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u_tamtam

@ u_tamtam @programming.dev

Posts
30
Comments
611
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Pay for privacy

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  • Attention à Element/Matrix, la fondation a de gros soucis de financement qui présagent un avenir incertain (et à plus forte raison avec le changement de license qui a eu lieu tout récemment avec la volonté annoncée de passer en opencore et l'enshittification que ça préfigure). C'est devenu intenable à gérer parce que Matrix est un protocole pourrave et inefficient qu'une décennie d'efforts n'a pas réussi à stabiliser/optimiser.

    SimpleX a le même souci de centralisation de sa gouvernance (une seule entité définit et implémente le protocole du client au serveur et contrôle toute l'expérience utilisateur) donc je recommande logiquement XMPP qui n'a aucun de ces problèmes, et les mêmes avantages, et qui plus est a une communauté fr active via jabberfr.org .

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • Everything you might use relies on a protocol down the stack. XMPP happens to be the only one to date that is an internet standard (IETF), is extensible by design (past/present and future use-cases can be build into it, what makes it still relevant 25 years later), is federated (but not P2P, a good trade-off for mobile usage), has a diverse/multi-partite ecosystem of client and server implementers (sustainable and resilient), and is deployed successfully at scale (on billion of devices).

    unless it’s been revised, imparts no encryption

    Today's XMPP uses the same E2EE as Signal/WhatsApp/Matrix/… XMPP had end-to-end encryption 10 years before Signal was invented

  • ‘An invisible killer’: Beijing cleaned up its toxic air. Why can’t New Delhi? | CNN

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  • Do you consider it normal that a mere dictionary citation triggers such a violent, unhinged and irrelevant response?

  • U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050

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  • Large scale electricity storage is very much a solved problem actually.

    I don't want to sound pedantic, but how exactly do you believe pumped storage work? It's not that complicated: you have a dam, i.e. renewable hydro, and when you get excess electricity from elsewhere, some of the water downstream is pumped back upstream so the dam can do its thing once again. Essentially, developing hydro storage means developing hydroelectricity and dams, but if hydro's contribution to the grid hasn't increased much in a very long time, it's not because of conspiracies, but simply because most of the available capacity has been tapped already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_United_States

    So, back to our initial problem: chemical storage (batteries) is expensive, environmentally dubious, problematic in many aspects and inefficient, chemical conversion (e.g. hydrolysis) is wasteful/inefficient, etc. So, no, we have no good answer to that.

  • ‘An invisible killer’: Beijing cleaned up its toxic air. Why can’t New Delhi? | CNN

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  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocracy

    Autocracy is a system of government in which absolute power is held by the ruler, known as an autocrat. It includes most forms of monarchy and dictatorship, while it is contrasted with democracy and feudalism.

    That checks out.

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • What the other responders said (there are great clients out there, that fit mainstream and niche needs).

    Also, it is not a problem of "federated protocols" per se, but of community-led projects. On the downside it may lack consistence and direction, but on the upside you can step in and contribute feedback, tests, documentation, and why not, code :)

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • So, what would be the appeal compared to XMPP?

  • A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

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  • Of course I wouldn't complain if more and more clients popped up, but IMO what matters is that the ones we currently have remain well maintained over time, in the hands of people who know what they are doing, and that there is one such client per platform, which is effectively the case today.

    If you have ideas on how to improve current clients, I'm sure people would take your remarks and contributions kindly (for instance, there's a zoo of pretty clients that forked from Conversations on Android, Dino tries to be a minimalistic client for the simple needs and is getting an official Windows build soon, etc)

  • A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

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  • XMPP's E2EE is comparable to everything else out there (Signal, Matrix, WhatsApp, …) in that it uses Signal's double-ratchet algorithm (guaranteeing perfect forward secrecy and al.). All maintained clients support it: https://omemo.top/

  • Elixir vs Go: what to learn in 2024

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  • Also mostly coding in Scala here (plus some python) and agreed with all that was said above.

    Learning Scala will probably make you a better developer (much more so than learning e.g. go/swift/rust...), you will first wrap your head around functional concepts that might not feel super compelling initially (why would I want to write a recursive function instead of a while loop+mutator?), but those, and the constant exposure to type level concepts and monadic/higher-kinded constructs will slowly make you write safer and self-documenting programs.

    Also, most of the intimidating language abstractions are not required to be mastered to be efficient with Scala, many of the bells and whistles serve library authors much much more than end users, so it's important to find resources that go just "deep enough", I think Martin Oderski's and Li Haoyi's books are perfect in that sense.

    Finally there was this video published recently which might give an idea of where future programming languages are heading (and why it might be a good idea to keep an eye on Scala for the years to come): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7mTNZeiIK7E

  • U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050

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  • Anyone with basic knowledge about anything knows that diversification is generally a good thing, this applies to energy as well: you don't command the wind/sun and large scale electricity storage is to this day an unsolved problem. For all the big plans we have about a greener and carbon limited future, we need large amounts of dependable cheap and low-carbon energy, nuclear very much fits the bill (in complement to the other low-carbon energies).

  • A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

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  • Just give XMPP a shot... It's what Matrix has been promising to be without ever actually delivering, was there a decade prior and still will be after the next.

    Matrix's purpose was to be a VC unicorn for is founders, it's not tackling a new problem, it's not bringing a novel or interesting solution, and everything that it does differently on a technical level seems to go against its goals and those of its users. Time to drop them was someandsome ago, but it's never too late.

  • A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

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  • , and this is just the beginning.It's bad omen to criticize an opensource project, I know, but in my eyes Matrix is a big technical and organizational failure, for not having succeeded in stabilizing the protocol after a whole decade of unsuccessful explorations, and for having its leadership consistently fail to define clear goals and steer the project towards them (just get it done and working well before trying to make it "peer to peer" or "in the metaverse").

    If this is the electroshock that Matrix needs to reconsider its design and directions? good for them. If that kills them? Well too bad, but it's not like they are the only cool kid in town.

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • This isn't wishful thinking, this is in defense of a model where our digital needs would be distributed at a level lower than that of the tech majors, which was commonplace before everything on the internet was so consolidated.I'm not saying that everyone should self-host, I'm saying that federated services could be hosted at family&friends/regional/national levels, simultaneously, and deliver a resilient service at a negligible cost. Hardware, which is very much a problem for Signal & al right now, wouldn't be in a distributed model, and could be donated and repurposed easily. My example was perhaps a bit too extreme, but I think you get the gist of what I'm saying.

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • Sorry to hear. I've been using omemo (e2ee) without a single message lost since.. perhaps 5 years ? I also don't use movim (I don't trust its model and level of stability/maturity, especially with regards to doing e2ee in the browser). I would not recommend "XMPP via Movim" either.

    Edit: a word

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • I've tried both Matrix and XMPP but stuck with Matrix

    And so did I but ended up with XMPP instead of Matrix. Self hosting my messaging was important to me, and the cost of doing so is prohibitive with Matrix, the protocol and its implementations are just that inefficient, and there has been no progress in this area for as long as I've been keeping an eye on it. In my eyes, Matrix is broken by design.

    Now, Element is indeed a decent client, and above the average of all XMPP clients, but what matters is for XMPP to have at least one great client per platform, which is undoubtedly the case. In practice, all my daily messaging happens over XMPP, the people I interact with are far from the nerdy type, and to them it's pretty much equivalent to WhatsApp & al.

    Back to Matrix, besides the fact that after a decade there hasn't been any progress towards diversifying implementations (it's so messy, complex and changing that it's basically the same people implementing both client and server sides, and there is only one viable implementation to this day, by one entity), which is a big fat red herring, the entity who's behind 95% of the code of Matrix is now facing severe financing challenges. The future of Matrix is all but certain because of that, and there are reasons for concern.

    I don't "hate" Matrix/Element/the Foundation, I just don't understand why they painted themselves in the corner they are in today, and rode the pipe dream of their broken protocol for so long. Would they cease to exist, it would look like natural selection to me. They are just not competitive and sorry if it hurts.

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • I laid it out elsewhere in this thread, but in short, costs grow non-linearly with scale: you can run thousands of users on a RPi, but a million users requires whole datacenters. Decentralization not only helps with not requiring "whole datacenters" in the first place, they also enable maximization of resources: if you have a NAS at home, or a RPi hanging around, a router idling somewhere, or an abandoned smartphone in a drawer, you can probably host enough accounts for all the people that you've ever met in your life. And there are hundred of thousands of such underused devices everywhere, which, put together, would be sufficient to host the whole world multiple times around.

    The other issue is sustainability: with this centralization comes single point of failure. It's no big deal witnessing the disappearance of one or few providers of a federated network. Accounts and data can be migrated easily. For most users, it's invisible. Now compare this to Signal running into financial issues: you are contemplating million of users losing access to their account and their data, and having to re-bootstrap their whole social graph elsewhere. This is another level of "cost", or price to pay, for centralization.

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • Agreed. Not ideal vs. a federation, because Signal would still be in a position of total control over the network, but with less incentive to go against its users.

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • XMPP

    As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, XMPP would be my preference. It just works. In fact that's what the other messengers (at facebook, Google, …) already use, but chose to put behind a walled-garden.What matters is that whatever comes next (or, from the past in the case of XMPP) is federated, so no single organization has a single-handed control/monopoly over the network. Matrix and SimpleX are federated alternatives to XMPP, but I don't see Matrix stabilizing any time soon, and SimpleX just isn't ready yet. XMPP can offer you today an experience that's comparable to WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/…