leans into that by waiting until 2020 to provide lane keeping assist on their 4Runners is a benefit. Body on frame, tried and true parts are all worth the trade-offs in ride comfort and MPGs.

If I wanted those things, I would go buy a Highlander or other SUV-shaped car lacking the ability to go from pavement to AWD to 4WD to locked diffs if I get really crazy.

I like to call my off-road truck (rig in the vernacular) 'too dumb to hack'. Not that it has any meaningful security, but it is only electronic, there is not enough digital logic for there to be any attack surface worth exploiting, and even if there were some exploit, it cannot do much more than shut down the engine due to faulty timings.

I'm not one for using emails for everything. Sometimes the UI / UX just doesn't go great with things like synced up messaging and besides, email leaks metadata all over.

Having said that, for extremely casual messages where I'm not worried about metadata (talking to my parents, a relationship that is already apparent), I would not mind chatting over something like DeltaChat (which is on-and-off working on trying to do XMPP Conversations-style multiple account sign on in one single app) over the alternative of a group text or FB Messenger message. Metadata exists either way, might as well be on an email system I will retain long-term-access to it. The likes of Signal force you to either manually screenshot messages or copy/paste them message by message, there is no bulk unencrypted backup for mundane things like serendipitous conversations about dinner plans for funny family stories. But since DeltaChat is still somewhat locked in to a single account (preventing me from using say work and personal), I'm doing the no-change-choice and continuing to tolerate Signal.

G1, G2, Droid, Droid 2, Droid 4, Photon Q, Dell Venue Pro (windows phone), Priv, Pro1.

The road for keyboard phones is long and winding.

The portrait sliders like Dell Venue Pro and BB Priv are the best IMHO. With glossy silver metal sides to protect the screen, mmmm.

> For me, the compromises were not worth it. The phone is too clunky and heavy and virtual keyboards are good enough these days.

There are compromises like I said in previous posts. Frankly I love the physical keyboard not for long form text, but for my terminal operations or just plain old character-by-character cut/copy/paste edits in text. If there were a virtual Ctrl key on my on screen keyboard so I could do Ctrl + V, then maybe I would swap to something else too, but for now this fxtec takes the mobile cake for anything more than a 7 word swype reply to a text.

I own one. Mine feels no thicker than the Samsung Galaxy in a case. As long as it perceptually feels more or less like a box of playing cards, I'm not worried about thickness.

Yes. I have one. Mine was ordered in Feb 2019 for shipping in August 2019. Come February 2020 it finally came in.

Biggest favorite is that I love they keyboard. I run the LineageOS 17.1 simply because I've been too lazy to flash LineageOS 18 unofficial. tdm the primary developer did a great job making the keyboard act well, and other developers made it behave via an app in Stock Android.

Second biggest favorite is that it has the trifecta of features I require from any phone: unlockable bootloader, microsd card, headphone jack. I prefer a removable battery but alas those are as thin as hen's teeth.

My biggest beef with this phone is that it has spotty voice reception. I have to stand in a particular spot in my house to not have my UDP packets drop off. Data reception is fine and when I do calls over signal or duo (wifi) it works a treat.

My second biggest beef would be the lack of snap-on case options like the old Nokias. I'm trying to figure out if someone does a 3d printed case or what, but with this curved screen, I'm nervous that each day could be this phone's last with just one fall.

I'm running calc.exe from Ye Olde Windows days, not this fluent-UI 'refresh', and it gave me 9.

Feeding it 1 + (2*3) produced 7.

I was positive I could not draw objects from life. But some of the tricks in that book showed that even I really could (in the right frame of mind) trace/render/copy/draw from life. Now I just needed practice.

Get this book, go through it, then look into drawabox if you are looking to draw from life.

For constructivist illustrations or styles like manga, I'm still learning.

I ended up with a Likebook Mars as it fulfilled the entire criteria I had. Very similar design to the Ares.

headphone jack

runs new enough android to run syncthing

supports SD card

iirc the extreme TL;DR of that was this:

rewrite your windows mobile 5/6 apps for windows phone 7? ok, its a brand new platform, i get it.

rewrite wp 7 for windows phone 8? ok... (there may have been wp7 mango that needed tweaks but my memory is too fuzzy)

rewrite windows phone 8 for 8.1 ? cmon now

rewrite windows phone 8.1 for wm 10? no

> because the tool forces them to do the job properly

I'd argue the same restrictions on "setting handwave to maximum" and "XHTML doc has one missing brace, no web page at all now" are two extremes that have their parallels in the 'dynamic vs static typing', 'immutable pure vs mutable impure functions', 'XML vs JSON (oh wait!)', and 'web app vs native program' arguments that we HN readers love to debate.

The trick is finding the happy medium between both extremes. Training some 'slackers' to "do the job properly" and convincing some 'purists' to be more pragmatic to the limitations of the world around them.

After all, we need something to occupy us during this Eternal September.

The Win32 counterpart to the UWP-centric design guidelines are here[1], titled "The Windows Interface Guidelines — A Guide for Designing Software".

Much more practical to designing native desktop software, whether you are using Win32/WinForms/QT or otherwise for your rendering engine. IMHO this is what makes a program 'intuitive' and 'natural' to many working adults ages 25+, which is often the target demographic, even if the program will not look 'modern' or have high "design award" value.

EDIT: and is even available in dead tree form: [2]

[1] https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Experience-Professi...

> Can a Birdy client with internet access serve as a gateway to other Birdy clients without internet access?

That's so far unclear to me as well. I will say, if they can crib some code or at least hints on how that might be done (provided they even want to support that feature), there was an old app out there called EnsiChat[1] that IIRC had internet relays running on servers, but was P2P-first.

So: if Alice could see Bob directly via P2P, they could chat. Or, if Alice could see Bob indirectly, they could still chat.

No idea if it supported meshing P2P connections to get Alice's message to Bob via Alice -> internet relay -> Frank -> Dmitry -> Bob

[1]https://github.com/Nutomic/ensichat

> “I was thrilled with those results,” says Neuman. “Even though we were hamstrung by the lower clock speed, we made up for it by just being more efficient.”

So besides the lampoon-ability of this article as inventing new words for old concepts (hardware acceleration) which I am not qualified to lob (and therefore only hint at ;) ), how much more software efficiency is out there to 'mine' out of standard CPU/RAM/Storage Von Neumann-style computing devices?

Some people claim that moving things from Electron to native would be a huge speedup, and I don't disagree with that, somehow a Windows 98 box provided 95%+ of today's computing experience (I can't speak for older things like Amigas, Apple ][s/Lisas/etc) at like 1% of the computing power.

But what do I know, maybe all the software efficiency in the world has been wrung out and there is no more low-hanging fruit? And/or that is the case for robotics but not for general computing.

Correct. That's why I sought it out and may or may not have baffled / actively disregarded the Best Buy sales guy who wanted to sell some other routing hardware that was 'newer'.

This message delivered to you with its help, and I am definitely going to be looking for its descendant when the time comes to replace this one....IF it is still open-source-ready.

Using our teams backup chatroom in a competing service. One of these days P2P Matrix will reach GA, then I plan to make a backup for my backups, Starfleet style.

That's exactly what I was thinking! Running far too much into fandon, this holds also for the fictional 'pattern buffer'. It has to examine the original AND communicate that state back to the duplicate quick enough or the 'clone' will be inaccurate, maybe even enough to kill someone a la Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I used to follow Brian Goulet of fountain pen fame on Periscope. I think either he stopped streaming or I stopped watching when Twitter bought Periscope and stopped letting people easily record their streams by sending them to a recording service.

Since then, I've not heard one mention of Periscope in my local circles, which is only anecdotes, but my point is that there is definitely room for a startup to redo the same app idea.

For me, Byte replaced Vine since iirc some of the Vine founders were involved with Byte's startup. Byte <> ByteDance

I just tried the above animation on W10 + uBo + Firefox 83. I went through 3 loops and it seemed to stay in sync. Then I hopped over to check this comment and came back to that tab, and it was out of sync at that time. So I think Tab Switching might be a challenge for Ruffle.

Clearly Ruffle is not perfect, but leagues, furlongs ahead of having to watch old flash content on YouTube via Unregistered Hypercam 2.

Every time I get a hankering to try out forking Ensichat or implementing a quick-n-dirty self-host-server-friendly Signal Protocol-based chat application, I stop myself because Matrix is doing it all, and much better than I can.

P2P Matrix homeserver on your phone or computer with multiple accounts will be the Syncthing of chat applications: slightly more scary and painful to setup the first time, then completely forgettable and pleasant to use long term - 500 chat services, 1 chat app, will finally be a solved problem again. Last time it was, we were all using Pidgin or Windows Phone hub!

> OTP inspired actor systems that run Webassembly code are a brilliant (and potentially way superior) alternative to microservice madness

I very much agree with this. While Actor model systems have not been commonly encountered in the circles I've run in (we don't need no stinking XML Web Services, we're going to microservices wooooo), this confluence of (Actors + Rust + Wasmtime) seems perfect for the age of increasingly-parallel CPUs as Moore's Law comes in for a landing.

I hope these kinds of efforts start to represent the dawn of a beneficial trend that starts us down the curve of excitement, cargo culting, then depression, then plateau of standard utility.

This trend doesn't have to get as bad as the OO craze of the 90s, but it needs to grow large enough to get people to stop reinforcing the OO model out of baby-duck syndrome or inertia.

I've been pushing away potential suitors to learn Actor-based systems, contenting myself with researching patterns to use with F# MailboxProcessor while I wait for Gleam (the proglang that is basically statically typed Erlang) to mature enough for this newbie to be able to jump in.

But the concept of rust-based Actor frameworks (that compile to WASM!?) is very, very tempting.

> I learned my lessons and made the fonts bigger. Designs do not look so nice (at-least to me and my team) but they loved my work.

That sent me down a nostalgia trail to this[1] book which has similar advice for Pocket PC developers. Drag the buttons and other form controls onto your program, then at least double their size, to make them go from stylus-required to semi-finger-friendly. Implement some custom code to drag empty screen to scroll, avoid the SIP where possible, wow, lots of memories making UX better for mobile users in the pre-always-connected-mobile-device days.

We're still here working, even if the form factor has retreated to serving delivery drivers and warehouse workers more than the general public. Pocket PCs / Windows Mobile 6.5+ embedded devices are a (often barcode-scanner-enabled) tool to get work done, data input, or data referenced in the field, with no VPN or internet access in several cases.

[1] https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781590590959