ldarby

Isn't this it? https://github.com/openai/whisper

Given this story from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34021944 it's easy to believe these stories about companies having awful support departments that can only be contacted via social media side-channels.

Can you post anything public to confirm Stripe's department isn't like that?

Sylpheed is still Sylpheed. Claws is a fork of it.

How much engineering effort went in to this, instead of other improvements like reducing power consumption / increasing battery life?

I would have bought a Librem 5 but haven't only beceause of the power issues (which is same reason I didn't get a Pinephone).

I'm not OP but a while ago I wrote this comment which you responded to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206569

Since then basically none of the specific bugs I cared about got fixed (that I think could be unbearable to me, some of them definitely are, not sure about all), which are: 8751, 9437, 9811, 10287, 10577, 13263, 13485, 14323, 14424, 15416, 15565, 16123, 16184, 16763, and 16807, all these were all opened before my comment, and everything earlier than 16123 is more than one year old and still open. Maybe one of those is miok's. Newer ones raised since then that also look important to me at first glance: 20046, 20005, 19929, 18458, 17838, 17218.

Also there is this closed bug still attracting comments: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/15500#issuec....

As much as I hate NPS scores in the industry, I think these bugs are preventing Matrix from getting new promoters.

I always decide between "Thanks," or "Regards,", or "Thanks and regards" or even the cringey "Thanks and best regards". It depends on the recipient and if I'm asking for something or giving advice.

One day I worry I'm going write an angry email to a group, then typo the sign off with "Retards," and send before I catch it...

> To be fair to them, they were probably advised to act in this manner by their lawyers.

Probably? Don't you think that's something that should be investigated and people held accountable for?

Nope, doesn't matter, only the stupid software bugs here need to be investigated. Got it.

Seriously, did you read a different article from https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3475967 ? I have re-read it several times but am not seeing what you apparently are.

Replying to myself to clarify a couple of things further. I'm not disagreeing with the idea of an IT accident review board, and I agree in general we should focus on eliminating bugs, maybe what PHK means is having even more details of the bugs, i.e. the specific coding mistakes, issues with internal processes in Fujitsu that led to the bugs being released, etc. and a database containing this and other company's mistakes that others can learn from.

I just don't think the bugs here are especially interesting compared to bugs in other software of similar complexity. In any other situation it goes like this:

    customer: hey vendor, this software has bugs
    vendor: whoops, sorry, here's a fix

or even this:

    customer: hey vendor, this software has bugs, and they're so bad we're suing you (which may have been appropriate in this case if the bugs caused financial loss)

not this:

    customer: hey vendor, this software has bugs, and we've sent our employees to prison because we don't want to admit the bugs exist.
    vendor: wtf?

That's a cultural / judicial problem and I just don't believe the reaction should be to focus on preventing other companies creating similar bugs.

I don't think you (or the sibling comment) got my point. No where am I "excusing" bugs. Civil engineering bugs are indeed a fact of life too, just check the god damn news.

What I'm saying, is that I think where PHK says "nobody sat down and documented precisely what went wrong", I think he is just wrong.

The guy in the Computerphile video, Steven Murdoch wrote this article:

https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...,

which has further details of the bugs, e.g.

"There is a window of time between a user printing and cutting-off a report. If another user was to perform a transaction during that window, that transaction may not show on the report."

which is from the long and very detailed judgment: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Bate...

The problem that needs investigating here is the miscarriage of justice, apparently the post office was aware of the bugs at the same time as prosecuting people for falling victim to the bugs, in order to save face about their IT decision.

It's known what went wrong, computerphile has a video with some details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10 but it doesn't address any of the judicial and cultural fails, that's what needs to be fixed. Software bugs are a fact of life, people know this, except the judges in this case apparently.

It's ironic reading this and then seeing the page track your progress reading it. Here's a screenshot of my browser dev tools: https://i.ibb.co/8Yt7FY0/trust-in-software-an-all-time-low-t.... It's a websocket connection to wss://wisps.underjord.io:8601/socket/websocket?vsn=2.0.0.

> they tend to revert to explaining it a different way out of a suspicion that you don’t get it.

I think that's because, in my experience (outside of HN), many people really don't get it. They say something like "this proprietary software did something nasty again" without knowing that the GPL exists or that it's effectively impossible for GPL'ed software to do nasty things. Hence, it is always worth explaining the GPL and its values to them.

It's not always easy to see when someone already understands the values and just disagrees with them.

Where it says "the whatsapp hack" it's referring to this: https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/14/whatsapp_zero_day/

I'm a bit confused by this attitude. You want the project to get better, and get better sooner than later.

You could donate, in the hope that donating will make it get better faster (or, depending on the amounts involved, you could get an agreement that they'll use the funds to work on the specific things you care about).

But you won't donate, because they still need orders of magnitude more funding than what you can provide? Well then you're going to be waiting longer. But then, you will donate once they're good enough, which is when they no longer need your extra funding to do the work?

Edit I think I figured it out after thinking about it further.

Let's say they're at e.g. 10% of the way to towards a usable device, and you could afford to donate enough to fund 10% progress. If you donate now, 20% usable is still useless and there's no visible difference in how long until it's 100%, but donating later when they're at 90%, if they ever get there, would "immediately" result in a useable device.

Elsewhere in this thread there's a link to https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-T0900200/public, which backs up what you're saying:

"Metal film or thin film resistors have little excess noise in these tests and thick film resistors show large excess noise"

> cURL has above-average name recognition.

It might to you and people in your circle, but that's not the entire audience of the article. I wouldn't assume everyone knows what a Dremel is either.

Are you aware of this story: https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/ ?

They recommend 80°C / 175°F: https://aeropress.com/use-it-now/getting-started/#steps

Thanks for the response, that sounds good and makes sense, I guess I'll continue waiting...

My family regularly does things like forget which browser they last used, or re-install windows, or otherwise mysteriously have all browser settings disappear, etc - all things that seem to be related to those key-backup issues.

The entire point of Matrix is that it has E2E. If E2E isn't a requirement then my prefered communication tool is email.

I wish Matrix would instead focus on fixing all the existing encryption usability issues instead of these new features:

https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues?q=label%3AA-...

I would love to migrate my family to Element (and also friends, and eventually also recommend it to employers if they're ever choosing something other than Teams) but can't until it's reliable as webmail. I also wrote this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271512 "Once Element is mature enough (and I'm sorry, but looking at the incoming issues on https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues?q=sort%3Aupd..., it doesn't look like it yet), then hopefully more companies will start considering it."

I get that E2E means it cannot be as simple as email, and I can handle the extra training that's needed, but not for figuring out all these known issues and attempting to prevent people hitting them, or having to handle the situation if they do.

There are many variations of standards of life. Some are objectively better than others. Compare a wealthy person to someone whose standard of life was so bad they froze to death on the streets in winter, due to homelessness.

There are many factors that affect standards of life, including e.g. having a shelter or not, etc. Other factors make less of a difference to the standard, e.g. access to education. This is all obvious and should go without saying. What you're trying to say is that 'having sex or not' is not a factor that affects the standards of life, but I think it quite obviously is one as well.

> "We are taking the position that people who are rich enough to buy into Team's ecosystem and throw lots of money to Microsoft might as well throw a little bit of money to Element to keep funding Matrix development."

This is a mistake. If they're already paying for Teams, then what exactly is the incentive to "throw a little bit of money to Element"? They aleady have a communications tool (Teams), so a) why are they going to pay for another one, and b) people who already bought Teams most likely do not care about the values Matrix stands for.

This is a good explaination why it has the current behaviour, but it doesn't answer the question of why the behaviour isn't better (i.e. which would be to tell the user what's needed, the path, instead of telling the user what was provided is not what's needed which is vague and leaves it up to the user to figure it out.)

It's not like the source code is now etched into stone and can't be changed. Or is it?

The first email in the thread [0] has 10 reasons why Stallman should be cancelled. They repeat Stallman's earlier opinions about pedophilia from before he changed his opinion on that, so they shouldn't be valid.

About point 5 about "defending sexual assault", I think it's important to note that it was "sexual assault" only because that is the statutory charge used in Texas for violating the age of consent law [1]. If the incident [2] had happened a few miles away in Oklahoma where the age of consent is 16, there would not be a "sexual assault" charge. I complete agree with Stallman's other point (made elsewhere) that more precise language needs be used to describe what actually happened.

I'm not defending Stallman about everything - the other points, which can be summed up as "he's a creep towards women and alienates them", are problematic, and if he won't change his behaviour that might be a valid reason to cancel him.

[0] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html

[1] https://www.ageofconsent.net/states/texas

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cody-wilso...

> Have you ever seen a payer demand a change from a proprietary vendor and get it?

This happens constantly, but in private. Usually the conversation goes like this:

    customer: opens support ticket, asking how to do some task X
    vendor: sorry, that needs a feature added to the product
    customer: fine, we'll switch to $other_vendor
    vendor: oh look at that, our engineering department scheduled the feature for next release.

Granted though that when dealing with vendors as large as Microsoft that's not going to happen.

For me, it was contactless payments. For the longest time I didn't want a contactless card, a little bit out of fear of someone being able to steal just by being close enough but mainly out of "it's such a minor convenience it's not worth asking the bank for the card". Several years go by and the non-contactless card expired, and the new one was contactless, but I still wouldn't use it.

Then one day I did, and holy shit it's the best thing ever, I'm never using cash again (this was before covid hit which has made contactless mandatory now).

I'm sure there are a few other things in my life like this, i.e. things that I'm aware of, but making stupid choices about, I'm just not aware that it's a stupid choice.

> GTK1 and GTK2 apps are not being left behind, they work perfectly fine even on a modern system

Wrong, GTK 1 was removed from Debian over 10 years ago: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=520441

> Enterprises don't want federation.

100% of companies require a way of communicating with other companies/people, and federated email and phone calls are extremely common ways (granted that non-federated means are becoming more popular, and I can believe there are a few companies whose only communication with the outside world is via non-federated means).

Companies have lists requirements for their tools and "not federated" isn't one of them, it's just that so far non-federated tools already fullfil the other requirements. Once Element is mature enough (and I'm sorry, but looking at the incoming issues on https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues?q=sort%3Aupd..., it doesn't look like it yet), then hopefully more companies will start considering it.

Also, some companies (at least some people in the one I work for, so I'm extrapolating) want to be able to text chat with other companies/people, and they currently do this with Teams (which requires both parties to have a Teams account). Slack allows this too if I understand. Federated chat would also give them this, so it is something they need, even if they don't realise that.