It’s remarkable how much proprietary software one can avoid using if one simply eschews GUIs as much as possible.

@prologic@twtxt.net

1. It’s criminal: Copilot was only possible because of massive theft of other peoples’ work (no compensation or even acknowledgement to any of the developers whose code was used to create Copilot)
   
2. It’s positioned to put software developers out of work or so fully de-skill them that they no longer know how to code anything but prompts (after which come corporate-justified salary and benefits decreases)
   

Don’t use it. No one should ever use it. You’re destroying your own future as a software developer by leaning on and supporting these things.

@jmjl@tilde.green I’m sorry that I’m not super knowledgeable about alternatives to jmp.chat but I’ll tell you what I know.

You’re probably right about jmp.chat not working for you, at least as it is now. You can only get US and Canadian phone numbers through it last time I checked, so if you’re not in either of those countries you’d be making international calls all the time and people who wanted to call you would be making international calls too.

I’ve seen people talk about using SIP as an intermediary: you can bridge SIP-to-XMPP, and bridge SIP-to-PSTN (PSTN = “packet switched telephone network”, meaning normal telephone). You can skip the SIP-to-XMPP side if you’re comfortable using a SIP client. I don’t know very much about SIP or PSTN so I am not sure what to recommend, but perhaps this helps your search queries.

There are a fair number of services like TextNow that let you sign up for a real telephone number that you can then use via their app (I wouldn’t use TextNow–they had tons of spyware in their app). I don’t know if that kind of service works for you but if it does perhaps you’d be able to find one of them that isn’t horrible. This page (https://alternativeto.net/software/jmp-chat/) has a bunch of alternatives; I can’t vouch for any of them but maybe it’s a starting point if you want to go this route.

Good luck!

Ugh, ffs–the datasette project just added #ChatGPT garbage. Another seemingly nice piece of software and project that I need to stop using.

I guess I can be thankful they self-identify.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t get your objection. dockerd is 96M and has to run all the time. You can’t use docker without it running, so you have to count both. docker + dockerd is 131M, which is over 3x the size of podman. Plus you have this daemon running all the time, which eats system resources podman doesn’t use, and docker fucks with your network configuration right on install, which podman doesn’t do unless you tell it to.

That’s way fat as far as I’m concerned.

As far as corporate goes, podman is free and open source software, the end. docker is a company with a pricing model. It was founded as a startup, which suggests to me that, like almost all startups, they are seeking an exit and if they ever face troubles in generating that exit they’ll throw out all niceties and abuse their users (see Reddit, the drama with spyware in Audacity, 10,000 other examples). Sure you can use it free for many purposes, and the container bits are open source, but that doesn’t change that it’s always been a corporate entity, that they can change their policies at any time, that they can spy on you if they want, etc etc etc.

That’s way too corporate as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, all of this might not matter to you, and that’s fine! Nothing wrong with that. But you can’t have an alternate reality–these things I said are just facts. You can find them on Wikipedia or docker.com for that matter.

On my blog: Software as a Haunting (SaaH?) https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2023/08/06/code-haunting.html #philosophy #programming #rant

An official FBI document dated January 2021, obtained by the American association “Property of People” through the Freedom of Information Act.

This document summarizes the possibilities for legal access to data from nine instant messaging services: iMessage, Line, Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp and Wickr. For each software, different judicial methods are explored, such as subpoena, search warrant, active collection of communications metadata (“Pen Register”) or connection data retention law (“18 USC§2703”). Here, in essence, is the information the FBI says it can retrieve:

• Apple iMessage: basic subscriber data; in the case of an iPhone user, investigators may be able to get their hands on message content if the user uses iCloud to synchronize iMessage messages or to back up data on their phone.

• Line: account data (image, username, e-mail address, phone number, Line ID, creation date, usage data, etc.); if the user has not activated end-to-end encryption, investigators can retrieve the texts of exchanges over a seven-day period, but not other data (audio, video, images, location).

• Signal: date and time of account creation and date of last connection.

• Telegram: IP address and phone number for investigations into confirmed terrorists, otherwise nothing.

• Threema: cryptographic fingerprint of phone number and e-mail address, push service tokens if used, public key, account creation date, last connection date.

• Viber: account data and IP address used to create the account; investigators can also access message history (date, time, source, destination).

• WeChat: basic data such as name, phone number, e-mail and IP address, but only for non-Chinese users.

• WhatsApp: the targeted person’s basic data, address book and contacts who have the targeted person in their address book; it is possible to collect message metadata in real time (“Pen Register”); message content can be retrieved via iCloud backups.

• Wickr: Date and time of account creation, types of terminal on which the application is installed, date of last connection, number of messages exchanged, external identifiers associated with the account (e-mail addresses, telephone numbers), avatar image, data linked to adding or deleting.

TL;DR Signal is the messaging system that provides the least information to investigators.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You’d need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn’t quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.

But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn’t be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I’ve played VR games and that was fine, but I’ve never tried to do work of any kind.

I guess where I’m coming from is that even though I’m low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can’t see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn’t there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision.

But Meta’s approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was “are they trolling us?” There’s open source metaverse software like Vircadia that looks better than Meta’s demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren’t there?

On top of that, Meta didn’t seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that’d look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven’t heard announcements from Meta that they’re working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing?

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.

LibreELEC dropped the RPi1 in August. There’s so little software left for the thing. All the more reason to devote mine to Gemini, I guess.

Trump’s Group has 30 days to remedy the violation, or their rights in the software are permanently terminated. SF Conservancy

I am out of popcorn, but might need some for this. 😂

It looks like @movq@www.uninformativ.de isn’t too active these days. This little piece of software is pretty neat!

On the blog: Politics in Art and Technology https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/10/18/stories.html #politics #art #software #rant

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: My Software https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/02/16/software.html #software #technology #meta

Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: Colagioia Industries https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/02/02/ci.html #software #technology #meta