I’ve been using SimpleX for a small circle of friends and it has been pretty easy to use. I am surprised it has not seen wider adoption. Writing scripts for it is also straightforward.
I tried to figure out its identity model and failed, and I consider myself somewhat familiar with encrypted IM protocols. How should non-technical users ever figure this out?
And if they don't need to, and it just works as a regular encrypted messenger: Why should somebody use this over any of the many alternatives?
Other than that, its "advantages" page looks highly disingenuous, e.g. by describing Signal as "Possibility of MITM: Yes", but itself as "No - Secure", with a footnote of "Verify security code to mitigate attack on out-of-band channel". How is that different from verifying a Signal verification code!?
A web where text/markdown is prevalent is a win for human readers, too. It would be great if Firefox and Chrome rendered markdown as rich text (eg: real headings/links instead of plaintext).
These days, I've noticed that lobsters feels a lot more genuine to me, like hn was a few years ago. These days it feels like hn is bland and homogeneous, which I suspect is due to LLM-written comments.
In my experience every English-language online forum not rooted in some project or community external to the forum (e.g. an open source project's forum or a local club's forum) devolves into anger, cynicism, and American political partisanship. I suspect that the people who like discussing these feelings are more numerous than the spaces that want to discuss them and so any open forum fills up with their posts. Lobste.rs's unique rules and moderation culture results in a particular manifestation of symptoms but the disease is the same.
I picked up lobsters last month, and I started to appreciate it much more because of the lack of generated comments. It has a anti-LLM slant, and they have their own moderation challenge (everything is getting tagged as vibecoding - which makes the tag lose meaning). But the comments are noticeable not-slop.
When they answer back to us in personal pronouns, we will always be wondering if it is like LLM just putting most probable words together or something really sentient.
When someone makes a virtual girlfriend of it, is it really a disembodied person or just a smart answering machine?
A whole lot of ethical and psychological issues are to open up here.
It looks like Mark Thomas maintained a phone number database up until 2007 or 2023 for many areas in the USA. I guess that could be a basis for starting 'my own' instance of payphone-go, maybe with twilio (or equivalent) to receive the calls.
This works because California requires licensing for payphones and Riley was able to FOIA state payphone database. I'm not sure if other states require licenses for payphones.
Who is actively lobbying against the “war on root access”? Which are the NGOs/PACs/non-profits with the best track record of getting results here? FSF and EFF come to mind, but I can’t think of others and don’t know of track records for any of them.
Are westerners entering a period of “minimalism fatigue”? Anecdotally it seems like color and texture are slowly taking hold in designs, especially in works targeting a younger demographic.
Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...
I hope so. I never bought into the minimalism/flat design hype and have lamented its loss ever since.
What’s worse is it bled out of the digital world and into the physical. There’s a real lack of color in our modern world, at least over here in the US. Everything is so neutral and boring, all in the name of efficiency.
Minimalism does have its merits though. When decorating my apartment I looked for ways to use color without making whole thing look like confetti poop.
Yeah I'll agree there, as the saying goes "all things in moderation." It's when it goes too far is when it starts to suck the life and human-ness out of everything.
I suppose my issue is more with the "corporate minimalism" trend rather than minimalist design in general.
I think good minimalism is when you express more with less. In my living room, the appliances are grey but wall artworks are colorful - you immediately look the paintings, not at the drawers. The artworks themselves aren't colorful, each one has a specific color scheme, so that when you take a step back, a pattern emerges, and there are gentle but clear color zones that serve different purposes. In another area I have space that's exclusively grey and white, and then there's one corner that's unicorn puke. Minimalism creates lower lows so that the highs punch even higher. The house is modern-minimalist and you can easily find angles to take photos literally from Ikea catalogue, but at the same time it's very radical from artistic point of view and nobody who's seen my house has said that it looks bland.
The problem with corporate minimalism is that the vague nothingness became the goal of the design rather than a way to set the scene for something else. It's like asking your audience to stop the chatter but then there's no show.
I hope so. I fancy myself pretty decent at reading. I see the Japanese sites and marvel at the amount of information they have available at a glance. I’m so sick of having to scroll 5 page lengths on western sites just to get to any meaningful information.
I know I certainly am. I hope we move towards things having colors other than white and black again. Please give me back grey backgrounds, I don't like the blinding whites everything has but dark mode is horrid when you aren't in a dark-ish environment
And now they're following Apple into maximalism again making it even less usable. As someone who did accessibility, minimalism did make it easier, it's hard to do maximalism right, one needs to use component extension and extensive styling rules for overlaps and bounding boxes versus a simple vector rectangle with revolved corners. I do miss the 2000s steel/gradient/font/faux 3d icewm-ish looks, they were pretty easy to pull off and didn't really hinder usability
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