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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: May 14th, 2024

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  • I know this is from 2015, but even then, it was a bit late to make this argument. This was already mainstream enough in the 90s to be the punchline in syndicated comic strips. By 2015, we already had “customer experience engineers” (i.e. tier-1 helpdesk). The ship has not only sailed, it has sunk.

    Anyway, the phrase originated in an era when programming was very different from what it is today, when most programmers came from a background in electrical engineering or something along those lines.




  • Yeah, Matrix is a very, very hard sell. I mean, “normal” people (for lack of a better term) are put off by Mastodon, and Matrix is a hundred times more complicated to join. I’m also not sure what it would look like to use Matrix the way I use Discord. Perhaps there is functionality in Element/Matrix I have never explored since I use it more for messaging and group chat, not for communities with multiple channels like IRC/Discord/Slack.

    In any case, Discord is too entrenched to be replaced by something that is merely technically superior, or even more user-friendly. Realistically, you can’t migrate entire communities if they’re bigger than a tight-knit IRL friend group, and even that is hard. That seems to be the only reason X still exists.


  • Almost, yeah. Certainly the big corps.

    This is why I strongly favor services that use end-to-end encryption or do not store history in the first place.

    There are not many times when I’ve needed to search back through history on a Discord server, and every time I have I thought to myself “this would be much better on any platform besides Discord”. Discord would, IMHO, be a better product if they did not retain history forever.

    Ditto for Slack. Slack has the additional gall to limit access to that data unless you pay for a premium plan, despite the fact that they keep the data forever regardless (as evidenced by their occasional free trials which magically bring all history back, and some search tricks you can use to access old posts regardless).

    Both Slack and Discord have lulled their user base into a false sense of privacy. Nothing you post there should be considered private.


  • It doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t. What matters is that they can change their TOS at any time, they keep an archive of all historical data, and you will have pretty much no recourse no matter what they decide to do with it in the future.

    Who knows what will happen to Discord in five or ten years?

    They might get bought by a narcissistic billionaire.

    They might sell all their data to Google for training AI.

    They might go bankrupt and sell off their assets to the highest bidder.

    They might have an IPO and begin the usual value extraction at the expense of their users.

    I know, I know…crazy ideas, right? When has anything like that ever happened?!


  • This is good advice, because email is very difficult to make reliably private. However, it’s not the best you can get. Tutanota, for example, stores headers with E2EE, and still has a search function.

    The goal should be to make it as private as it can realistically be. Ideally, any cloud service you use should only store end-to-end encrypted data.

    I’m not trying to shit on Proton — it’s a huge step up from the popular mainstream email services, and the inclusion of cloud storage makes it a much easier transition than going piecemeal with 2-5 different services.


  • Not the encrypted mail, mind you, because they can’t do that

    Just want to point out for anyone new that ProtonMail does not use E2EE for email headers. That means they CAN access your subject lines, to/from fields, and other email headers. That means they CAN be forced to hand it over to the government.

    Source: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

    Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.

    Personally I am disappointed in a lot of Proton’s wording about this. They frequently promise they can’t access “your data” and “your messages” when they do, in fact, store potentially sensitive data in a format they CAN access.









  • Switching to another Chromium-based browser is a half-measure. Other Chromium-based browsers are on borrowed time.

    As time goes on, it will become more difficult for them to maintain v2 support. Nobody has the resources to properly maintain a browser fork with more than minor modifications. And you can bet Google will go out of their way to make this difficult for everybody else.

    I mean, sure, use what you’re comfortable with if you really can’t use a non-Chromium-based browser for some reason. But it means you’re likely going to have to jump ship again sooner or later. Why not just jump once, to something with better long-term prospects?

    Then again, the folks behind Arc Browser have expressed interest in becoming engine-agnostic, so perhaps there will be a Chromium-free Arc version in the future. That would be very cool.




  • This doesn’t seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.

    In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.