It makes sense to want to use Delta Chat because of the UX right now, but I’m just assuming the UX on all of these projects is bad in some way, and I’m assuming there are improvements to be made in other regards as well (Delta Chat is only recently trying to land Perfect Forward Secrecy, for example). I’m more concerned with looking at the future trajectories of these projects, as someone who has had to convert their friend group between solutions multiple times and is sick of projects that don’t go anywhere or will get superseded by projects with better designs.

With that in mind, I’m mainly looking at the fundamentals of the implementation and if, given enough community support/money, all the UX issues could be solved eventually. Even projects like Matrix, which sucks for a few big reasons right now, could still be mostly fixed up with enough effort. My suspicion is that “fixing up” Delta Chat would realistically mean that they should move away from emails as part of their stack, unless there is some actual value-add from keeping it.

(For the record my friends and I are using Signal currently. I played around with SimpleX a long time ago but found the UX lacking for normies.)

Yeah I did, I watched the talk and read the article before I posted. I understand that the article calls out several times “email is fine actually”, but I’m not under any delusions that Delta Chat is using “traditional email”, which is what the article spends the most time debunking. The article’s points on stubbornly using email technology were “countries have a harder time blocking it” (which I mainly focused on) and “email servers are battle-tested”. I’m not counting the second point as worth talking about since it’s kind of dumb to imply that there’s no possible way to have more efficient communication relays than pre-existing email servers, and they’re already modifying those email servers to fit their own purposes anyway so that removes the “battle-tested” perk.

(Not a crypto expert, not familiar with Delta Chat at all, vaguely familiar with SimpleX)

I kind of don’t understand why this is being built on top of email at all. They say it’s harder to block by nation-level actors, but how is something like SimpleX easier to block? They also needed to staple Iroh and its encryption implementation on as additional surface area in order to get regular chat capabilities because email transport doesn’t support things like larger data or real-time communication (voice/video). I see a lot of ways that they have retrofitted email technology to fit parts of the task, but not really a compelling reason why we needed to use email technology as part of the solution? Is it really just the nation-level thing, and is that really only possible through using email?

Assuming SimpleX is resistant to government censorship in the same way that Delta Chat is (multiple dumb relays, no central identities, etc), what transport/encryption problems are being solved that something more purpose-built couldn’t handle? Is Delta Chat more of a proof-of-concept that it’s possible to get this far when starting with email (which, yes, congrats, it is impressive), or is it meant to be the last word in instant messaging? Given that it’s not popular right now, I’m not sure if I’m compelled to switch to or support it over some other new bespoke technology that isn’t starting with its hands tied behind its back?

Snow worms are much cuter than sand worms.

Gamers just don’t care about non-intrusive DRM. The ideological downside of losing access to a game at some unknown point in the future just isn’t real enough for many people to care about. If there were more examples of it happening (e.g. The Crew) I think we’d start seeing a culture shift. I do think there are a fair number of gamers who will skip buying games just because they include worse DRM like Denuvo, but games that ship with Denuvo are typically also just bad games, so the intention of “voting against DRM with your wallet” gets a bit diluted.

Arches isn’t pornographic, but it can still hurt you in other ways.

Unsettling that I could recognize Mii Todd Howard from the thumbnail. Have graphics gone too far?

TOTP yes. I don’t normally have any passkeys (not political, it’s just new tech that I don’t use enough), but I tested with passkeys.io and passkey creation works with Vaultwarden, and the passkey then exports as expected, so I would guess all fine. When transferring from BW->VW, I’d recommend using the .zip export option so that it carries over attachments also.

If it helps, you can use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ to stop the auto-AI inserts.

I switched to self-hosted Vaultwarden and it was so trivial. I had it set up and switched in literally like 10 or 15 minutes. The ability to export your vault from any of your devices makes it less of a concern that you might accidentally wipe your Vaultwarden DB and be screwed, and you don’t even need to add surface area by exposing it to the internet if all your devices log onto your local network occasionally.

Originally I was okay kicking $10 to Bitwarden as a sort of donation, but them doubling the fee for dubious “ooh fancy smart scanning tech” just seems like them wanting more money, or at least misusing the money that they have. If they polled users to ask “do you want to spend double the fee for us to do smart scanning?” I guarantee they would have gotten a resounding ‘no’.

Apparently the price increase happened yesterday; I hadn’t heard anything about it until just now. Gave me the push I needed to switch to self-hosted vaultwarden in like 15 minutes. Very pleased with how simple the docker compose and export->import were. I’ll note that I’m running it privately on my local network, which I’m assuming should work fine as my devices enter that network semi-frequently and should keep everything synced up(?).

Personally it’s because my fingers are already on “s” and “u”.

Really appreciate their takeaway from this. It’s unfortunate that AI is so popular right at the moment that a lot of people are trying to switch to Linux. They’re also still solidly within the honeymoon period so we’ll see how they feel in a month or two.

I was looking at point #3 from the article, which is more misleading in this area than point #5.

ZFS doesn’t require more RAM (or at least not meaningfully more), it just uses it if you have it. The RAM/ARC can be turned down in the configuration if you don’t want it to do that. I think on Linux other filesystems just use the native Linux RAM cache instead(?), so it’s basically the same thing as ARC, just less prominent? Also, doesn’t ZFS have RAIDZ expansion now? Actually a lot of this article smells funny… probably because they just happen to know more about BTRFS. Doesn’t BTRFS still have the RAID5/6 write hole? I wonder what sort of setup they’re using if they’re running it on a NAS.

Note people are reporting some crashing at certain points with the voices38 crack. It will need to be proper’d again. I also feel like voices38 doing Dead Space when 0xZeOn was already spending a lot of time doing it is disrespectful, doubly so when voices38 is like “hey my crack is real and proper and doesn’t crash” and then is immediately eating crow when theirs is crashing also. Maybe ZeOn will be able to study voices38’s crack and learn from it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they just rage-quit instead; I know I would be demoralized as hell if someone just swooped in and invalidated all my work.

After a certain point I think the more likely scenario is not that right-wingers keep “falling for it”, it’s that they have a singular motivation that they need to hide with other more socially acceptable excuses. When those excuses are cast aside whenever convenient, they get to appear outraged and tricked, all while their real goal continues chugging along. This also sets up a sock dummy for leftists to laugh at and pretend that progress is being made, while in fact nothing has changed. IDK, maybe there are people genuinely being convinced otherwise, but we’re about a decade into this nonsense and if someone didn’t exit the train about… a decade ago, it says almost everything we need to know about them.

I don’t think they’re all that separable. In the worst case, using a corporation’s LLM, as Linus is doing, is in essence voicing support for any negative effects in the strongest way possible. LLMs as a technology are fueled by stolen and scraped content, which is in turn fueled by other myriad issues, like datamining and privacy erosion. LLMs as a technology are also extremely inefficient and resource intensive; by writing yourself off as “just one person” doing it we’re ignoring the global effect of many “one persons” all consuming resources by using this technology.

I guess my point is that by using and helping to normalize LLM usage it’s playing right into the hands of all the previously mentioned consequences. Big tech doesn’t need you to use their specific brand of LLM, they just need you to become dependent on the idea of LLM assistance itself. Their endgoal is total adoption and mindshare, and they’re spending vast amounts of money in order to reach it. By refusing to support the technology no matter how “useful” it might be, we can prevent many of the inherent problems from getting worse, and prevent big tech from gaining even more leverage over slightly important things like “is the news real”.

Given his flogging of LLMs with respect to the kernel, I’m guessing Linus is of the opinion that vibe coding is okay to play around with for yourself and for your personal tools, but to use it professionally or to force others to interact with your own vibe coded junk is where the fault lies. This is a fairly mature take on the surface, but also I’m someone who really can’t get past the part where the inherent existence of LLMs is carving ruin through the world through their content theft, resource depletion, and class warfare… so like… I hope he pulls a little harder on those threads sometime instead of judging it purely based on its utility.

All targeting the same person as the other 3 accounts, 4 hours apart? That’s quite a coincidence if it’s not the same person. My guess is they first went through with their main account, then decided to do the same later with their other accounts. Either way, it’s the exact same behavior as the others, so it’s worth calling out in the exact same way.