Yup. The one thing that is certain is that you cannot just leave companies to self-regulate.

These companies 100% said they’d be carbon neutral by 2030 in order to take the wind out of the sails of people pushing for carbon taxes, rather than because they actually intended on doing it.

That all gets better due to having far more users. You can’t just say “let’s ignore adoption rate” - that’s a pretty huge deal. It’s by far and away the main thing that holds them back.

And again, they were fine with SMS, which is far far worse.

Some level of privacy, yes. Solely in WhatsApp-signal chats. And users can be notified of that, like they were with SMS.

But you know what the alternative is? Nobody using signal. And that’s objectively worse.

Cross-compatibility with WhatsApp would mean way more people on signal, and way more people willing to try, meaning more signal-signal chats. Meta would scrape metadata like when two accounts send messages and the like, but the contents of the chats would of course still be E2EE.

Signal-SMS is FAR less private, but they were fine with that for years, and people are still angry about it being removed.

Cross-compatibility removes the biggest hurdle for Signal - the chicken and egg problem of nobody using signal because they can’t talk to anyone. It would act as a Trojan horse for pushing signal-signal communication.

I’m a signal donor and while I disagree with your point regarding UI (have you used in the past couple of years? It’s went from feeling dated to feeling pretty modern), I agree with the rest.

Even worse, though, is that the EU offered them the opportunity to become relevant on a silver platter, by forcing WhatsApp to open up their app and be cross-platform with others who want to. Signal said no thanks.

I get it, WhatsApp stores metadata, and Signal doesn’t like that. But they were fine with (way way worse) SMS for a while? The day Signal chose that path was the day Signal willingly chose to be irrelevant for the vast vast vast majority of people.

I love this app but the way the project is managed baffles me sometimes.

Intel graphics has improved leaps and bounds but it’s still problematic and more poorly supported than AMD.

I imagine part of it (beyond general stuff like Intel trailing AMD in efficiency, both on the CPU and GPU side, as well as the die size being far larger for the same performance, meaning more expensive) is that Valve really didn’t want Intel graphics issues being reported in reviews and forums as being Proton/Linux issues.

On top of that, Intel straight up doesn’t have a custom semiconductor division. AMD does (predominantly for Xbox/PS, but they’re not the only ones).

Intel would either have to set up an entirely new working group for Valve (expensive! Something that Valve would’ve wanted to avoid considering they had no idea whether the Deck would be a hit or not) or they’d have had to go with an off-the-shelf intel CPU.

“Jeff, why the living fuck have you tried to claim 5 femboy OnlyFans premium-tier subscriptions on your work expenses account?!”

sweating “uhhh… to… ummm… make sure it wasn’t CSAM…?”

“Oh! Nice work Jeff. Very proactive. For a second I thought something dodgy might have been going on.”

Not to mention there could easily be a court case where Valve gets told they can’t host mods that infringe on copyright and are told to remove it all and not accept anything like it.

Kiss goodbye to your Skyrim mods that add Thomas the tank engine characters as dragons, Spiderman as a playable character, LOTR characters and weapons, etc.

As much as I think steam workshop is great and convenient, it shouldn’t be the only accessible option.

Tankie is a term that stems from the UK Communist Party (fringe political party) mocking/distancing themselves from some of its more extreme members that defended the USSR sending tanks in to quell civilian protests in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And later, to mock those who defended Mao’s crackdowns.

Since then, the term has evolved to mean any westerner who proclaims to be left but defends the imperialist actions and human rights abuses of Russia (despite them not even being remotely left wing anymore!) To a lesser degree it’s also applied to China.

In short: a westerner who rails about how horrible and imperialist the west is, but falls silent or defends it when Russia or China do the same or worse.

What an odd thing to double down on, I know plenty of women that use computers (literally all of them I’ve ever met).

Thinking women using computers is “political” is batshit insane.

E: I didn’t realise that women existing was such a controversial take lol

Not saying otherwise. I’m saying IR cameras are probably an excuse to bump up the price.

Let me guess. Add infrared cameras onto the Airpods, costing them very little extra, and using it as justification for an £80 price rise.

Perhaps you only care about the wayback machine, but there’s more to the Internet Archive than that, and they shouldn’t be expected to roll over and take it whenever some awful company decides to do a bit of digital book burning.

You post a lot of pro-china stuff. Strange.

And the Imperial College of London is one of the top universities on the planet, certainly in the top 10, as are Cambridge and Oxford (shit, those two are probably in the top 3). Pretending otherwise is stupidity.

Clearly the university did have stuff China wanted, otherwise China wouldn’t have targeted it. You don’t have to be educated at IC to figure that out.

And partaking in American nationalist chest-thumping while at the same time being someone who regularly defends China is pretty interesting. You’d think they’d be mutually exclusive.

They can absolutely be called tankies, the word has evolved, just like how fascists aren’t limited to Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, but instead applies to any extremely authoritarian right winger.

To a tankie, it doesn’t matter whether Russia or China are left or right wing anymore, all they care about now is being anti-western. The US, UK, etc could turn socialist tomorrow and tankies would still hate them and defend Russia and China.

Anything the west does is bad and imperialistic, and when you bring up the dodgy shit that Russia and China do, all you’ll get back is whataboutism.

They don’t consider the iPhone a smartphone… because they refer to it by its name?

I’ve got some news for you, Samsung, OnePlus, etc all call their devices by their brand names in announcements/advertising too.

Nobody said Apple would do that. I don’t know where you got that from.

They said that if Apple were to use their clout to pressure others into using an Apple-controlled ecosystem, people would be angry about it.

Yet, because it’s Google not Apple, people are celebrating Google’s RCS as a good thing and them being the good guys.

AFAIK that name was created before tianmen.

Correct. It actually originates from westerners who defended the Soviet Union sending tanks into Hungary and Czechoslovakia when citizens were protesting.

Wouldn’t that make them just autocracy fans, not tankies?

They’re kinda the same thing. A tankie is a fan of autocracy, but only when Russia or China does it. It’s not a worldview that makes sense.

Minor correction, although it changes nothing about your point:

tankie actually refers to people who defended the crushing of Hungarian and Czechoslovakian revolts by Soviet military personnel, who went as far as sending tanks in to quell civil unrest.

The term was originally coined in the UK and was an insult to British Communist Party followers who would slavishly follow the Kremlin line.

Of course, the term has now evolved to mean someone from the west who seems to dislike the west and praises Russia and China, despite them also being Capitalist countries now, and generally being more into imperialism.

And Samsung’s only got approved because it’s Google’s under the skin. A bit like how every browser on iOS is actually Safari.

RCS is purported to be open, but in practice it really isn’t.