eredengrin

> Who ever argued it was?

I think lots of lobbyists were making such arguments about the DMA in Europe.

> That’s a bogus argument from Beeper. Why would Apple trust them?

This has little to do with beeper's client. The point is, apple could easily bring imessage to android and doing so would increase their customers privacy, because now all their android conversations could be e2ee. apple of course chooses not to do this even with how trivial it would be, showing that their privacy focused marketing is really just empty words. Beeper's role here is simply bringing more attention to this two faced apple propaganda.

> https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android

It's possible that imessage wasn't brought to android for monetary purposes early on, but at this point it's pretty clear there's a large segment of android users willing to pay a subscription to get imessage and that would be practically free money for apple. I think the main reason they still haven't included android is it goes against their vertical integration philosophy. They want to control everything (they don't control android, or the android app store) and are willing to make sacrifices and gambles in pursuit of that (eg them sinking loads of money to try and engineer their own modems even though it is likely to be worse than qualcomm's for quite some time, and who knows if they'll ever even ship an iphone with an apple modem before they shut the division down).

Beeper has been around since 2020 and its primary product (now called beeper cloud) is an all-in-one chat application which supports many protocols from the same client, not just imessage. Even if imessage/beeper mini is the product generating discussion right now, beeper cloud has been the primary focus of their company since the start and beeper mini is just a recent tangent. They use matrix bridges as the backend and some of the devs now working for beeper were already working on the open source bridges which beeper now uses even before beeper the company existed. Beeper was the first organization (and one of the few it seems) to become a corporate sponsor of the matrix foundation, and they also routinely sponsor developers to work on the open source bridges that make up much of their infrastructure, even beyond the ones they hired on as staff.

I'm not sure how all this points to "get-rich-quick" silicon valley startup type to you but the behavior looks pretty different to me. Given their history, my guess is they put beeper mini out there primarily to put pressure on apple. If apple doesn't shut it down, cool, everyone has access to imessage through beeper. If apple does shut it down, at least it leaves little doubt about the situation: interoperability is not impossibly hard, apple really doesn't care about the security or privacy of their customers as much as they like to say they do, and at the end of the day imessage is only limited to apple devices because apple is apple. (For most companies I would say imessage is locked to apple devices because it's about the money but apple is one of those companies that takes weirdly principled positions even when it makes no sense, kind of similar to nintendo in that way.)

I suppose if all I had seen was the past month of buzz around them then I might perceive them differently.

Last commit 2 weeks ago? Doesn't look dead. Perhaps not actively developed by original author but seems they're still acting as a maintainer and willing to take PRs.

> Beeper is charging people who haven't purchased devices

Do you have numbers for that? Sure, some of the users haven't purchased devices, but many of them have an apple device or two and just want access to the network across all the devices they use.

> For Matrix to be a success, we need to design it such that there can be contributions from others than New Vector.

What exactly do you think is stopping such contributions? It seems to me there is plenty of room for community involvement, it is simply a matter of the community doing it (which many have been of course, but there is also always more work to do and free skilled labor is not easy to come by in large quantities).

> Having at least a bunch of money in the foundation would reduce that risk, but New Vector seems to even be siphoning off that.

I'm not following. How does the foundation having money reduce this risk? In particular, how do you think the foundation would help prevent the "collapse" of matrix if they had more funding? If you ask me I'd think that funding developers would be a good way to do that, and as the primary force behind the reference implementations, wouldn't funding Element/New Vector be a good way to do that? Although I was under the impression that resources primarily flowed the opposite way, from Element to the Foundation, but I haven't kept close track so could be wrong...

In any case, I'd echo the original sentiment of this thread - as someone who joined their patreon back when it first started and still haven't left it, I don't really mind if they haven't documented for the public where exactly every penny went as long as it's going towards the people developing matrix. Yeah maybe not ideal, but given that the foundation has very little money to begin with I have a tough time faulting it. It would change things if they were bringing in millions, but when the community patreon is not even bringing in enough to hire a full time minimum wage employee in California, much less a developer, accountant, or lawyer, documenting the expenditure of a few pennies is pretty low on my priority list.

1. Used in on my desktop for approx 8 years but migrated away a year or two back when I ran into one too many things that doesn't work well for desktop experience. Now it's only running on my nas.

2. I still use it on my nas because I'm familiar with it, has good documentation and very stable, and first class zfs support.

3. OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD both look quite fun to mess with but not the greatest desktop experiences, so that's why I always used FreeBSD in the past. Now I keep using it because familiarity and I know it will do what I need for my nas (mainly serving files and virtualization).

4. The desktop experience. It's doable if you're willing to give up some features and spend a bunch of time configuring some other ones but I've got other stuff to do these days.

5. Mainly I'd miss the first class zfs support.

How do you know that the 24/96 and 16/44 came from the same masters? If this isn't controlled for then of course the result might be different.[0]

Also, what is xm1000w3s? I can't find any record of this so I'm guessing maybe it is referring to the WH1000XM3 headphones? Given ldac is also mentioned this seems a reasonable guess as it's a bluetooth model. If that's the case I wouldn't call it "good listening equipment", the default frequency response curve of the wh1000xm3 is incredibly bad, it's barely worth listening to classical music on without using AutoEq[1] or something equivalent (I have a pair and it's much worse than my old Ath M50s which were like half the price). The bass heavy curve of the headphones is far more noticeable than any difference between 16/24 bit audio would ever make.

[0] https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html#toc_d...

[1] https://autoeq.app/

As far as standard checking/savings/credit card accounts go, I haven't had one that didn't have a csv export option yet. Some of them are very buried and much harder to find and use than I wish, but they are there at least with the banks I use.

There is a middle ground I think - all my banks/credit cards (7 or 8 accounts spread across 4-5 providers) offer csv downloads of transactions. I haven't tried to automate downloading the csv, but once the csv exists locally automation becomes straightforward. But yes, for real-time automated gathering of the data, this wouldn't be appropriate I imagine.

At least you can avoid bolero pretty easily. The real disaster is canon in d...

I mean there's degrees of temptation. I don't think that simply being in the ring's presence was generally portrayed to be an insurmountable temptation. Some situations were specifically mentioned as causing the ring's power over a person to increase (eg length of time someone used the ring would put them more under its temptation) so I don't see why it's so hard to believe that someone could send off the ring bearer. In any case if that's an issue for you, how do you get around other more fundamental issues, such as how eg Aragorn manages to escape the temptation?

Fair enough, I exaggerated a bit there, I was mainly getting at the fact that in the book Faramir's compassionate/gentler/selfless nature was kind of a direct contrast with the power-seeking nature of his older brother and father. To have him try and take the ring by force seems to remove the entire purpose of his character. He's practically just another Boromir but with a chip on his shoulder.

I actually don't consider that a major gripe. It's certainly a very weird decision and I'd prefer the original version, but it doesn't ultimately affect all that much imo, it mostly just means the humans did a bit less orc killing in the movies than they had to do in the books.

But yeah, I agree with you, I'm happy it turned out as it did for the most part, some of my favorite movies for sure.

The treatment of Sam (and the Sam/Frodo friendship) in Return of the King movie, and the treatment of Faramir as a character. I kind of get what they were going for, it just went way too far overboard imo and probably shouldn't have even been attempted. I'm assuming a bit of knowledge in the unpacking of these below for brevity but hopefully it is not too unclear for those who may have only watched the movies.

In the books, Faramir was pretty much the one redeemable part of the house of stewards. Yes, the ring may be tempting, but I think that was already sufficiently shown throughout earlier moments in the movies and there was no need to throw Faramir under the bus. He was already a relatively minor character in the books, why do him dirty like that? Everyone, both the characters in the book and the readers outside the book, looked up to him. One of his men broke a rule (punishable by death) to save him in the books and from the context you can imagine most of his reports would have done the same, but if all you knew of him was what you saw in the movies, it gives a very different impression. He came around in the end but at the very least he should have done the right thing sooner than he did in the movies.

As far as the Sam (and Frodo) thing goes, admittedly it's been a year or two since the last time I read the trilogy and it's easy to confuse the books/movie in my memory, but I don't remember seeing any signs of contention between them the way it was shown in the movie, and certainly if there was, it was not even close to the same degree. Among other things, I think the movie was trying to show the darker side of the ring's effects, but again, it's already been shown multiple times throughout the movies and they just went overboard with it. Frodo pretty much had the highest trust for Sam (even in the movies this is basically true outside this incident), and would Sam really give up and abandon Frodo that easily because of a few crumbs? Tangentially, I don't remember Sam being particularly cruel to gollum in the books, and that's really the root of this breach of trust in the movies. That entire aspect of Sam shouldn't have been there to begin with, and if it wasn't, the staircase scene would also make no sense to show that way.

The reason I find these two particularly inexcusable is that I simply don't see how they added much to the movies in terms of story or character development. There's an argument for it but it's just weak imo, Tolkien had it figured out just fine thank you very much. I also don't see how it would have helped in terms of budget, reducing film length, etc. I can excuse other omissions or slightly weird things if there are budget/time constraints, you can't reasonably ask for the impossible, I just don't see it in those two cases.

I too love the books, I've read the trilogy at least 16 times and the Silmarillion at least 3 or 4 at this point (haven't gotten into the others yet but hope to one day). Yes, the tv series can be entirely forgotten. So can the hobbit trilogy - I personally don't mind if the tone is a bit more lighthearted, the book was as well, it was meant to be more of a children's book after all. But certainly much of the extra material could have been removed, and I don't think it needed to be a trilogy, two movies at most. The book has far less material than the LotR trilogy books do and the third movie dragged on forever on pointless battle scenes.

But as for the original Jackson trilogy movies, I think it's entirely possible to appreciate those as someone who loved the books. There are only two major gripes I can think of which are particularly inexcusable and a few smaller things I would've liked to change but which are excusable either for not being particularly consequential, or because of time constraints. Overall though blocking the two major complaints out of my memory, it's quite well done. For a twelve hour film to have only two major gripes compared to the books, I'm not actually sure if there are any other film/book adaptations with a ratio that good.

The only game mechanic I want to see Nintendo patent is brawl tripping. Probably not necessary as it seems other fighting games haven't seen the brilliance of such a mechanic, but may as well play it safe in case others become enlightened.

How long have you used Here WeGo? It used to be my primary maps application but a couple years back they updated it and broke everything (offline address search stopped working, no route choices anymore, I think they removed the TTS options which made the voice directions much harder to follow, etc).

The reviews for the app tanked after that disaster and practically all of them mentioned the update as the pain point, do you know if they ever recovered a semblance of what it used to be? Maybe I'll have to check it out again, I've been using Magic Earth ever since then and it's pretty solid but there are a few minor things I still miss.

You are correct, the government cannot default on its debts (assuming they were legally authorized). Justin Amash recently wrote a very helpful blog post [0] about the debt and this is his interpretation of the amendment. Recommend reading the whole thing but the most relevant portion would be myth #4.

[0] https://justinamash.substack.com/p/the-debt-ceiling-isnt-wha...

Not sure I buy that. [0] has some data to suggest that light decreases crime, and there's also common sense. If you can see a potentially sketchy situation a block down, it gives you the chance to take a little detour and perhaps avoid it entirely. The light also allows more witnesses, more people to step in if needed, more people to call cops if needed, and more chance for cameras to be effective.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/5/9/how-something-a...

I'd say split it half and half, 6 months LA to learn the pain of the wrong way, then 6 months in a place with proper transit like Amsterdam or Seoul, then they come back with a vision of what could be.

> seeing their original massive OSS project now only achieve what's 'required' and nothing more

If they were only doing "what's required" they would have ditched their upstream first approach to fixes and the only ones seeing their code would be paying customers, or people who the paying customers distributed the code to. The fact that they are still one of the primary contributors not only to the upstream linux kernel but countless other open source projects pretty much by definition means that they are still going well above and beyond "what's required". If you don't like their direction, fine, but pretending like they are entirely freeloading and doing nothing for the broader open source community really weakens your position.

> In fact it's basically a love letter to the uninformed viewer

Absolutely, and it shows in how many people I've recommended this video to who know nothing about sm64 who absolutely love it. (I also know nothing about sm64 and absolutely love it.)

> The thoroughness of this video seems to me to be proof that he wanted to get these newer viewers up to speed

Yep and he literally says it right in the video, "but maybe what you guys need isn't a paragraph, maybe you guys need an example". He admits his previous attempts were maybe not getting across and adapted. Teaching at its finest. The TJ Henry Yoshi callout was clearly for comedic effect, and if I were TJ I'd be pretty happy to get an answer this thorough, understandable, and entertaining.

edit: listening to it again, even calling it a callout as I did above is kind of incorrect. "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, hear me out." He didn't say "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, this is where you're wrong" or "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, what didn't you understand about the paragraph?", he just asked for a listening ear for another chance to explain his perspective in a different way.

> It's obtuse jargon for the sake of it.

Not really. The speedrun is to optimize for fewest total A-button presses. This metric is known from the controller's perspective in the sense that if you sniffed the communications between the controller and console, you could know the number of A-presses. Given this metric, the term half A-press makes total sense once it is understood. To reiterate the video, in a single level run, a half press rounds up to 1, but in a full game run it rounds down. How else would you communicate that without "obtuse jargon"?

> if press, hold, and release are different actions, and those are meaningful to the speedrun, and you care about what a general audience thinks about it, then just count them separately

If you want to distinguish between the actions taken based on the state of the a button, that is fundamentally different from tracking the number of button presses since it requires knowledge of the game state. Not only does it make much harder to define but it's also much harder to track without advanced tooling (how do you know if the game state was modified in an important way or not if someone presses the button for eg 2 frames vs 4 frames?). I'm not sure how I see this would make it easier for the general audience to understand either since now they also have to understand the game state rather than how many times a button was pressed. Also, this makes it entirely disconnected from the physical world, when presumably the idea of the challenge was to use the buttons on your controller less.

There's nothing stopping speed runners from tracking it this way I suppose but complaining about how a community plays a game is a bit odd. Although it is a nintendo game so I guess complaining about how the hardcore fans play it is pretty much expected.

[1] is about speedrunning peach's break the target test in smash bros melee which involves some craziness (including rng considerations), very good watch. AsumSaus also has tons of breakdowns of weird mechanics in melee, very hard to choose as pretty much all his videos are excellent but [2] and [3] are as good a starting place as any.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKWKICUqWU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA8kpvTBh8Q

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fo0cPmj4VA

GrapheneOS has features that allow this to various extents, for example storage scopes which trick the app into believing it has all the storage permissions it requested, or contact scopes which give an app access to whatever subset of contacts you decide on (including none). Similar feature exists for sensors and possibly others I've forgotten or am unaware of.

This reads to me like wanting to learn sports, and then disliking that your soccer instructor didn't teach you how to throw a ball. There's a lot you can learn about music in the classical framework, but the focus there is certainly not improvisation based on chord sheets. Generally learning about improvisation in a high school context would happen in jazz band, although in my experience lots of people in jazz band (including myself) are not too interested in improvisation either. A separate music theory class might also help although dedicated classes for that are probably even less common than having a jazz band, although if a student is particularly motivated and interested and the school is at all flexible, you can sometimes work out a deal with the band teacher to do a special run of such a class. Also music theory is just theory, it's totally insufficient without also actually practicing improv as doing it in real-time is a much harder challenge.

I wouldn't doubt if learning guitar or piano would help with this aspect, but I know plenty of people who learned it just fine on wind instrument if they want to. It's not too surprising especially for those learning wind instruments - taking a solo in high school is already scary for a lot of people, and even more so when they don't even have music to play or practice ahead of time. Also there is admittedly probably a higher barrier of entry to improv on wind instruments so a lot of the focus necessarily has to be on achieving a baseline technical proficiency before it even makes sense to think about improv (if they don't put in the prerequisite technical work, it would be hard to move to improv). For example, with guitar or piano, right off the bat I can play any note in tune and sound at least halfway okay. On a wind instrument, even playing the most basic note will sound quite bad at first, and generally the range of frequency is limited for beginners and learning to extend it can take many years. Playing in tune likewise takes years.

Anyway, all that said, I entirely agree, if someone really likes music, it's hard to go wrong with also learning guitar or piano. Piano in particular, as one of the most versatile instruments, used in so many genres, and can help with learning fundamental theory, composition, and even gives a very good sense of rhythm as the two hands have to act independent of each other in a way that other instruments normally don't have to. If I had to go back and learn a different instrument, piano would be a likely candidate.

I haven't read much about lxd until just now but based on that link, the differentiating feature between lxd and podman seems to be that lxd can manage full virtual machines (using qemu as backend, according to [1] which was linked elsewhere in this thread). Whatever this distinction is between application and system container, it doesn't appear to be a technical distinction nor a feature that lxd has that podman lacks, unless I'm wildly misunderstanding it. Containers you run with docker and podman are fully capable of running multiple processes (in my experience it's quite common to do so) and Red Hat has blog posts from years ago specifically discussing running systemd in podman, eg [2]. Managing VMs is indeed an additional feature though.

[1] https://ubuntu.com/blog/lxd-virtual-machines-an-overview

[2] https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/04/24/how-to-run-sys...

I think you're probably overestimating how much most people know or care to worry about setting custom do not disturb settings, although that's just my anecdotal guess based on interactions with friends outside the tech space. Also, I'd consider myself pretty on top of tech (enough to run cyanogenmod/lineageos/grapheneos) and have a custom DnD schedule, but I had no idea setting it per contact was an option until you hinted that it might be. I've been wanting that for a while so thanks for letting me know, but also I'd imagine most people are very unaware of that option still.

Same, I distro hopped for a while across various ubuntu and ubuntu derivatives, always ran into weird issues, stability problems, etc (and still do at work where we use ubuntu). Installed fedora eventually and have been using it ever since, outside of a packagekit bug like 7 years ago that didn't clear the cache and ate my disk space, it's been pretty smooth sailing.

Are you aware the amount that Red Hat contributes to the kernel? Red Hat has more contributions to the upstream linux kernel (which every distro benefits from, RHEL or not) than just about any other corporation. The amount of testing and stability effort that goes into the kernel would be dramatically reduced without Red Hat, not to mention the code changes themselves.

Just to get a basic idea, [1] has some stats of kernel contributions for the 4.20 kernel, Red Hat had second most changesets accepted. Intel was first, although if you combined Red Hat + IBM then that would push Intel to second. And looking at the core kernel commits (ie ignoring things like device drivers, where hardware companies are making contributions solely for the purpose of supporting the hardware that they sell), the difference was even more skewed towards Red Hat (and interestingly, IBM as well).

And that's just the kernel itself, they're also the primary force behind plenty of other widely used projects (fedora is one of my favorite distros, systemd, for better or worse, it's still used by most distros, and as much as people like to hate on gnome, I have to say I've found it more stable and worry free compared to other options including modern KDE, and the list goes on). Maybe they are not the perfect role model but don't pretend they aren't giving a bunch back to the entire community in many ways.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/