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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

    Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

    Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

    Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.


  • Yes, there’s much more.

    But it’s hard to explain without spoiling things, as is typical for Kojima games. His games often feature unique and bold new gameplay, have a strong focus on character storytelling ( almost movie-like), all embedded in worlds that share many similarities with our own, but have bizarre twists to them.

    In terms of gameplay, it has elements of survival, crafting, stealth, fighting/shooting, and navigation.

    I consider Kojima games pieces of art. Not everyone will enjoy them, sure, but it’s worth having at least attempted to interact with them, purely to experience their hard to forget uniqueness. Those that find the gameplay enjoyable often rank it as a game of the decade in terms of memorability.



  • My intent was just to provide a viewpoint from someone that loves and uses Linux aplenty, but spends a lot of time with Max quality gaming, using high end hardware.

    And while things have improved massively over the past years and probably will get even better in the next years, nvidia’s monopoly on top performance GPU means I’m being bottle necked by their shitty Linux support.

    Sure, I can play almost any game out there on Linux, but not with the performance and sometimes not even the same quality I can achieve with Windows. I know this is no fault of Linux, but it’s the pragmatic reality I’m confronted with.


  • Still a couple deal breakers for me, though most stuff otherwise runs fine. No HDR support. Sucks if you have a great monitor but can’t use it. No nvidia broadcast. Necessary for my mic+speaker setup, common alternative such as noisetorch are convenient, but don’t even come close to echo filtering quality from the speakers. Yes, that’s super subjective obviously. Performance tends to be noticeably to only slightly worse on max settings with nvidia on highly specialized, very demanding games. Some anti cheat tools struggle with compatibility modes.

    We’re getting there, but it’s tough with nvidia not caring. :/




  • Interesting, will have to read up on how that works in Brazil. We also have a separate tax id here ( which is also used for pension and social security ), but that one is even more secure/private than the passport ID. We only provide that to our chosen medical insurance provider ( bc they need to register it with the ministry of finance ) as well as employers ( because 50% of the insurance has to be paid by employers).

    It’s explicitly not allowed and intended for generic identification purposes, because it makes it too accessible for identity theft and associated scams.


  • Where do you live that providing your government id to a business is standard? In Germany, the only one outside of a judge to be allowed to request that is law enforcement ( even then only with proper cause ). Of course, some businesses are legally required to request and process your ID number ( e.g. when booking international flights, medical insurance companies etc), but these are under tight federal control and supervision to ensure data safety.

    Age verification sometimes is a thing for purchasing 18+ things ( media or drugs like alcohol & smokes), but even then businesses will only ever perform a visual check of the date of birth on your ID. Technically they can never demand to hold your ID, not even for a short time just to better read the date. You only have to show them your ID. And actually recording and/or storing any of that information would be insanely illegal.

    Germany / Europe might have its issues, but we at least try and take our freedom and data privacy serious. I would never dream of handing my ID to a generic business like a club for anything more than the age check.




  • Isn’t it weird that EU, famous for being so fragmented that they can’t decide on common interior or foreign policy, all while being ridiculed for their large and inefficient bureaucracy, still is the sole entity that manages to stand up to mega corporations?

    And those are sometimes fights that have zero benefit to a different wealthy elite, but actually protect citizen liberties.

    I shudder to think how the world would look like if EU had not established and enforced the GDPR as well as it does. Consumer protection is probably one of the only fields where the EU had a global positive impact.



  • We factually know that China is committing (at least cultural) genocide, possibly more such as forced sterilizations and relocations against Uighurs in Xinjiang, and we still deal and trade with them. Not only some big evil corporations, many individuals knowingly buy Chinese products all this. Because they are cheaper. Money talks now, money talked back then. Yes, everybody is to blame for their part in not speaking and acting against injustices of the world, but there are different levels of “helping” someone commit evil.

    Back in the 30s and for decades after, many in the US could not share the same bathroom or attend schools/education based on the color of their skin, and many in the general populace were fine with it.


  • Pretty much. RCS just defines the protocol. That is basically how messages are formatted, how recipients and senders are labeled, how timestamps are formatted, how messages are compressed, transferred and possibly stored and resent in case of inability to deliver (e.g. recipients phone is off) and a lot more technical stuff.

    To use this, you need a network of servers that can actually receive messages from phones/ cell network, then possibly transfer them to a server/ cell tower near the recipient(s) to have it broadcast there, making sure only the intended recipient can decrypt it, and possibly storing it for an unknown duration and a number of attempts to deliver it if the recipient is unreachable. And possibly sending a receipt or failure-to-deliver message back to the sender as well. And all of this has to work reliably 24/7, because people will not accept downtimes.

    And then you also need client software on the phones to send/receive messages using the RCS protocol as well, hopefully handling true e2e encryption as well.

    It’s a lot of hardware and software engineering to actuallyimplement such a seemingly fundamental standard.


  • “Help” is a inflammatory hyperbole. IBM had good financial relations with Nazi Germany, and its tech was heavily used in many bureaucratic endeavors, just like in many other nations. This included holding a census, organizing many of the fairly recently federalized infrastructure systems such as railway, telephones, etc. Remember, Germany was only merged a couple decades before from a mix of dozens of highly individual states with history going back almost a thousand years. So it was a lot of work to do in short time, and Germany was never before and never since(!) as centralized as it was under Nazi rule.

    As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that IBM as a company was even aware of, much less actively and intentionally “helped” the Holocaust. With that logic, everyone that did any business with Germany in the 1930s “helped the Holocaust”. I think a more nuanced view is beneficial for all. Don’t dilute the blame from those that truly deserve it.


  • RCS is an open standard that states to be formalized over ten years ago, and was planned to replace SMS. However, SMS is a service offered by the cell network providers, so these were addressed to get together and implement it in all networks, so everyone can reliably use it, just like SMS works everywhere. it’s not a feature of phone or OS manufacturers. They simply use the SMS protocol that is already available in the network implementation.

    Sadly, the big network providers have failed to reach a consensus on if and when and how to implement RCS. Some say they simply had nothing to gain from it, and I believe they might be right. So they dragged their feet so long that Apple implemented iMessage to offer more features. Google held out longer waiting for the providers, but ultimately gave up as well and implemented their own messaging solution. And while the implementation is proprietary, it’s still based on the open RCS standard, unlike the fully closed iMessage protocol and implementation. This means that as long Apple supports the RCS standard, it matters little to the end user if they build their own proprietary implementation. Google and Apple will be able to talk to each other via RCS. So why is it still not great, even if everyone will be able to use RCS this way?

    Well, look a bit further. Any non-Android and non-Apple phone will not be able to participate unless they submit to Google it Apple. No more indie phones with truly independent RCS. The services are also owned and controlled by Google and Apple, two companies that are notoriously resistant to regulations. Unlike cell network providers, which are under comparatively strict federal regulatory control, and even international treaties on minimal requirements for consumer protection. They are well supervised and have to adhere to high security and privacy standards. It’s definitely not perfect, but the current development is much worse. With RCS, it’s now two global supranational companies that will handle your private communications, and history has shown that they are much less worried about adhering to local national laws.