From my perspective, the biggest differentiator is that Matrix allows users to remove the centralized coordinator from their chat provider. That is, I can run my own Matrix server, where my users can chat with each other, without any interaction with Element.io or other operator. All other major providers (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc) all rely on a single operator to coordinate the system.
Of course, it's still useful to be able to chat with people without accounts on your private server, which is why the federation is still important. You can link up with broader networks, but you're not reliant on them.
Why this might matter is because if e.g. the UK government compels WhatsApp to implement a backdoor, as an end user I would never know. But, as someone operating entirely outside of the UK, they have no standing to compel me as a private person to implement a backdoor in my own deployment (or at the worst, at least I would know if it occurred).
Think of it as the chat analog to running your own mail server. Does everyone need to run your own mailserver? No. But if we'd started with a siloed system in email, we'd probably still be sending emails only to people with our same TLDs to this day.
> Without advocacy, conferences, documentation and tutorials, Matrix would become a niche protocol used by a few enthusiasts for side projects, whilst big proprietary and siloed networks continue to hold the world’s communications.
Advocacy and conferences aren't going to move the needle on mainstream adoption; those methods almost by definition are targeting the enthusiast crowd. In my view, the only factor that matters to attracting users is UI/UX. Streamlining the user's experience will do more for user adoption than any number of bridges.
It's possible that growing the community is the primary goal of Element.io rather than the Matrix Foundation, but in that case, it seems that there is a tension between the goals of the foundation vs Element. I'd like to understand the breakdown between the responsibilities of the foundation vs Element more clearly.
I partially agree, and I'm generally in favor of doing our part to help dang and keep the level of conversation high. With that being said, I read the parent post slightly differently.
I took their post as an implicit request that commenters share their own experiences and how they receive value from these services. A bit like the nuance between the statements "This is pointless" vs "I don't see the point", where the latter has something of an implicit (yet).
From my reading (IANAL), there are three types of occupational fraud: asset misappropriation, corruption, and financial statement fraud. Since job posting are interpreted as a positive signal but are not (it seems) typically and explicitly included in formal financial statements, this wouldn't rise to the level of criminal fraud.
> There are obviously still people working in German law enforcement today, who think that harassing a node-operator NGO would somehow lead to the de-anonymization of individual tor users.
This is not why.
> As a consequence, I am personally no longer willing to provide my personal address&office-space as registered address for our non-profit/NGO as long as we risk more raids by running exit nodes.
This is why. It's basically a textbook example of a chilling effect.
This is a "modest proposal" for sure. No legitimate thrust toward domestication would cherry pick such an esoteric example as "threading wires in automobile manufacturing facilities".
Take the (very real) fox domestication as a counterexample -- the topline takeaway is about how cute and cuddly they became. A smart and cuddly pet would be a believable pitch, but a helpful, even productive "human assistant" is far less so.
With that said, there are raccoon breeders out there (according to Google), so this proposal might be 25-50 years too early, eventually ending up like chinchillas or other small, exotic mammals.
Historically, Google has served as the fallback for pretty poor performance from Siri on knowledge tasks, which to this day often falls back to web search results.
But, if Bing (especially circa 2016) were that search provider, it would lead to confusion all the way down. It's bad enough not to receive an answer from your first attempt, but it's much worse not to be able to receive an answer at all.
The payments were certainly a sweetener to discourage exploring (or incubating) alternatives, but I agree with the article that I don't think they could have dumped or replaced Google at that time, even without the payments.
Given a broader shift from search engines to "knowledge engines" or however they're branded these days (which, in fairness, probably drew some inspiration from Google's Knowledge Graph), I think that Apple's options are wider these days.
This correlation is often referred to as the 'hygiene hypothesis' by researchers. The underlying cause is still being understood; you can find an article comparing two theories here [0].
Truly, dang is the "secret sauce" in maintaining the HN ethos. It certainly helps that the commenters do their part to reflect the ecosystem that they want, but it's easy to underestimate the important role that even a little guidance/nudging plays in making that happen.
Thanks for the recommendations! I checked them both out, but for me iTerm is still a better fit. I think of my Mac terminal as my viewer into the lower level, and not as the lower level, and the batteries-included approach that iTerm takes (e.g. having a UI for manipulating the settings file) is better aligned with that view.
FWIW, they both seem extremely performant and would probably be a great fit if I daily-drove Linux.
> the attitude of the developer in the response has certainly convinced me to never become one
If you are a Mac user and not using (or at least considering) iTerm2, you are doing yourself a disservice. It is by far the best terminal emulator available and runs circles around the built-in option.
If you are a not a Mac user, then the entire discussion is moot either way.
What is the expectation here? That the companies would refuse to comply with an (apparently legal) governmental information request? What justification would they use?
Wire and especially Proton seem to have gone to the limits of their ability to enable their users to be anonymous, and the weak link was the user's own inclusion of the recovery address.
Obviously Apple (and Google, and Meta, and Microsoft, etc) will have more information about their users, but I don't think it's a common expectation that those kinds of services are anonymous.
If we're unhappy with the outcome here, I think it's a legislative question, not a technical one.
Emphasis on 'standardized' -- the 2 in LPCAMM2 is indeed meant to refer to the second generation of LPCAMM, but it's the first generation that has been approved as a JEDEC standard (and therefore, the first one that most people will be able to buy).
Like the GP (and most people, I assume) I really value my mental faculties, but more relevant in my opinion is that in terms of time and often money, your collective knowledge and education is probably the most expensive thing you've invested in. To not do the bare minimum to protect that investment is incomprehensible to me.
My friends will buy ergonomic keyboards, standing desks, monitor arms, etc. to keep them healthy and productive (which is important), but not wear a helmet because "they look dumb". Without a working brain, none of that other stuff will matter! I always ask them, 'Are you expecting to find a partner while you're on the bike? Who are you trying to impress?'
I don't think that was the grandparent's premise, but I actually think that it's not unreasonable to expect experts to be able to boil down their ideas for non-experts.
We know it must be possible, because they themselves arrived at that point in an abstract "graph of knowledge" starting from a blank slate at birth, so going the other direction is (at worst) merely backtracking that path. However, most experts know enough other nodes/edges in the graph to identify shortcuts from their conclusion back toward the 'beaten path' that most people would know.
I often argue that if you aren't able to articulate the core idea of your research to someone outside your field, you might not understand it as well as you think you do.
(Re: the grandparent) When communicating with the scientific community, however, it's not unreasonable to be as precise as possible to convey the idea accurately to fellow experts. Replacing scientific papers with blog posts is not a good solution; augmenting scientific papers with blog posts might be appropriate.
I have one, and I can corroborate your experience that its Bluetooth connection was atrocious. However, after a number of (nail-biting, fritzy) firmware updates, it's pretty good now.
It helps that the default behavior is pretty much what you expect, and so it's not necessary to go into the app except when I want to "force" a reheat of a room-temperature beverage.
I expected to hate it, would never have bought one, but having received this as a gift from my partner -- it's actually grown on me, and I like it now.
One other side note, the pogo pins on the charging pad are a wear item and will eventually fail. You can get them from DigiKey (952-3127-1-ND) and they're easy to replace with a little basic soldering.
From my perspective, the easiest way to design such a system would be to create entries for every 'actor' in the system, feed in as much data as you can get your hands on, and then let the weights sort themselves out. So for example, if you're hanging out with ISIS members obviously your weights would be higher, but even if you're a server at Applebees you'd still be in the system somewhere.
Doing it the other way necessitates some kind of bright-line division, and any such boundary, once defined, becomes susceptible to exploitation. e.g. I won't hang out with the White Nationalist Militia because that puts me "into the system", but I can hang out with insert radical right-wing group where I can talk to 80% of the same people without being flagged. In practice, I imagine that the gradient of extremism is rather gradual and with blurred boundaries.
[Edit: Interesting that there are multiple effects, e.g. the sibling comment, that refer to similar but distinct phenomena!]