The thought termination at the end, ugh…

It’s not about a banner, the subject is a person and there is a predicate to a direct object. The post is about people who do something, not about the thing they do.

I think most people would just use Windows without activating it

Not really.

I’m a big signal proponent, but it’s very barebones. There is a half ass story implementation, but otherwise, it’s a pretty lean messaging application with voice and video and that’s pretty much it.

Signal doesn’t really have a mechanism for following accounts the way you can on telegram and WhatsApp, and while it supports group chats, it’s more akin to an old school group text rather than a channel like on telegram or Whatsapp.

I remember multiple times my chat switching to SMS when I did not have a stable data connection, though, admittedly, it’s been years since signal dropped support and I don’t remember the specific mechanics of the situation, but I specifically remember the same message chain would have both sms and signal messages in it.

I’ve used signal for at least 6 years now, and I remember online discourse being centered around why signal included SMS in the first place, with most of the discussion being around how people dislike the false sense of security comingling insecure data with secure data provided. The discourse didn’t change until after signal announced they were dropping support and suddenly people came out of the Woodwork talking about how horrible signal is for adopting good security practices.

Why doesn’t telegram or Whatsapp get the same treatment?

The same way that they know that you clicked on literally anything on their website.

It’s foundational to how the modern internet works (more specifically JavaScript)

For a more visual example, let’s say there is a button that makes an animation or changes color when you hover over it.

That is happening because of code running in your browser that was written by the website that served it to you, in order for the button to know to change, the code must know where your mouse is and if the mouse is hovering over the button.

Your browser, emits ‘events’ which the JavaScript code is able to interact with, these are things like keystrokes and mouse actions. The JavaScript running on the page can very trivially record these actions.

Every single way you interact with a website can be tracked, here is a commercial product that specializes in complete session recording (in theory to see how your users interact with your pages to make improvements: https://mouseflow.com/platform/session-replay-tool/

I think their logic makes sense though. Signal as an SMS app is functionally pointless. If you can’t convince someone to use signal because they are just using SMS anyway, then what is the point? If you are prostletyzing encrypted communication to people, an important aspect is communicating the why’s. I think sms on the platform ultimately did do more harm than good, it confused the normal people, and presented risks for leaking data, since it was not always clear if hitting the send button would result in an encrypted message or not.

A nice example that is always brought up with signal, is matrix, which perfectly demonstrates the issue at hand. Matrix, which is touted as a ‘secure’ platform, is actually the opposite, it requires positive action to enable and maintain encrypted messaging, and because it allows insecure communication, it opens up tons of holes, either from user error or unclear messaging from the platform. (Things like severe metadata leakage and unclear communication as to what is encrypted or not). There is a reason governments and militaries around the world use signal over other options.

I think you only need to look at the recent Atlantic leaks to demonstrate that users don’t actually know best as well. You have a general user base that has poor security hygiene and the concept of op sec is completely foreign. Confidential group chats would be constantly compromised by one person losing a data connection resulting in the message being sent as SMS and if you don’t have automatic fail over, then SMS support offers no functional benefit, and only serves to add a workload that accomplishes nothing.

Signal has cultivated a platform that has no unclear boundaries. If you send a message on signal, it is e2e encrypted every single time, there is no scenario where this is not the case. That’s more valuable than presenting the option to have an encrypted conversation.

I also don’t really think that is a valid argument, none of signal’s contemporaries offered this feature and it didn’t stop them. I have never heard someone say that they can’t get people to use Messenger, Whatsapp, or Telegram because it doesn’t support SMS.

Another counter point is that signal’s user base has only grown since they removed the SMS feature.

Finally, I don’t think that what you are saying aligns with the previous comment anyway, in fact it seems like it was agreeing with me. The decision wasn’t done because of developer resources, it was a conscious decision they made because they believed that SMS should not be part of their product.

I thought they dropped it because sms is fundamentally antithetical to a secure messaging platform and their view was that sms inclusion was causing confidence issues for their users who weren’t sure if a message would fall back to an unencrypted sms message.

It’s not like you can’t return a body with the 404 that specifies that the user itself is not found versus the ending being wrong.

Yea, I don’t really see a scenario where you are both, making http requests (and therefore care about http responses), and also not able to see the response.

If you are using some wrapper client for an API, you wouldn’t be dealing with the response anyway so it being in json isn’t particularly helpful

Yea, electron has flaws, but it’s basically the only way to make a truly cross platform native and web app. I would rather take a larger installed size and actually have apps that are available everywhere.

The sad truth is there aren’t enough developers to go around to make sleek native apps for every platform, so something that significantly frees dev time is a great real world solution for that.

I don’t get paid to optimize, I get paid to implement features.

It’s fun to talk about.

Vs code has no integrated environment though, it’s just a text editor that supports plugins, you still need to install python or node or .net or Java or gcc, etc.

As far as vim requiring keyboard commands, that’s really only the case if you leave mouse mode off

set mouse=a

And of course, to muddy the water further, we have tools like https://helix-editor.com/ which, more closely approximate vs code, while happening to live in a terminal.

I maintain that in order to qualify as an IDE and not a glorified text editor, you must be able to, out of the box, without external dependencies, run and build the code it was built for (idea/visual studio) otherwise it’s not very integrated, and I don’t think you need to have nice graphics for that qualification.

I would say that an IDE is something that includes build/run tools integrated into it. Everything else is just a text editor. (But that’s just my opinion of course)

To expand on my point, I don’t think it makes sense to call vs code an integrated development environment if it doesn’t actually have the environment integrated.

Visual studio and idea would be examples of IDEs, they actually have all of the tools and frameworks needed to run the languages they were built for out of the box.

You can’t run node or python out of the box with just vs code for example, without their respective tooling, all vscode can do is edit the code and editing code is not functionally different from editing any other text.

So I maintain that both vim and vscode are text editors and not IDEs

Vim and emacs are text editors.

Vs code is a code editor (but really it’s also just a text editor)

Maybe they mean IDEs like visual studio?

I’ve never really heard it called a coding GUI before.

I don’t think that’s wrong, though I think he picked a bad choice with columbine as both shooters were bullies themselves and not loner outcasts as perceived.

However it wasn’t my point, which obviously didn’t get across given the response, my point is that artist intention doesn’t always matter, we easily accept the concept of death of the author when critiquing works, and we also easily accept that at least some forms of media have a direct effect on people’s decision making. So while I don’t think any artist should be censored, I do think it’s foolish to imply that just because something is in a song (or by an extension, is played by a character) it means that nothing bad can happen.

If SpongeBob was telling kids how to stick a fork in the outlet is it fine because SpongeBob is a character

Besides, according to the man himself, on his own website, the lyrics are about relating to the shooters. From eminem.com - “Eminem was often bullied growing up, so part of him understands the desire to lash out at your entire school that the Columbine shooters felt”

I like Eminem but let’s be real, this is a shock lyric, there is not much deeper meaning and the rest of the verse moves on quickly.

Also, didn’t em himself have multiple songs and music videos about his influence and how children shouldn’t listen to his music

“I take seven {kids} from {Columbine}, stand 'em all in line Add an AK-47, a revolver, a .9 A MAC-11 and it oughta solve the problem of mine And that’s a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time (Ahh-! Ahh-ahh-!)”

Edit: I want to add that the context, like always, is more nuanced. But it is foolish to say music has no impact.

If a song can make you feel happy and sad, it can also make you feel angry. I’m not saying an artist should be restricted in their art, but that we should also accept that art influences people.

Unity uses a managed language (c#) and can be decompiled (but not disassembled) into human readable code almost completely automatically.

You just invented saas

I recently came across a scenario where the person I was talking ‘felt uncomfortable’ taking down my email, because it didn’t end in .com. I would be careful when making assumptions about the general population.