I try to keep in mind that no matter what the thing is, I can always still spoil it for some people…

…or introduce it to some people.

xkcd: Ten Thousand

The tag notified me, so mission accomplished. You don’t need to tag someone when replying to them directly; Lemmy notifies them about replies.

Your description reminds me of Doki Doki Literature Club, which also takes the dating sim visual novel format in unexpected directions. To avoid spoilers, I can’t say much more than that, except that it’s free and that I found it interesting despite all these things being far from my usual taste in games.

FWIW, I think it’s too early to tell where this will end up.

On the one hand, it’s possible that machine-manipulated (or even machine-generated) voices will supplant most of the demand for voice actors, much like modern photo/image tools and cheap crowd sourcing supplanted much of the demand for professional photographers.

On the other hand, the legal issues (and possible protections) around human likeness and unauthorized use of existing work are in their infancy, and we’re already seeing a lot of mediocre-to-bad output from content generation machines.

It should be interesting to see how this all unfolds.

No, it does not. The closest it comes is allowing a PC to take control of a mobile client on the same local network. That might be a convenient way to type with a full-sized keyboard if you have both devices in the same place, but it is not what people mean when talking about multi-device support.

GP wants the ability to use their account from multiple devices independently. From different locations, not tethered on a LAN. With shared message history, notifications, unread state, identity, etc. That’s what multi-device support means in the context of messaging services.

https://archive.ph/HcVVC

I didn’t know that; thanks for sharing.

(BTW, I think you meant wreaking havoc.)

I don’t care how they estimate their cost in dollars. I think the cost to all of us in environmental impact would be more interesting.

Not to be confused with Khaaan!

The title of this post should probably include the words console and mobile.

SimpleX also loses messages if you don’t pick them up in time. Going on vacation for a few weeks could be problematic, for example.

Just keep in mind that any service that asks for a phone number can also disclose it.

I hope what leaves the Signal client is a hash of your phone number, rather than the number itself. They might even be using salts and expensive-to-execute key derivation functions, to mitigate brute force searches (which are otherwise easy given the relatively small search space of phone numbers). But if compelled, it would be trivial for Signal to change that behavior.

The unfortunately paradoxical thing about opt-out services is that using them requires giving out your details, and hoping that they aren’t (deliberately or accidentally) leaked.

CoreLogic defended its practices as legal, saying it’s too difficult to verify consent or anonymise personal data.

And this is what needs changing. It should not be legal for them to have it, nor for anyone to give it to them, in the first place.

I don’t want to single out a favorite, but one who stands out is Tynan Sylvester. Not just for making RimWorld a good game, but for participating in unofficial community forums, discussing features and flaws discovered by players, and bringing a good attitude. This kind of openness helps improve things for everyone, IMHO. I wish it was more common.

Gemini is not just a delivery protocol. It also specifies a content format.

“Feel,” “happy,” “comfortable”… Privacy doesn’t care about your feelings.

The motivation to do the work, spend time learning the risks and available mitigations, disrupt existing social relationships in order to adopt better tools, inconvenience friends and family, partially isolate one’s self by avoiding the popular systems… all of these things are part of improving privacy in the real world, and at least for many people, fueled by a person’s feelings. Don’t discount the human factors just because you can’t quantify them.

2. distributed server network controlled by many entities (resilience)

It only fully meets the first criterion, yes. But personally I give it a bit of credit for the second too, in that it belongs to a non-profit foundation with multiple stakeholders, somewhat like Wikimedia.

These two things are not at all equivalent, or even comparable.

Signal is not my tool of choice, so I’ll answer from a more general perspective:

Having multiple friends and social groups on an e2ee chat system for the past few years feels great. Knowing that our words aren’t being recorded and exploited by half a dozen companies, we no longer feel the need to self-censor. The depth and value of our online conversations have grown noticeably.

Yes, there is more work to do, both at the endpoints and in the protocols. No, not all of us have flipped all the switches to maximize our privacy yet. That’s okay. Migrating is a gradual process. We do it together, helping each other along the way, rather than trying to force it all at once. Every step an improvement.

Even if the source is paywalled. Having the original source in the main URL field would have let apps immediately show what domain the article comes from, let the bot do its bias check, and let various spam control systems do their job.