It’s taken me forever to reply because (a) I feel guilty about short replies to long messages, (b) I had to think about this a bit, and © I almost exclusively access Lemmy on my phone and I hate typing long messages on my phone. Not an excuse, just an explanation. There are no good Lemmy desktop clients, but I’ve finally logged in to my instance’s web interface to respond to this. 3 months later.

So, yeah. I honestly didn’t pay much attention to whatever backstory the software authors were selling; I was looking for a feature set, and Session had it. I got some of my circle using it, and we eventually stopped because message delivery reliability was iffy, and there were enough of some UI issues with (e.g.) attaching photos that everyone drifted back to what we were using before. I’m sure Session will improve, but just for the record, I haven’t been using it because of technical reasons.

I don’t have an issue with cryptocurrency per se. There are issues with current implementations, but the fact that it’s used for laundering money or scamming people is also an argument that can be made for fiat money, but you don’t see people saying we shouldn’t use dollars because a vast amount of them are used to enable the military industrial complex that is killing people around the world. I haven’t read that Bitcoin is being used to fund any of the attempted genocides currently underway – but fiat money has. People have been scamming people using regular money for far longer than cryptocurrency has existed. A lot of people have lost a lot of money trying to get rich in various cryptocurrencies; do you think more people have lost more money in cryptocurrency than people have lost trying to dabble in the stock market? Have more fortunes been ruined by cryptocurrencies than were ruined by the collapse of the “legitimate” currency of Germany during the Weimar Republic? And what, exactly, is a “fake economy?” If people are willing to exchange goods and services for A Thing – whatever that Thing is – it’s a real economy by definition. The argument that because the currency isn’t endorsed or backed by a government means it’s not real seems debatable, at best.

While I think a debate about the relative merits and evils of cryptocurrency is a good thing to have, since the OP topic was messengers, to answer your questions: in the entire time I used Session – and though today it’s still on my phone and receiving messages, although nobody’s sending any – I would not know that the developers behind Session had some grander vision involving cryptocurrency unless it had been brought to my attention here. That they want to improve privacy by using an anonymous method of payment for services – one not based on the collection and sale of metadata, or on a traceable currency (which all electronic fiat transactions are) seems reasonable. I imagine that, eventually, they’ll build something like Lightning into the app, so users can transfer cryptocurrency to other users, or to the operators of their servers. If it ever gets to the point where you must pay to use the service using crypto, then maybe I’d be concerned. It’d be no worse than buying tokens at a video game arcade – a practice that was around for more than a decade without an indignant uprising.

I think it feels sleezy to you because the devs are also interested in integrating cryptocurrency into the Session ecosystem, and you believe cryptocurrency=bad. I think it doesn’t feel icky to me because I’ve been working as a software developer since long before Bitcoin was introduced; and I understand how blockchains work, and know what “proof-of-work” means and what it implies; and I’ve watched the evolution of the internet and the growth of the web, and lived through the eternal September; and I saw how email turned from a communication tool for people in higher ed into a way for scammers (and legitimate businesses) to deliver spam. And I believe that a very many people will try to take advantage of other people and take their money, and they’ll use any possible tool to do so. But I believe that scamming is not fundamental to the nature of cryptocurrencies in the same way that killing people is in the fundamental nature of a gun, any more than buying heroin is fundamental to the nature of a dollar bill.

Related, but just hanging this on here. As the default (as installed) security of distributions has improved, so have the amount of headaches when trying to use tools like this increased. For decades, when I’ve had issues like this is not been because of a LAN firewall issue, and so now my first thought is never been, “I should check the firewall,” when it should.

Sadly, firewall info is almost always locked down so that apps can’t even check by themselves and provide helpful hints to users.

Anyway, it’s been a hard lesson for me to learn, for some reason. I need to practice my mantra: it’s always the firewall.

Creative Commons is exactly the tool you need for licensing; they even have a “build-your-own” customized license tool. The tool will generate an icon, text, and a link to easily understandable legalese for your license.

CC is like GPL (but more flexible) for art, and it’s an awesome service.

The French version of La Femme Nikita, although it’s more of a redemption arc than “villain turning out to be a good guy.” She starts out as a junkie petty crook who murders a cop in cold blood, spends most of the film assassinating people for the government, and in the end seems to have gotten her life together.

But she starts out as a very not-nice person.

You forgot “comrades.”

I agree. It’s the plural of “you” that should be the official standard, since it disambiguates “you.” It can even be broadened to include larger groups via “all y’all,” as in, not just y’all in talking to, but all y’all in the house.

It can replace “guys”, but not “man,” though.

I could never get into TAS. That is probably more a character flaw than failing of the series. I just… I don’t know. I guess I’ve just never much cared about cartoons that weren’t Looney.

But you’re probably right, considering who went into making them.

Or, another job opportunity and litter the code with comments like “have fun parallelizing this code, sucker!”

It kind is, though. Proprietary doesn’t mean paid; I’ll pay for OSS apps. Proprietary means they won’t release the source code, and this is bad for a whole bunch of reasons. But the reason that gets my goat is that it’s almost guaranteed that proprietary app was developed with open source tools, and probably uses at least some open source code. I fucking hate hypocrites.

Yeah. I wish folks would do a simple web search before picking names. Radicale has been around for years; it even has a domain, radicale.org .

Don’t over-architect, but also don’t architect yourself into a hole.

The best advice I was ever given was don’t do more than you need to, but make sure that you design in such a way that you can rearchitect without rewriting the while damned thing.

I know I have the minority opinion; even Cohen said he like Buckley’s version better. But I just like Cohen’s more. Part of it is his baritone voice, but I love the depth the backup singers give it.

What’s neat is that people have such strong feelings on this. It’s truly a great song.

Flatpack puts all app data in ~/.var?? Ewww! No thanks.

We should start a company.

I’m cheering her on if only because any of her wins has to burn another ulcer in Trump’s stomach.

Plus, Biden might be able to beat Trump again; I’m not so sure how he’d do against Haley, especially after she’d pivot post-primary to more moderate center messaging.

I’m still glad she’s hanging in there being a distraction for Trump. She’s definitely going to lead the party ticket in 2028, though. This is just a pre-game practice for her, and the Democrat party better be paying attention. I mean, assuming Trump fails to turn his presidency into a perpetual dictatorship a-la Putin, which is still on the bingo board.

I ended back on the vendor messages app, too, when every other FOSS option failed to manage group messages correctly. The worst was one that looked fine on my end, but to everyone else in the group it looked like I was sending out 1:1 messages to each of them. This particular group it a mix of Android and iOS users, and the Android users saw it funky, too, so it wasn’t just an Apple thing.

I guess SMS messaging is just a lot harder to get right than most.

Your nudes will still be leaked.

Lower Decks is the best, and most faithful, Trek since TOS.

Fight me.

Every single suggestion so far has been positive, life-affirming, and productive, so I’m going to be Gru here for a change:

Bolos. AI tanks with no crew and heavily (Greek) Spartan-centric model training.

Nano-tech medicine, for sure. Injectable swarms of individually dumb, tiny robots which are controlled by an external AI doctor.