USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, I’m still with jmp.chat, and still very happy with them overall. Their beta period ended and their pricing increased a bit, so that’s worth a bit of consideration. I also managed to get one of their eSIMs. I’m slightly less happy with that aspect of their service, though they seem to be actively working on improving it and I knew in advance this was an early beta kind of thing and likely to have issues.

The only unreliability with calls that I’ve noticed was traceable to the unreliability of my own internet connection. I’ve confused incoming calls by simultaneously making and taking calls from the computer and the phone, but I think it’s understandable that problems might arise and that’s not a real use case for me. Once or twice I did not receive a text transcription of a voice mail, but the support is usually quick to address things like that.

I host my own XMPP server and have for a good decade now, and that’s what I use with jmp.chat. I can’t speak to the quality of their hosting options.

Group texting works fine for me if one of the other parties initiates the group text. I haven’t tried to initiate my own group text in well over a year; last time I did, it didn’t work. That may or may not be a problem for you, and it may or may not have been fixed by now. Worth investigating more if it’s important. I should also say I’ve only ever used group texts with 3 participants, and can’t speak to what happens if there are more nor whether there are upper limits.

Group texts don’t use MUC. Rather, they use a special syntax in the JID, something like “+1XXX,+1YYY,…,+1ZZZ@cheogram.com”, where the + and , are required, the XXX, YYY, through ZZZ are the phone numbers (no dashes or other special chars just digits), and the @cheogram.com at the end is required.

I recommend the cheogram app if you’re on android. It has a lot of nice features on top of the Conversations base. I use gajim on my (linux) computer and it works well with jmp.chat.

I’m happy to answer other questions if you have them!

@prologic@twtxt.net It was super useful if you needed to do the sorts of things it did. I’m pretty sad.

At its core was Sage, a computational mathematics system, and their own version of Jupyter notebooks. So, you could do all kinds of different math stuff in a notebook environment and share that with people. But on top of that, there was a chat system, a collaborative editing system, a course management system (so if you were teaching a class using it you could keep track of students, assignments, grades, that sort of thing), and a bunch of other stuff I never used. It all ran in a linux container with python/conda as a base, so you could also drop to a terminal, install stuff in the container, and run X11 applications in the same environment. I never taught a class with it but I used to use it semi-regularly to experiment with ideas.

On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of “If you’re not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you’re going to be left behind.”

Two things about that:

1. No you’re not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you’re already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
   
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they’ve been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the “AI” that they’re forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don’t fall for it. It’s far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way–most of these “AI” tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that’ll catch up with them.
   

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci ISO 27001 is basically the same. It means that there is management sign off for a process to improve security is in place. Not that the system is secure. And ITIL is that managment signs off that problems and incidents should have processes defined.

Though its a good mess of words you can throw around while saying “management supports this so X needs to get done”

ahh this is useful https://go.dev/doc/modules/managing-dependencies. the go culture doesn’t typically have large dependency graphs like Ruby or JS.

Having used—and still using—1Password (a password manager) for many years, I have gone through a few stages of disliking/frustration with it. The first was when subscriptions were set in place, the second is now, with their approach for auto-filling under iOS. It is, more often than I would like to, telling me to configure it when I did so from day one. My open support ticket isn’t going too far either.

I wish iCloud KeyChain would mimic some of its features, so I can just dump it. KeyChain has improved a lot, now allowing OTP to be saved with a credential, but it is still not quite there yet.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de, how do you handle twts in Mutt? I mean, how do you organise, or manage the inmense amount that comes throught? Do you delete/trim? Move things to folders? Or simply keep that huge (12,000+ for me now) list?

On the blog: Managing Priorities https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/06/13/priorities.html #rant #programming

On the blog: How Long Will That Project Take? https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/01/27/estimate.html #techtips #programming #management

My daughter grabbed my mouse and started smacking it arouond and managed to do things I didn’t know you could do with my WM with a mouse… nor how to undo them.

@prologic@twtxt.net this is a very curious project. I would love to see how it manages to do its federation between pods.