pitninja

I assume you’re not using iMessage anyway then because Apple’s Messages stack isn’t open source. If you’re not using iMessage anyway, it shouldn’t matter to you what Beeper Mini is doing. This app isn’t for the ultra paranoid. Neither is Google’s RCS in Google Messages. This is where Signal and Matrix would be better choices. If you are using iMessage on an Apple device, you’re choosing to trust Apple despite their app being closed source and you’re not choosing to trust Beeper, which is fine and I don’t judge you at all for that stance. But at that point, your qualms aren’t simply about Beeper Mini being closed source, the implication is that you don’t trust Beeper as a company and/or its developers which, again, is a valid stance even if it’s one I don’t share.

But I am personally pretty sure I can trust Beeper and Apple enough with my relatively meaningless conversations.

I think you got hit hard by Poe’s Law here. Except it’s more like people couldn’t tell if you were jokingly or genuinely getting your math wrong… Even after you explained you were joking lol

I would encourage people to code switch rather than adhere to one style of language over another in every case. Imho, it’s kind of problematic that language itself has become racialized in America to the point where people can actually be criticized or made fun of for speaking in the “wrong” style associated with their perceived ethnic background.

By that logic, there’s nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it’s closed source. If you don’t want to trust Beeper mini, you’ll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they’re promising to do (and you still won’t know that Apple isn’t scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it’s because I look at what they’re transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren’t going to release the source for their client ever because that’s the only way they make any money.

The federal government should charge Texas for the costs to remove the unauthorized barriers. The fact that the rest of us are paying for their idiocy is appalling.

deleted by creator

Thank you for laying it all out there. It sounds like you’re doing it the right way 🙂

Thank you for providing some context for this. It kind of sounds like a fork might not have been necessary if Ernest was willing to make @melroy a maintainer. Do you know if there’s any philosophical reason he wasn’t willing to do that? Real life stuff comes and goes, but it seems silly to halt the “official” project that others are relying on and still wanting to improve upon and thereby force a fork. As it stands right now, it sounds like it will be awkward for Ernest to come back in and try to restart work on kbin and will be increasingly awkward the more that mbin progresses, becomes the standard, and the code bases diverge.

It’s kind of interesting to watch in open source which projects survive and which get forked and essentially made irrelevant. It basically becomes a referendum on the vision of the original individual or team and how well they’re serving the collective user base. If they aren’t accepting PR’s and competently managing development, they’ll likely be forked. So I’m glad to see that folks are making progress with mbin and I can’t help thinking that its entire existence is probably due to individuals not being able to agree on a roadmap for the platform. If anybody has any info on any drama that led to this, I’d be curious to read about it.

I don’t use hotspot on my phone on a daily basis, I use it if I’m out in the field somewhere and my work laptop needs Wi-Fi and then the hotspot feature turns itself off automatically when my laptop is no longer connected to my phone for a period of time.

I’ll occasionally use hotspot for my Wi-Fi only personal tablet as well while I’m traveling. But that’s about the extent of my use for it.

Does your phone not turn off hotspot automatically when nothing is connected for a period of time?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been particularly impressed by the results that an already dumb populace has achieved recently in America. So America getting even dumber doesn’t particularly bode well…

We ought to be concerned about the numbers even if there’s not much we can do about the kids entering adulthood.

The article actually addressed this and apparently they are even developing some resistance to diatomaceous earth. The only sure fire treatments described are extreme heat or cold. It’s a pretty horrifying situation we’ve made for ourselves.

A study paid for by casinos shows casinos are a benefit to society instead of a drain? *Shocked Pikachu face*

It’s easy to look at all the positives when you just ignore the negatives, after all.

It all starts with defining what morality means. The way I would define morality is behaviors that maximize flourishing for sentient creatures and minimize suffering. While it is clearly difficult to quantify flourishing and suffering, there are behaviors that clearly cause suffering in this world and impede the opportunity for flourishing and, by the above definition of morality, are plainly immoral. The way I see it, rejecting the possibility that flourishing and suffering can be quantified at all is the only argument that can be made against moral absolutism. Everything else is just quibbling over relevant variables across the spectrum of available behaviors to determine what makes them more or less moral. There is always a behavior that is objectively the more moral choice, but it might be difficult in practice to determine which is the more moral choice due to a lack of available relevant data. The absence of said data shouldn’t be assumed to be because it doesn’t/can’t exist, but rather that it hasn’t been collected. Rejecting the idea that there is always a more moral behavior amongst several choices is the dangerous assumption, imo.

I’ve never heard a rational defense of moral relativism that made any sense. If there are no moral truths, then serial killers have done nothing wrong for example. If a moral relativist admits that there are some moral truths, then moral relativism is completely indefensible. At that point, you’re just arguing over what is and what is not a moral truth.

Yeah, I’m holding on to the lifetime grandfathered premium and don’t foresee myself using anything else until they end it.

Yes, Koch has apparently funded a good amount of Ken Burns’ work. I have no reason to suspect that Ken Burns has let Koch influence the content of his work, however.

He probably doesn’t deserve a devil’s advocate, but that said, I’m pretty sure Louis didn’t masturbate in public, but rather during phone calls and in private in front of unconsenting or at least not explicitly consenting company, from the accounts I’ve read. I’m not defending it because it’s abusive and wrong, but it’s also not quite the same thing as masturbating in public.

Yeah, I would really like to see them either stop doing that or make it very clear in their email that you should only respond if you know the answer to the question.