I've never used it but Matrix does seem to support conference calls, if not natively then via Jitsi. I'm sure a good app can paper over the differences to get a voice-chanel out of it if this is what people are after, though I've never really used this much on Discord.
The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.
> And anarchy is not even an exaggeration as many of its members occupied buildings, engaged in shut-ins and shut downs of privately owned businesses, as well as mounted police cars when one of their members were arrested
As far as I can tell, freedom of speech never extended to actions. "Free as in anarchy" is more like being able to shout insults, offensive, blasphemous, and politically incorrect, or deliberately misleading speech.
Wire fraud is no less serious punishment wise. The main factor is probably the operation cost, as sending scam mails is more expensive per recipient and scams usually have a fairly low yield.
That's mostly because of them using Musk's other business as leverage. A good company created explicitly to operate like this has no such vulnerability. The UK can try to stop them by trying to block the IPs or whatever, and the company is in turn free to try to circumvent it. The only issue is they may be banned from App store, which is a self-inflicted problem caused by Apple.
> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects
True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server.
The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.
> Any sufficiently popular alternative would be subject to the same issue: you can't backdoor encryption without making it insecure.
I'm just saying this is not true because you can have a company without any legal presence, thus susceptibility to law enforcement, in the UK. The legal issue will be shifted onto the user, but it's hard to go after millions of users compared to one big company.
The parallel with piracy is that they also tend to be operated from beyond the jurisdiction of countries enforcing the copyright.
You can have a service beyond the reach of UK law enforcement. Somehow piracy on the clearnet never really stopped with it being illegal in most countries.
Scale matters. Police don't have the time to go through everyone's computers. It is much easier to scan everyone's conversations, notes, or photos. Cloud storage invites this kind of mass surveillance by being high-value targets with little capacity to resist.
You can always have an company without legal presence in the UK to do the operations, beyond the reach of the UK government. If you are allowed to run your own software on your devices, you can always encrypt before sending. Apple and to a lesser extent Google got themselves in this position of being able to spy by building their walled gardens.
This isn't really true. The heating elements are pretty much entirely a resistive load, which do not cause arcing when switched off. What desoldered your PCB might be the heat itself.
I thought I would be just fine with the CLI but I was amazed by magit. A GUI can work well if it leans into the strengths of GUIs - discoverability of features and showing state. Magit does all of these exceptionally well. It helps that git's CLI is quite poorly designed with a lot of unintuitively named commands. How do you undo a commit? How to unstage a file? What's a stash? What's the difference between log and reflog?
With magit I've been able to do things I wouldn't bother before, like reverting small parts of hunks from past commits, doing partial staging of files (not including all changes), and dealing with stashes effectively.
I wish there is a browser extension that would do the following:
Evaluate all the font sizes in viewable text, find the median (weighed by character count), set it to my preferred size, scale the rest accordingly.
This is akin to volume normalization for audio. Just like TV channels shouldn't increase their volume willy-nilly, neither should web developers get to scream their entire articles at me.
While there is a concern about the plaintext answer leaking, I wouldn't think too much of it, since if the credentials db got compromised, I would assume the attackers also got everything else of value. Leaking the password at that point is no different than any other random string.
Not saying you should share your personal info on these charts, but you should never give real answers to security questions anyways. They are going to be easy to guess by definition, on top of revealing personal information to the vendor and any attackers.
If you use a password generator (and thus you never reuse or forget passwords), the easiest thing to do is to just set it to the password (though they may be stored in plaintext), or a different password you keep on the notes in your password manager.
My understanding is that permissive licenses (BSD,MIT) can generally be relicensed. For example you can fork a MIT project under GPL. But to do the same for a GPL project requires agreeement from all copyright owners, or just you if you made everyone sign a CLA. This is the whole point of GPL.
The bandwidth still doesn't quite compare to a GPU, and 128GB doesn't fit DeepSeek R1, however. If they bump it to 512GB for $5000 or so, that will disrupt the market.
> such as waiting for you with the open door and closing the door for you as you enter
Most taxis in Japan have driver-controlled doors. The driver doesn't have to get off the seat at all. Given it is already automated, it is trivial for a driverless car to do.
Apps can stop you from doing it, and many will, then it fails silently. It's also a deprecated feature. When I mean a full backup, I mean a bit for bit identical copy, not what the app developers think you should be able to access.
You never had chat apps that don't let you back up the chats? How about login tokens, authentications? That counts too. Are you able to roll them back selectively when an app misbehaves?
You can roll back to a backup right before the OS update that caused the bug. For example I have hourly snapshots using btrfs. Each snapshot is entirely bootable by itself, so if I ever broke anything, I just roll back. The system snapshots are read-only, so they are unlikely to be destroyed by bugs like that. You can also just make another snapshot of the same snapshot to be safer. It's also separate from the user data I care about.
One of the worst things about the move to smartphones is the inability to make full backups. I don't understand. It's my own device, all the data belongs to me, and I should be able to back it up whenever I want.
I think Google is well-positioned to do it. They have experience with ChromeOS already, and running Linux apps on Android should be at least somewhat plausibly deniable. Google doesn't sell laptops either, so they aren't especially worried about the cannibalization.
There are a few others that's pretty usable now. The difference is mainly in some more advanced features, such as spaces, threads, or SSO, but many people don't use these anyway. The company also doesn't control the network, as it's not difficult for any organization to spin up their own server. With some government investment it's not hard to imagine building a good competing client to Element.