…made by developers with a special student/hobby account, only for a limited number of devices.

Half-assed “solution”.

On Android, there is Quicksy, and yes, it uses phone number sign-up for ease, but it seems more private than corporate apps.

Without phone numbers, there’s Conversations.im. There are some public XMPP servers with open registration, but you would need to find one, e.g. sure.im by Tigase lets you make aan account, but I don’t remember if calls work.

Are you looking to self-host something as well? Snikket is all-in-one chat+calls, but you would need to host a server. (Still based on Conversations and XMPP)

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.

My best guess (especially if taken by the water) is a juvenile bald eagle. They don’t get the distinct white head feathers until 2 or 3 years old.

Although, Golden Eagles live around the Rockies, too. But the pose makes it difficult to see details and size.

From this year’s spooky season movies, Happy Birthday to Me (1981) was a hidden gem. While it seems like a typical slasher, the ending was quite unexpected.

Rotten Tomatoes ratings are really low though, so probably not everyone’s cup of tea.

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

Numerical marketing is nonsense all around.

Video, which was always counted by vertical resolution (lines on analog TV), suddenly became horizontal with 4K, 8K, and it’s not even close, 4K usually referring to 3840x2160.

There are three entirely different things that “5G” can refer to: the mobile network standard, 5GHz WiFi standard, or 5Gbps network connection.

The best explanation I saw several years ago: Large tech companies drive change through competing individual teams and projects. So some manager pitched a half-assed idea, somehow convinced upper management to go with it, got developers to heroically implement it, and might have gotten some bonus for doing so. It doesn’t matter if there was no value as long as some decision maker thinks there is (or does not care, or numbers were fudged anyway).

It is literally change for the sake of change.

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.

The Messenger does something similar but in a different way: dying summons a demon that eats any coins that the player collects for the next minute. I already suck, and now the game is punishing me by delaying upgrades.

Moved from mid-range OnePlus to a-model Pixel with GrapheneOS. It’s much better, don’t miss anything. There was no LineageOS for that OnePlus yet, every OnePlus app would scream at you if you turn off Google Play Services, had some unreproducible bugs with GPS failing, log files filling up disk space, and killed any non-whitelisted background apps. GrapheneOS works as I expect it too, and with the exception of Google+carrier suddenly killing RCS, I did not have any issues.

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.