K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@bonifartius It baffles me that Signal is still going. I used it from 2014 (as TextSecure) to 2019 and the experience was one of constantly having to work around the developers' decisions that everyone should use the app according to a certain paradigm, which never seemed to line up with my habits.

They had this weird double view of who uses the app. On the one hand they imagined that everyone was using the app for top secret dissident activity - it had no functionality to export a plaintext backup, only encrypted; it nagged you every time you saved an image because other apps could now read it; it blanked the screen when shown in the overview, and so on. But in other areas they slavishly followed the latest UX "best practices" - it enforced everyone using Apple emoji for uniformity; it kept up with trends involving "sticker packs"; it had a mercifully short-lived phase in which *your* messages changed colour on a per-conversation basis, but your interlocutor's were always grey.

Eventually a bug overwrote the encryption keys, causing me to lose all my messages and rendering my backups useless. I do miss some features of the app (it unified my SMS and encrypted messages in a single view nicely) but I'm so glad to be free of that ecosystem.

@QOTO

Just to note:

I did in fact see Michelle’s post within two hours of it appearing, and suspended the account the next day after securing moderator consensus. I don’t know if the other mods were blocked and I (the junior mod here at QOTO) escaped notice, or if I was simply the first to look at it. QOTO mods see this discussion for details. The other account referenced in that convo was @p0l6rb36r.

I think I also saw and ignored Nikon’s post since I recognised the clip as a fairly common meme that doesn’t really indicate support for Naziism. The problem is, even if a mod isn’t blocked, how many want to watch yet another stupid resubtitled Downfall video? So videos where the thumbnail looks innocuous won’t get any scrutiny (and in fact, that’s what happened here - not a single person bothered to watch the video and report it). But when taking screenshots to report, dishonest actors can pick more offensive frames.

I recommend rolling back the IP blocks. Both michelle and nikon used the site via Tor and I don’t think cutting off Tor users in general is a good idea. On the other hand, if you do want to block Tor, only blocking those two addresses is ineffective. The email blocks (both 10minutemail domains) look good though.

TL;DR: Blocking mods doesn’t really seem to have been the problem in this case.

@Gargron @arteteco @Sphinx @freemo

@freemo

I don’t know it’s a misunderstanding as much as just a carelessness or lack of rigour with the vector math (mixing observers without accounting for time dilation when adding velocities leads to errors at relativistic speeds). The sum of the velocity of B as observed from A and the velocity of C as observed from B is not necessarily the velocity of C as observed from A.

@Science

@freemo

All that matters is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light relative to me the observer.

More generally, since this is true for all observers:

All that matters is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light relative to any observer.

Which is exactly what is meant by saying the speed of light is a “universal speed limit”.

@Science

@awethon It's technically incorrect, but common in casual speech. "Used to do so" is the more formal or proper equivalent, which contains the full infinitive.

@awethon It's correct, but maybe a bit awkward having so many forms of "use" in one sentence. Some possible changes for a more natural sound:
"I have not" -> "I haven't" (US) or "I've not" (UK)
"used to use it" -> "used to" (casual) or "used to do so" (formal)

@lucifargundam You generally can't do that in the USA; federal law prohibits putting anything in a mailbox unless you pay postage. However, the restriction does not apply to mail *slots* that feed directly into the building.

@blinkwarp use the googlebot user agent instead.

https://qoto.org/@khird/105397853408353279

@freemo Looks like you resolved this. For future reference though, I can read/write French okay; I just can't understand it by ear.

Lots of celebratory gunfire mixed in with the fireworks this year. I'm sandwiched between office buildings to the east and a pretty expensive residential area to the west, so I wouldn't have expected that much shooting around here. But I'd guess I've heard upwards of a hundred rounds fired just now, maybe two hundred.

@freemo

Okay. I'm not keeping statistics on the spam, but if it's a perceptible increase I'll bring it up.

@arteteco @Sphinx

@freemo Reminds me of an old xkcd punchline: You don't use science to show that you're right; you use science to become right.

@freemo “I’d rather you agreed with me than were well informed, so I’ll only tell you the facts that support my position. That way you can feel like you came to your own conclusion based on the facts, but you really just believe what I want you to.”

@freemo Thanks for keeping the lights on around here! I'll continue to do my best

@nanko Here's one I've been kicking around but probably won't get to this winter. There's a musical ornament set called Santa's Marching Band - see the link below. These can be had used pretty cheaply, but they only play a preprogrammed set of carols, which gets mighty old over an extended advent/holiday season. So the idea is to gut the controller box and replace its contents with an Arduino that reads a simple MIDI file and gives the bellringers the appropriate commands to play it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5SITCi8T_k

@gawrsh ooh that does look nice, but... 100USD/mo/line? You can get five lines for that money. Hard to justify the cost just to give the metaphorical finger to snoops.

@Hyolobrika

You may be interested in this previous conversation on the topic: https://qoto.org/@alex_/103263224293042663

@freemo