These features you ask for strike me as an afternoon's worth of programming effort. Either their codebase is so spaghettified they can't get new features like this implemented and they are now stuck just periodically rearranging the interface and pretending to release new versions; or they are being manipulative bastards deliberately and they have weird deals struck with crap artists like drake and swift.

I have been saying this is the business model for audio books for about 7 years now. I listen to 3-5 audiobooks per month. There is exactly a zero percent chance I would buy that many through audible seeing that many of their digitally delivered audiobooks cost more than buying the same physical book.

I've long felt there was an arrogance to audible and their massive endless advertising across the digital universe always left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe I am missing it but Spotify never advertised anywhere near as much; I suspect people like and recommend their fairly reasonably priced product to others.

While I don't find Spotify to be some kind of idyllic company I do love how they smashed the traditional music industry (another super arrogant industry) right in the teeth.

Mastodon, is a Twitter clone with the ability to network Twitter clones.

So technical people can run their own Twitter clone.

ADX Seems to be trying to make it so the data is structured n such a way the user creates it's data in one location, but can move it somewhere else.

Also means: moderation is just a filter on the user's data.

Personally I think Matrix.org already solved most of these issues. Except maybe moderation as a filter. But seems to me this should already be possible to build that way.

You might be surprised, when WebRTC standard was created they did a bunch of testing. For example a tablet would use more power transferring the bits over WiFi or 4G (same applied to the screen) than it would use CPU power to decode video in software.

Actually, because blockchains are verified, what you need is more miners than currently are on the blockchain.

Which means you are back to square one: to many miners.

Good company culture leads to success. Bad culture leads to eventual failure or at least under-performing your industry.

Any company that approves of this sort of surveillance is clearly displaying an out of control terrible culture. This is probably a few terrible managers who are feeling left out in the cold and exposing how they are not actual contributes to success who are pushing for this sort of BS. The upper management is not displaying any leadership skills by curtailing such out of control behaviour. Even worse if they are the ones encouraging it.

I both hate and love companies like this. I hate them because they are making people miserable. I love them because hiring their best miserable people is super easy. You don't have to offer them more money, a better location, or anything like that. You just tell them. "I will stop punching you in the face every day." and you have a winning offer.

My theory is that there are bots and humans working hand in hand. If you post about a certain chemical company who make certain products of dubious safety they will be all over you with hard hitting debate school champion talking points. You can point out how they just lost their latest high court lawsuit and by the end of their reply you will be debating that the justice system is even qualified to rule on anything involving science.

If I were to hazard a guess, it is the bot finding your posting, it is the bot suggesting the response, and it is a human using their own common sense to tailor the response to what exactly you said, and again with your replies.

What is funny with these people is that they play a game of "last word". You can rebut what they say until the cows come home and they will keep up solid work with their talking point based answers.

If they were bots only the responses would be off target and have that robotic feel. Other than these bozos are clearly pulling from an approved list of talking points and insults cooked up by a PR company they do seem to be paying attention to the details of what you are saying.

Again with a guess, I would suggest that a human with these bots are literally 100x of times more productive in shilling than a human just futzing about searching for facts that need refuting.

Or these companies hire 1000s of fairly well educated shills.

The irony is, you are already trusting the person behind the cr.yp.to site: Daniel J. Bernstein (DJB for short) is one of the leading and most trusted researchers in the world of cryptography and computer security in general.

So you didn't cheer for the US in the space race ?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or are you going to deny the huge influence Von Braun had on US space exploration ?

Apparently the military had a highly streamlined process for getting waivers to not use ADA. I don't remember the exact statistic but in short order it was close to zero ADA products.

I have used misra autosar and SIL (a train one) for programming mission critical stuff including embedded. I have seen other code being created that was mission critical going out the door that was so bad employees were quitting in order to not have blood on their hands in the case of a mass casualty event.

My general assessment of most code leaving "hard core engineering" shops is that it is crap held together with bandaids and glue. I have exactly zero experience in the world of automotive programming but I have read a few reports that came out along with lawsuits (Toyota accelerator stuff). The assessment of the code was that it was total crap.

I would be curious to know if companies like VW and Ford have a system where they can both produce high quality code while maintaining flexibility. This last is critical as I have seen companies that make super safety critical systems that are so inflexible as to literally become unsafe as they refuse to adapt to reality. A great example was a SIL system involved in an LRT level crossing. The whole setup was both a time wasting disaster and a safety disaster as causing cars to scoot across the tracks after the obviously terrible signalling system had just screwed them for the 5 time in a row. The company that built it totally refused to alter it as it would cause the whole SIL process to restart which was slow and expensive. Their estimate to change a single parameter that would change the wait time was between 500k to 1 million in SIL process related costs alone.

I have read that NASA faced the same challenge. Development got so bogged down that changing anything was brutal. Being flexible was so hard as to literally drive costs of change to exceed the cost of the risks of those changes going wrong. They of course could point to the problem with a multi year mission to mars going wrong because someone went cowboy but the reality was that it was overall making doing any science too hard. They streamlined the process and from what I can tell over the air updates became a thing with this streamlining.

So, I would love to know if these guys are producing the crap that I have seen more often than not in "mission critical safety critical" systems or are they doing things right.

BTW when I say doing things wrong. A simple example of doing things wrong is shipping these systems without proper unit tests, or no unit tests at all; just manual testing. Yes, that bad.

Quite simply Signal offered me what I most wanted from iMessage which was messaging on my phone and desktop that were in sync. Most people I know are now on Signal and thus leaving iMessage would not be a problem. I still prefer iPhones as they don't rape my privacy like most Androids. People keep trying to convince me there are non-rapey alternative OSs but none that I have seen aren't a giant compromise.

There are certain polarizing people like trump and Ayn Rand who I love to use to see if someone is a broken cancer on society or maybe qualifies as human. If they Absolutely love either, or they start making excuses as to how their imperfections are outweighed by where they were right, then I flip the bozo bit.

Ignoring, for a second, the fact that this guy makes a living renting out office space; this guy is just a giant d-bag who is the poster boy for the worst of the worst in tech. The general rule should be, "Do the opposite of anything this guy says."

Kinda sad.