I’m pretty sure she couldn’t. She would wonder why she couldn’t contact anyone from her contact list. Sending individual links to probably hundreds of people without knowing if they use Simplex is completely unfeasible. Signal and WhatsApp you just open the app, immediately see who else uses it and can start texting. No multiple profiles, no meeting to scan QR codes or sending links, which is especially ironic because she would probably send that via Signal or WhatsApp 🤣

But to be fair Mail is pretty centralized too nowadays for most people @gmail and @outlook. Of course there are others but my point is that there a a hand full of providers up to a point that it’s almost unfeasible to maintain and run you own mailserver because there is a high chance that those large providers will flag your mail as spam because it’s rare to see a “wild” mailserver.

I did the same what @warm said and I don’t even have WhatsApp. If someone needs something from me they have to write on Signal (or SMS 🤣).

I see what you mean but that’s not what I thought China did. I thought they just declared every prisoner automatically an organ donor which would totally be fine IMHO.

I live in Europe (Austria) and the solitary-based health care system is amazing. Automatically declaring everybody a donor is the best thing you can do (in in that case there wouldn’t even be a difference if you are a prisoner or not).

If you ask me we should even get rid of the option to opt out unless in well founded court approved exceptions. Opting out of being an organ donor is probably the most egocentric, selfish thing one could do. You are dead and you still want to deny helping others at literally no additional cost for you.

It also has practically the opposite effect of what you mentioned. If you only have a few organ donors and one is in a bad condition in a hospital there a probably a few people that hope they don’t make it to get the organs. But if everybody is an organ donor the situation gets much simpler because there isn’t this artificial scarcity.

Long story short, I haven’t heard a single good argument for not being an organ donor except that people could care less about the paper work to opt-in. That’s why the European opt-out system is way better, but many US citizens probably would call that communism :-)

All sounds files are “raw bytes” 😉

You are definitely right but it’s probably almost right at the sweet spot. Decentralization/federation is great for privacy, but think about what most non-technical people can handle. With federation alone, practically all non-tech people would even fail (or be confused by) the first step, namely to find an instance.

So are there more privacy friendly options than Signal? Definitely. But are those user friendly enough most people could use it? I can’t think of one, but would live to hear some alternatives that are simple enough my mom could use it.

Why would they phase that out? Once you are dead you don’t need organs. I’m so happy to live in a country where you have to explicitly opt out of organ donation if you don’t want to be a donor (many EU countries do it that way).

Every country where you have to opt in to be an organ donor has it completely backwards.

Update: ok maybe, I should have read the article

sometimes when patients are still alive

Ok that’s fucked up

No that’s impossible with your voice even for those slow speeds back then. But one could implement a similar system that converts sound to data/images if you invent you own modulation depending on how precise you can make sounds. If you are totally ungifted with your voice like me, the simplest would probably be something like morse. If you have perfect pitch you could use many different frequencies and amplitudes and combine those (a bit like QAM but without phase modulation, because humans can’t control the phase with their vocal cords). The more different frequency-amplitude combinations you can make and the faster you can switch between them the faster you “manual” data transmission could be.

Sounds actually pretty fun to play around with 🤣

PS: I personally would drop amplitude modulation and only use different frequencies (FM) and only pick a few different values (maybe four? or eight - one octave cdefgabc’) with variable speed (decoding based on short pauses between notes) to be most reliable.

PPS: what did you (and adhd) do to me 😅. Now I want to make something like that and have no time on my hands anyway.

The screaming was not only during handshake. The acoustic coupler you see in the image was making that “scream” all the time (that’s how the data was transmitted), so no noise, no communication/data.

People got so used to the noise that some of them could even diagnose connection issues based on the sound the coupler made.

When modems were updated they internally converted the data directly to electrical signals to be sent over the telephone via, without the audio indirection, but most modems had a built in speaker anyway that still played back the audio during handshake (on default settings) to allow users to hear/debug connection issues.

Practically all modems from that time allowed you to turn off that noise - even during handshake.

Over the years the need to “hear” the data went away.

Any backups of the repository itself (and not the GitHub rendering)?

How about driving with at most that speed that would allow you to break to a full stop inside the range you can see. Or within half that range if the street is to narrow for another passing car.

I didn’t say they have no knowledge, quite the opposite. Here a quote from the comment you answered:

LLMs are extremely knowledgeable (as in they “know” a lot) but are completely dumb.

There is a subtle difference between intelligent and knowledgeable. LLM know a lot in that sense that they can remember a lot of things, but they are dumb in that sense that they are completely unable to draw conclusions and put that knowledge into action in any other means besides spitting out again what they once learned.

That’s why LLMs can tell you a lot about about all different kinds of game theory about tic tac toe but can’t draw/win that game consistently.

So knowing a lot and still being dumb is not a contradiction.

The “may” carries a lot of weight so it probably depends. The way US law works is pretty weird IMHO and the reason for many of such disclaimers/waivers. “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”, “Contents may be hot”, etc.

But wouldn’t you point still be true today that the best AI video models today would be the onces that are not available for consumers?

(sorry for the long answer)

Besides the vendor-lock-in and “enshitification” things (which are also a direct consequence of capitalism) just compare the Microsoft Office Suite against LibreOffice. It’s not even close.

Don’t get me wrong it works good enough for typical use-cases but the difference in depth, quality and polish is huge. Same with Photoshop vs Gimp, After Effects and other Adobe stuff.

Tons of software doesn’t even have proper Open Source equivalents because they are so nieche (compared to office software or VLC for example).

Unity (vs Godot), IDA Pro (vs Ghidra), EnCase, SolidWorks, etc.

Check out how Mozilla Firefox makes its money. They are over 80% funded by Google and make all kinds of shitty decision. Not because they are bad people but somebody has to pay development because good software doesn’t just happen because a hand full of junior devs have some free time.

Look at the shitty Ubuntu decisions, also done because somebody needs to pay for development.

Look at audacity, redis, FluentAssertions, OpenOffice, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, MySql, IdentityServer4 and many more OpenSource projects that went commercial or changed their license because it was unsustainable.

You can of course always fork, but the forked project than has the same issues. Development works as long there are skilled people motivated to practically donate their free time in exchange for nothing. That already greatly limits the people that even can work on open source and if their situation changes history repeats.

It’s not even OpenSource only. Look at YouTube creators especially science educators. A lot of them with great content and talent explaining various topics. But also trying to sell you stuff like squarespace, Brilliant and NordVPN because it would be unsustainable otherwise.

So yes great (by that I mean big polished good quality “unenshitified”) FOSS won’t happen under capitalism because writing software is time-consuming.

Why do you think people pirate commercial software like AutoCAD, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, MS Office, SketchUp, SolidWorks, etc.? Because they are polished in a way no open source project could be, because hundreds of engineers worked for decades on those.

All that said, FOSS is great. I use and rely on a tons of OpenSource software, self-host a lot of services, regularly contribute to quite a few projects and also am the maintainer of some libraries other people use (even commercially) and I still stand by what I wrote before:

Open Source can’t be as polished and high quality as big commercial software because it doesn’t have the funds to do that. Five motivated people are not enough to write an After Effects competitor.

Probably won’t happen under capitalism. It’s way too expensive (time consuming) to write good software/make good products.

That’s right and I don’t blame anyone who bought a Tesla or anything really (except that you have to be out of your mind to buy a car without knobs 🤣 for that price) and people still buy from Amazon and Nestle and I don’t blame them either. That’s actually something that politics would have to solve, but that’s an entirely different story.

Owning a Tesla doesn’t make you a bad person that’s right, but Elon was a complete idiot at least since his PayPal time.

Wave was actually on to something because it had the capabilities to be federated like email but more modern.

Coding isn’t special you are right, but it’s a thinking task and LLMs (including reasoning models) don’t know how to think. LLMs are knowledgeable because they remembered a lot of the data and patterns of the training data, but they didn’t learn to think from that. That’s why LLMs can’t replace humans.

That does certainly not mean that software can’t be smarter than humans. It will and it’s just a matter of time, but to get there we likely have AGI first.

To show you that LLMs can’t think, try to play ASCII tic tac toe (XXO) against all those models. They are completely dumb even though it “saw” the entire Wikipedia article on how xxo works during training, that it’s a solved game, different strategies and how to consistently draw - but still it can’t do it. It loses most games against my four year old niece and she doesn’t even play good/perfect xxo.

I wouldn’t trust anything, which is claimed to do thinking tasks, that can’t even beat my niece in xxo, with writing firmware for cars or airplanes.

LLMs are great if used like search engines or interactive versions of Wikipedia/Stack overflow. But they certainly can’t think. For now, but likely we’ll need different architectures for real thinking models than LLMs have.