(and has E2EE)

Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.

Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you’re in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there’s a better client out there for that?

The number in e.g. “Category 5” hurricane actually refers to the Kinsey scale.

Same with Italian food. Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century.

Leonardo da Vinci lived his whole life never knowing what a tomato was.

This is a perfectly reasonable take. This part pretty much sums up my thoughts:

Still, it’s utterly ambiguous here where Vincke is drawing the line between “critical” and “hurtful” or “personal”. And in any case, it can be appropriate to direct some outright vitriol at the people making a game, inasmuch as art expresses the values of its creators. You don’t get a pass for making poison just because you poured your heart into it. Sometimes, utter scorn is justifiable. If Vincke is serious about this conversation, I would encourage him to actually cite some reviews, games and game developers and discuss the finer workings.

I don’t expect Vincke to call out any specific writers, but unless he does, I really have no way to tell what, specifically, he’s trying to argue against. He’s opening himself up to being misinterpreted, and a lot of people won’t even realize they’re doing it. His little rant is like a horoscope reading — so vague as to let you project your own ideas onto it and pretend they came from somewhere else.

But really, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Perhaps I just don’t read those types of publications, but I can’t recall the last time I read a professional video game review (as opposed to, say, Steam user reviews or randos on Reddit) that personally attacked creators. If anything, most professional reviews err heavily on the side of positivity to avoid angering fans and potential advertisers. The article touches on that, too:

I’ve received plenty of death threats for scoring things 8/10 or lower, and in a media sphere that depends on traffic volume, there is continual ambient goading to approve of, or at least acknowledge games that already have some kind of mass following.

Death threats. For an 8/10 rating. Completely insane, but sadly not surprising.

On the one hand, sure, it would give the administration an “excuse” to escalate still further.

On the other hand, who are we kidding? They’re not going to stop escalating no matter what. There’s no point in trying to appease fascists. They’ll take whatever excuse, no matter how flimsy, whenever they feel like it regardless. That’s how we got here.

Sounds interesting. What kind of data can it reliably ingest with “attach”? If I dropped, say, the entire Python docs in there, would it be able to get anything out of that? Or does it need to be minimalistic plain-text statements? How is it actually performing retrieval?

I’ve yet to see a major media outlet call it what it is.

It’s sheer cowardice at this point. The president himself has called it war.

Chicago. LA. Minneapolis. And more, but those are currently the most egregious.

A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people’s relationships. Polyamory, in case you’re unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

• Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you’d draw lines between them as well.

• Extend an extra level and include all of your partners’ partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

• Extend that further and include all of your partners’ partners’ partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don’t personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

Etc.

I see this as kind of like the “loudness war” in radio.

It’s not a conspiracy or anything, it’s just the networks and producers adapting (correctly) to how people actually watch/listen to stuff.

Audiophiles can complain all they want about low dynamic range, but if you’re listening to radio in a noisy environment (like a car), high dynamic range is actually fucking awful.

Similarly, there’s nothing inherently wrong with watching a show when you can’t give it your full attention. Sometimes I watch TV while I’m doing chores, or even during my workday. You know what’s great for that? Those stupid competition shows where they narrate everything on screen, and have five instant replays plus recaps after ad breaks. I never feel like I’m missing anything even if I ignore 80% of the show. I’d never sit down and really watch this stuff though. My brain would rot. It’s just a step above white noise.

Let’s not pretend we understand the mechanics of consciousness. If you can prove what is required for consciousness, there’s at least a Nobel prize in it for you.

Do not want an AI browser. I’m more likely to switch to a text-only CLI browser.

Orion is a fine choice for Mac or iPad. Basically Safari with Firefox/Chrome extension support, more customizability, and a few other niceties.

Edit: not open source, FYI.

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Can’t bring myself to read this whole thing, but it seems clear to me that he can’t see the forest through the trees. By and large, the hate has nothing to do woth biases on what McCartney is “supposed” to be, or intellectual musings on synths.

It’s just fucking annoying.

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The warm blood going into the feet transfers its heat to the cold blood going back. That means less heat going into the feet where it would otherwise be lost to the environment.

Humans minimize heat loss by simply restricting blood flow to the extremities. It’s uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable (or dangerous) as a cold core.

I don’t want AI in my browser even if I can turn it off for the same reason I don’t want my refrigerator door booby-trapped with an explosive even if I can turn it off.

Bugs happen. Configuration changes happen. User error happens. Software is complex, and I shouldn’t need an intimate knowledge of every goddamn app I run to be sure it’s not siphoning all my data off to god-knows-where. I use hundreds of programs on a daily basis. It is completely untenable to carefully configure every single one, stay abreast of constant updates and changes, and spend 76 full working days reading every TOS I am subject to. And of course, all their policies and defaults are subject to change without notice, so nothing I learn today will necessarily apply tomorrow anyway.

I want to be confident that my web browser is not — either by design, due to a misconfiguration, or due to a bug — sending my data to OpenAI. I do not want a booby-trapped browser, even if I can turn off the booby-traps. I do not want my fridge to explode, so I don’t buy fridges with built-in explosives. Seems pretty simple to me.

I also want to be confident in the same for others. If I deploy a browser to 100 employees’ machines, or even just my mom’s, a little opt-out checkbox under Settings will not give me any peace of mind.

Microsoft CEO Can’t Understand Why No Fish Wants a Tongue-eating Parasitic Louse in its Mouth

In all seriousness, this is very interesting, if only because the methods are easy to control and reproduce.

That said, I’d really like to see comparisons against a more typical warmup routine. I’m not sure the tendon vibration is doing anything more than simulating a warmup. Even that on its own is interesting, just because it opens the door for more targeted experimentation.