And don’t even get me started on “AI”.

As the family technical person, I can say after years of attempting to teach people to understand and solve their own problems, my support calls are down in the past year! Is it because they got smarter? No! They started using ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc and following it blindly. Do they understand the concepts of what they are changing and doing? No, but as long as the original problem is fixed, who cares if a dozen more are created, as long as they(the problems) keep quiet.

I am cursed to be in the middle, couldn’t just be given a well paying technical job like my forebears, but nobody thinks they need my technical skills anymore, so I have talents now viewed as outdated and of limited use.

In the video game Wolfenstein, the side character Tekla goes on a wonderful rant about the continuity of consciousness.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_4oU7sB_AJ0

If you want a darker aspect, the game SOMA is all about this concept, though it is meant as a horror game, so it explores all the worst outcomes.

Having a union to begin with.

Folks that stop by this post and don’t have a union, think about this. The reason you have the default concern about your job security, the reason you have inequality in the workplace and the reason “wage-slave” is a term, is because you, your peers, and your predecessors were propagandized away from unions or any form of worker solidarity.

Some of you might say, “but if I even talk about a union with co-workers, I’m fired”, or, “I read about how Walmart would rather stop having a butcher shop than let them unionize”. I say that’s exactly why you need one.

Others are posting the well written explanations, so I’ll make the short comparisons.

GitHub is like Reddit is to Lemmy. It’s the main player in source code hosting, proprietary and centralized to the profits and whims of Microsoft. But for that cost, you can easily bet a project you are looking for has a presence there, and it’s easier for a dev to pop from project to project with one account and identity.

The others are like Lemmy, meant for hosting your own GitHub-like website with all the bells and whistles on top of the standard Git codeshare. There’s a lot of feature parity, though some softwares have more than others. But it comes at the cost of obscurity, Codeberg is a big player but any instance you find is isolated, and any devs you entice to help you need to register additional accounts personal to that instance. And the hosting costs are on you, it can all vanish with an unpaid domain/server bill unlike the central giant of GitHub.

Note what they continued to allow. They could still text and call, they did not completely isolate. They just shrunk their bubble.

Instead of being bombarded by global stressors, international conflicts, and the need to participate on a massive stage, they were limited to those friends and family they would give a direct line of contact to.

An echo chamber, if you want to think negatively about it. A village, for a positive label.

The internet is an ongoing experiment, what happens when you take a being who for thousands of generations commonly only directly interacted with his village and neighboring villages, for whom “The World” and all its glories and shames, was just an abstract concept brought home by stories from wanderers…what happens to that species when you put the whole world, up to the minute, within reach at every moment?

What happens when you can subscribe to every conflict and decision made way above your pay grade, and worry how it might hurt you? What happens when you don’t even have to choose to subscribe, it’s injected into your data stream because your anxiety and need to know bring revenue? What happens when you don’t even seek it, but it is delivered right to you?

From the looks of it, the variety of ways you can purposefully or accidentally destroy your local database, and the strict limits on accessing your profile, really gives me the feeling SimpleX is intended to be extremely disposable and deniable.

After playing with it I just don’t see it being used for anything expected to be convenient or ongoing. Regarding the one device per account thing, I think the whole point is you just protect your one app, nobody is sneaking in your laptop or tablet, no remote leaks possible from a sync engine. On iOS you can link to a desktop app, but your phone must remain not just on, but in the app and on the pair screen. One twitch out, PC disconnects.

Feels like something for journalists, whistleblowers, protesters, and all the bad ones. It’s a burner app for your burner phone.

So what’s the opinion here between Signal and SimpleX?

Signal gets all the attention, and seems more approachable but ties to a phone number which can be a big deal.

SimpleX ties to nothing but I could absolutely see people I know fucking it up and wondering where their “account” went.

So, Signal as an common man’s adoptable compromise and SimpleX to nerd out with full “opsec” and disposability? That about right?

Might I suggest a hybrid approach? Pull from a DDL, verify quality, fix metadata, and then put your whole library up on a searchable DC like Soulseek or a DC++ group(are those even still around anymore?) Torrents if you want to make the effort of compiling the torrents.

I looked at Soulseek and it appeared like a mess of disorganized libraries, random compilations, and I couldn’t even find some major bands or albums on it. But I suppose that’s to be expected.

Same. Mullvad #1.

Unless you need port forwarding, then Proton for those activities.

Deadpool?

How long until you start questioning if it will work and invite doubt? Or will you assume defeat if the vampire fills the gap with, “why, thank you my good sir”?

My understanding of the idea with many interpretations of magic is they are all just ways of focusing your will on the world.

Ergo, the words aren’t themselves the source of power, your expectation that the words will result in a certain outcome is.

Therefore, if your intention is to deny entry is strong, there could be a fairly good gap.

But on the other hand, playing around to try and see could create doubt and uncertainty, weakening the effect.

That’s how they get you to put up with shitty jobs. You, through deals only a corporation can afford to make, can have the privilege of paying half that for something twice as decent…if you grant a company at least 40 hours of your week, with as many extra as the boss wants, any time he wants them, lest ye be terminated for “underperforming” and lose the healthcare with it.