IMO not as good as The Circle. Although it follows one character, they move between so many departments, it reads more like a collection of short stories.

Did you read The Every yet? It’s a sequel, but instead of anti-privacy, it leans more into greenwashing, and how only the powerful corporations can save us from a climate disaster.

Welcome to Gemini!

There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background

This was the trend circa 2012 too, at least I recall Microsoft’s pages and software becoming less legible. Not sure if I got used to it, screens got better, or it went back to higher contrast.

.kkrieger for those who want to look it up

Ironically, this was the first thing I tried for Matrix deployment circa 2019. Worked like a charm… Until a reboot. Then, since I did not know where anything was installed and how it worked, I had no idea where to even start.

I guess it would make more sense now that I know a bit more.

What will I see? I mean I am seeing some corporatization and incompatibilities as I described.

Same for me, I initially went with Matrix for the bridges.

I think for XMPP it’s gateway or transport, Slidge author (Nicoco) has developed some in the last year.

Any hidden nuances that one has to know for Snikket nowadays?

E.g. with Matrix Synapse, user accounts cannot be deleted via API, DB accumulates hundreds of thousands of records in state_groups_state taking up space, and for client-side, onboarding is a pain

Why did you switch? I went from Matrix to XMPP around 2019 since Riot/RiotX (matrix client) at the time would not get notifications in time and/or was a battery hog. And then went back to Matrix when it seemed more stable, to avoid messing with prosody configs.

Stardew Valley has plenty of silly and funny moments to begin with. But the last patch added a “green rain” event, and during the first occurrence, all villagers are hiding inside, except Demetrius. This guy is just walking around in a full hazmat suit, collecting samples and babbling about mushrooms.

Chrome sharing the same login as the Android device is not only bad for privacy and usability, but is a complete pain in the ass to explain to non-tech-savvy people.

Got PineTime pre-tariffs (even though it took a while to ship to US)

Pretty neat piece of hardware, has everything that I want (notifications, time, weather, timer), InfiniTime OS is open source and was easy to read, build and flash (had to do so to add missing Cyrillic letters and a shortcut)

As long as your expectations are that of a microcontroller-powered device and not a supercomputer-on-your-wrist, it’s fantastic.

Looks interesting, but curious how it bypasses reddit’s requirements. AFAIK there are teddit and redlib proxies, but also few apps like RedReader still work.

Yeah, after seeing plenty of “quirky”/“edgy”/“ironic” culture in 2010s, and given the absurdity of current world and tech leaders, I cannot tell if something like this is genuinely delusional or just satire.

And its neighbor, WSTB 88.9 The Alternation, with local bands, indie/emo/pop-punk, sometimes clueless DJs, regular news and weather.

IMO it had all the content and users some time ago. I follow mostly specific interest/hobby subreddits, but lately even they have devolved into illiterates asking the same exact questions repeatedly; some strange attention-seeking posts such as pictures captioned “getting started”/“this just arrived" or “what should I do with this thing that I got?”; and really dumb stuff such as “I inhaled solder fumes, will I get lead poisoning?” (These are at least entertaining in a way)

IMO Snikket (XMPP) is the easiest all-in-one solution with audio/video chat at the moment. Pretty good on resources too.

I currently host a Matrix Synapse server, but:

• Matrix seems to be expanding in the corporate / institutional direction, more services are expected for regular functionality
• Element X (upcoming client) breaks calls compatibility with old Element, now requiring Element Call. It’s kind of a mess, I presume this is to support group calls, but makes it a PITA to use currently.
• Even with small number of users, Synapse DB grows in size due to state_groups_state table, non-deletable users, and copying ALL data from other servers’ rooms (this one is by design but still…)

AI is a tech debt generator.

Any programmer who worked with legacy code knows a situation where something was written by a former employee or a contractor without much comments or documentation, making it difficult to modify (because of complexity or readability) or replace (because of non-existing business documentation and/or peculiar bugs and features)

AI accelerates these situations, but the person does not even exist. Which, IMO is the main thing that needs to be called out.

I ran prosody server and used Siskin IM as a client, it worked pretty well. But as others mentioned, since this is Apple, the client developer has to run a push server, no background processes and long-polling allowed. Some other XMPP clients (Secret Messenger I think) did not have that set up and do not have notifications.