Green washed. If they cared about sustainability they wouldn’t have removed the headphone jack for longer-lived headphones—and instead started selling their own branded Bluetooth earbuds like the rest of the manufacturers.

I would like to lose the Android phone soon. Signal will not work without an Android/iOS primary device.

But also… Signal requires a phone number for signup where a lot of countries require a passport to get a SIM (unique identifier that is easy to track you). The service is centralized so there is no sort of self-hosting option. There really aren’t alternative clients (not counting mere forks) you can rely on (this helps with the double ratchet encryption of clients with XMPP & Matrix losing keys) unless you go the gateway/bridge route—where the Electron desktop client is pure ass cheeks. Historically they have a big gap in commit history—we can assume there was some sort of CIA/FBI plant. They refuse to use a self-hostable MQTT/XMPP/UnifiedPush option for notifications meaning that the notification data timestamps always flow thru Google & Apple servers. And I am still salty the mobile clients removed SMS support which made it so easy to recommend to family in the first place.

Mumble is perfectly fine for low-latency VoIP for gaming—I think it was the first to even use the Opus codec everyone uses now. Mumble uses a ton less resources than an Electron app. You will want your main chat on another protocol, but this is hardly a barrier.

I use XMPP whenever possible. Requires many fewer resources to run on just about any hardware & I can hand out accounts if needed.

I don’t care for the centralized or de facto centralized alternatives. I regret along with my uncle convincing family onto Signal several years ago.

Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality, but just that more authenticated Microsoft accounts, real or fake, have pressed a button—where the more popular/normie/maintstream languages/frameworks get the most signal. You can also read anecdotes thah some folks use this as a bookmark to look at later rather than actually using or enjoying a project.

Free software doesn’t need to rely on a dubious value signal on a proprietary social media platform like MS Github.

It’s tangential, but Mumble is still good for voice only chat. Rarely do we find video to be useful or necessary with a lot of collaborative tools showing multiple cursors per users & programs like Upterm that allow sharing a terminal session.

Do not assume contemporary low-end quality would the flagship quality. Flagships like LG when they had jacks had high quality DACs—even current Sony phones are good. Adding a jack to the device means less things to dangle & put stress on the already kinda weak charging port; this takes up little room & does not affect waterproofing. Almost all other gear for consuming media has a jack, it is pretty much a conspiracy to push folks into perpetually buying Bluetooth earbuds when the batteries die.

How is the headphone jack?

Big compromises. Only 90% sRGB? Last decade has been making shifts towards DCI-P3 & they can’t even cover sRGB?

Matrix is defacto centralized around Matrix.org & servers they provide (where the cost of hosting makes it largely inaccessible to low-spec & medium-sized servers causing them to inevitably shut down & recommending users back to Matrix.org). All the metadata gets synced back to the mothership that was funded by Israeli intelligence. Avoid it.

Cloudflare is a CIA front. They offer “free” DDoS protection + static proxy thereby giving Cloudflare the ability to MitM all TLS connections thru their servers. They convinced so many ‘developers’ via ‘influencers’ that every tiny site needs Cloudflare in front of it as a precaution/optimization, but it is an entirely premature optimization that doesn’t need to so widely deployed, but it is. 🤔

Microsoft has always been an enemy but somehow managed to Trojan horse their way into the minds of developers again (neo-EEE) trying to centralize how software is created. Like we avoid Microsoft Windows, the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem should equally be avoided: Copilot, LinkedIn, Outlook, Exchange, Office, Teams, Azure, VSCode, npm, GitHub (Sponsors, Codespaces, Copilot). Literally none of these projects/services can’t be replaced to help protect the privacy of your clients, coworkers, contributors.

How dare you‽ 😂

Overstreet needs to hire someone to do all of his communications + public relations + LKML patches/pull requests. The behavior is going to get one of the most exciting filesystems in a long time yanked & momentum die just from the we he handles conflict.

Firefox can’t load HTML pages? Huh?

I do this with my kernel & a couple of applications that either compile super fast anyhow or at runtime benefit from further compiler optimizations.

NixOS & OpenWRT are my two. NixOS’s Nix language as declarative config is such a great tool for setting up & maintaining a machines for the long-term that despite the initial learning curve has paid off in the long run (Guix or a Nix successor should also be in the same category). OpenWRT is the purpose-built tool it is for having an OS for a router with low overhead & a UI that can be easier to understand the config when networking isn’t something you do on the regular.

Dongles create additional & unnecessary points of failure in your setup (sometimes additional stress on the USB jack too which is usually your only I/O port (which is also making you choose charging or power)). Personal devices that play media need this standard jack that has existed for decades—& I refuse to play ball with these OEMs hurting customers.

And that is exactly what I am running—and without regret since the OEMs are screwing over users just to sell branded Bluetooth earbuds whose batteries will die & not be repairable in a year for you to buy another set. I will not participate in this.

OCaml has ppx_deriving. PureScript has derive instance.

Which of these smart phones lets me have a headphone jack… ’cause that is how I will choose. I can patch software & be wary about how I use the device, but I can’t just add I/O to the hardware. Until the Pixel brings back the jack, it is dead to me.

That’s good too. Not a Monero hater or a Zcash fanboy—I just think we need to be honest about the capabilities even if the methods of getting there are different.