Fool me once...

A lot of vim users use comma as the leader key so this is probably natural for a lot of folks.

Also seems convenient to be able to type ,<tab> to autocomplete over your custom commands, in case you forgot the name you assigned them.

Incredible popular software lore here. Calibre and Kitty are two of my favorite pieces of software in the world.

Obligatory reference to Simple Made Easy https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

I watch this talk about once per year to remind myself to eschew complexity.

Wireguard ships with the Linux kernel so you only need to receive ~60 bytes of configuration information.

Wireguard is also easily censored and is already censored in the places that censor VPNs.

Is that true? I thought wg-quick etc were just convenience functions and that it's relatively trivial to use iproute2 to configure a VPN link

You don't need wg-quick. You do need the "wg" command.

Signal has a central, proprietary server. It's between impractical and impossible to run your own Signal server like you can with Matrix, Revolt, or Delta Chat for example. BlueSky has a similar approach (compare to Mastodon).

Also Signal requires a phone number to sign-in. It's not exactly private. AFAIK the proprietary server can glean your IP, your phone number, who you talk to, and when you talk to them. This type of metadata is valuable information.

The WhatsApp co-founder gave Signal $105M in 2018. Signal costs ~$50M/year to run. It's also funded by wealthy donors such as Jack Dorsey (Twitter, BlueSky, Square). BTW Jack is now pushing Signal to integrate Bitcoin.

When evaluating the "ethics" of a chat platform, we should factor-in the metadata, soft power, and eventual leverage that centralized (controlled by a few) platforms like BlueSky and Signal afford to wealthy folks who are bankrolling it.

> Signal has a central, proprietary server.

The signal-server repository is open source

Critical portions of the server are not FOSS. Also the core software forces you to join their servers.

Also we have no proof that they are running the server software published on GitHub. This concern is exacerbated by the fact they didn't publish server code updates for many months.

I mean sure, but also, the client app source code lets us know that unencrypted data is not sent to the server. So at best they could perhaps be collecting some additional metadata, but I don't think it's a whole lot

And it doesn't matter if it's open source or not. because messages are encrypted P2P.

> AFAIK the proprietary server can glean your IP, your phone number, who you talk to, and when you talk to them. This type of metadata is valuable information.

To the best of my knowledge, so can matrix.org or whatever servers you connect and federate to. This is required to route messages between users. What is your point?

*Riot -> Element

Oops I meant Revolt, the Rust-based alternative to Discord. Updated. Thanks. https://github.com/revoltchat

It's illegal to encrypt CB radio signals in the US and many other countries.

Toothless, since it's impossible to prove that any given message is or is not encrypted.

This comment I'm writing right here might not mean what it appears to mean, and might not be aimed at who it appears to be aimed at.

It's effectively merely illegal to pollute the shared medium with noise.

I can imagine somebody could make with some AI a system that talks something that makes more or less sense, but has encoded information in the message

I didn’t mention CB, any particular frequency, or country. My comment was on secure communication at the abstract / theoretical level.

In principle, yes. Technically, no. D-STAR vocoder.

Fascinated by so many replies of "actually Nix does this just fine, you just have to be an expert like me"

It's "the usual" when mentioning nix anywhere.

When a company is writing all of their technology and business using, lets say JavaScript. And then they come here and post about them switching to some NIH home-brewed language instead because they couldn't understand how functions or arrays work. That is not a problem with the people commenting on their stupidity.

Yeah but if everyone was saying "I don't understand how functions or arrays work in Javascript", that's a pretty solid indicator that functions and arrays are badly designed in Javascript and are unnecessarily hard to understand.

I think in some cases things are just fundamentally difficult and them being hard-to-understand is intrinsic. For example formal verification in Lean is hard to understand but I don't think Lean is badly designed.

But it's hard to see why package management is one of those things. There are soooo many ways Nix could be easier to use and understand. The language itself is unnecessarily esoteric in my experience - compared to something like Starlark for example.

Welcome to the world of Nix.

Just the latest in the line of "my totalizing world view will solve all your software problems" to which the answer of "this doesn't do what I want" is always "you're holding it wrong."

Exemplifying the meme.. "[Doing American things Americanly]: What are we, ASIAN???"