xethos

While I think you and I would agree if I argued it was more about culture than firearms per-capita, it's pretty hard to say children aren't suffering some pretty real harms from said firearms (to say nothing of adult suicide statistics when firearms are kept in the house)

Reducing the number of guns doesn't solve the root issue (which I think we'd also agree on), but it should minimize the harms while being dramatically easier than changing the American ethos. Hell, America could likely get 80% of the results (no school shootings) with 20% of the effort (additional restrictions on firearms, more akin to Canada)

I further think the second amendment is causing Americans more harm than it's worth, though that's a seperate discussion; some examples include suicide statistics, accidental discharge, a lack of protection even when carried legally (such as in Alex Pretti's murder) and the fact that, when firearms could be anywhere, police must treat every interaction as potentially fatal - with all the force that requires

> don't you have problems with apps that add events to calendar transparentny?

Not to be dismissive, but no, not at all. I'm not even sure which apps I'd want that add something to my calendar. A massage therapy place's app might do this, but I prefer the website when booking anyways. Beyond that, I'm not sure what types of apps would do this (though I'm confident you have examples that'll seem obvious as soon as they're listed).

I could imagine gMail doing something like this with Google Calendar, but I avoid the panopticon for myriad reasons - not least of which was, last time I had an issue with my eMail services provider, I recieved an intelligent, issue-resolving response from support, within 24 hours

> do you use Gemini for adding calendar events and tasks?

No, and the most I'd consider is a locally-run LLM on something like a local Home Assistant with a few microphones around the home. I don't believe I'm a person of interest, but "We kill people based on metadata" has left me with little appetite for something so personal being run and controlled by for-profit, American entities.

Countering "most Motorola phones don't support video out" by going back a decade and a half to find a single example is not the argument-ending line you seem to think it is

And making it easier, better, faster, and more common isn't going to be a good thing. Reminding us that this already happens in smaller scale isn't really adding anything helpful considering the entire goal is to prevent it happening more in the future.

> DAVx5 actually didn't work reliably afaict

I've been self-hosting it for several years, with the entire thing (ntfy / UnifiedPush for calendar event updates, Radicale for CalDav & CardDav) working perfectly once background "optimization" is disabled

iOS was actually much worse - it happily synced to an ip address and port on the LAN, then failed silently and without error messages when using a VPN away from home.

> tried to move to Android because it's more open

At least we agree on this - AOSP is more open, but that's not what's on offer any more. Hell, Android Beam was AOSP, and super nice for transferring files. It's now "Google Share", with all the proprietary bullshit that implies, and NFC's utility crippled if you don't use Google Services.

Just a note about police overtime: The correct amount of overtime for a union employee is not zero. Paying overtime for a few weeks each year to cover vacation can absolutely be cheaper than funding a pension and other benefits for several decades.

Agreed. This is not the first time Manjaro has made a boneheaded mistake, nor will it be the last. This is just the most recent.

I may be out of date, but last I looked there was a push to rotate the "default" through servers with open sign-ups and reasonable policies to prevent one server ruling them all

Are we sure it isn't the offensively-well-funded tech industry that's being referenced here?

If one goes looking, Zinwa-made Passport mainboards are starting to enter testing. Based on my experience with the Q20 / Classic revival, I'd recommend one for anyone that loved their Passport

My Zinwa (full-device, not kit) BlackBerry actually showed up, and has been my daily for several weeks. It's fantastic, and I adore it. I love the trackpad, and use it for scrolling and cursor-placement in text daily. The keyboard is an actual, honest-to-god RIM keyboard, and it feels like it. Batteries have gotten denser, but the screen is still small, and I ditched GApps - so my battery life is measured in days.

To temper expectations though: the screen ratio doesn't always work perfectly with apps, getting Google Pay can apparently be a challenge, and the LineageOS build is imperfect (though fixes have been sent, and I expect it to get better).

Should anyone pick one up, mind the antenna resistors when using the SIM removal tool - it's possible to bump them, and they'll have to be soldered back to the board for WiFi and GPS to work correctly after.

Overall, it was cheap enough [0] that I jumped on it early, and it's gone well enough that if the Q10 revival happens, I'm buying a full device and a spare mainboard immediately.

[0] Initially there were two sets of specs, and I bought the lower-end one. Later on, to simplify production, Zinwa bumped everyone to the Pro version at no extra cost.

America finally caught up to Canada and ditched the penny. That's a victory everyone can feel good about. Hopefully the nickel is on it's way out too, and we can get bigger bills back in circulation to catch up with inflation

> "Boy, he's lucky this bus is full of Americans!"

Perhaps only because they have a high likelyhood of speaking English and being able to help him? And sure, many Italians speak English, but if I needed help finding my watch, I like my odds of able to communicate with the Americans over almost any other nationality

> my feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits and in suggestive positions

> I was taking screenshots for a while

More than a little surprised this seemed like a good idea at the time, let alone that you did so for a while without thinking "There is no scenario this ends well"

I'd amend that as "didn't have enough [IRL] friends *on FaceBook* in first place", but that starts off a conversation about platforms being only-technically not required socially, network effects, etc.

You might be using old clients that are recommended against, as (AIUI) Jitsi stopped being the default with Matrix 2.0 (released ~late 2024 [0]).

Is it totally fair to blame users? Not entirely, as some features are still being pushed into ElementX. But it's a known problem, with a known solution (finish ElementX and/or wait for other clients to catch up), and a weakness of an open ecosystem.

Moxie wasn't wrong when he said that open ecosystems have to move slower, but I believe it's worth it in the long-run.

[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...

> Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.

Which I have all kinds of questions for; my Synapse install is the FOSS community release, and pmap -d shows <1.5G of RAM usage even without the paid-org-optimizations. I thought maybe that was including postgres, but that shows only ~2M. This isn't a single-user instance either - I'm running half a dozen bridges, and use Matrix with my fiancee. Not much above single-user, but also less than half the claimed 4Gig at idle.

I do see ~3Gig mapped (still <4), but that hardly feels fair - any process will start to consume unused RAM, and it can be pushed out when under pressure.

The E2EE breaking for OP is something I haven't seen in somewhere between months and years either, which suggests the entire thing was last trialled before (or shortly after) one of the major performance improvement pushes

The point regarding Soatok's blog about the vuln is absolutely not a good look, though I'd want to dig into it a bit more to see if it's "a malicious admin can break the encryption", "a malicious actor can break the encryption", or "a malicious actor can access metadata". Not great whichever the case may be though.

Sure, but they wouldn't have been the market for XMPP's cross-compatibility before, either. You would have been, and you can have that now - your friends don't have to move to Matrix for you to get one chat app to rule them all. They can stay on Discord, and it doesn't stop you from having inter-op text chat

We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0]

We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.

Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.

[0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/

What part of Ring or Nest's cloud-connected camera network do you consider "closed circuit"?

Apparently yes [0]. I thought I'd seen a different post the other day, but this one was further up in a ddg search

[0] https://tomsitcafe.com/2025/11/06/private-matrix-hosting-a-s...

I was actually playing with voice rooms the other day. One can create a standing call room that people can join or leave as they see fit, without having to set up a new call each time. Discord currently has more integrations with streaming and voicechat rooms, but they had a bit of a head start, and even Element (let alone Commet & Cinny) are catching up

That's why the bittorrent protocol is in such dire straights /s

Bittorrent actually has fewer real uses than Matrix. The former is useful for Microsoft and others trying to roll out big patches, but the latter is used by NATO, the German Armed Forces, and the French government

You didn't say, and I wouldn't want to assume the situation, but calling the number on the back of a bank or credit card would work better here (in case it was a bank). This is also an argument in favour of paper bills, or logging in to a customer portal as a best-of-the-worst option

Found your article for you, as I was looking it up the other day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...

I assumed it was because people here are constantly telling Arathorn that Element (not ElementX) is slow and buggy, and that when they last tried the default server (circa 2019 or so) is was buggy and full of rough edges

He's (in my mind) always positive, open, and willing to admit the shortcomings of the platform he shephards... but damn does he deal with a lot of undeserved criticism (and deserved criticism, where applicable)

Mobile notifications do not require outside operators. UnifiedPush / ntfy is FLOSS, and allows for a single background connection for multiple apps / notification channels. It can also be self-hosted (and I do!)

This puts the operational costs (number of devices and notifications) on whomever is running the server - and because of how valuable metadata is, I expect them to be run in-house by governments

You would think so, but:

> You won’t find apps for either service on Google Play or any other app store; users who have tried report that it’s impossible to run them on any other third-party device, suggesting that they were custom-built by or on behalf of the makers of SuperBox and vSeeBox.

Ballmer was kinda the best Microsoft CEO for Windows, IMO. He didn't get the Justice department's attention in either the states or Europe, and he started building alternate revenue streams (XBOX, Windows Phone) without destroying the core product. Sure, MetroUI had no place in Server2012, but that was less egregious than the AI-everything and multiple settings menus

Nadella is a marvelous Microsoft CEO for Linux though. Credit where it's due

This cuts both ways - ADP requires changing some settings on-device, and (in some cases I've heard) calling Apple to disable. So it is baked in, but it's hardly easy to enable and disable

GrapheneOS (which, FWIW, I do trust at least as much as ADP) has a web-installer IIRC, making it similarly easy to enable, but a little harder to disable for normal users. Moreover, it's not built-in to the Pixel. It's entirely third-party, and did not ship on mass-market hardware

Being an option on the default OS, with OEM support, can make all the difference sometimes