"logically separated" as opposed to "physically separated" (pretty rare in the Cloud world)
If you want more details, read their open source codebase or ask them specifically what documentation would boost your confidence, instead of leaving snarky comments.
Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions. Maybe this also correlates with qualities like blind optimism, or disbelief in institutions like capitalism?
> Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions
That's not a reasonable definition. The distrust in the institution is actually a side effect of questioning the authority for authority sake. Anarchists aren't a bunch of individualists that want to burn down whatever we've got in terms of mechanisms in the society regardless if they are necessary. It's just the manifestation of the dialectical opposite of the expression of power and authority.
And privacy enthusiasts just know very well that power shifts and what once was a necessary mechanism can be abused by an elected authoritarian leader.
I like the idea. But I’m pretty happy with Signal. Signal does require a phone number I think, but otherwise seems very similar.
Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage. It makes recovery simple. It does block the ultra paranoid use cases though. Oh well.
>Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage
In many jurisdictions, telecoms form an abusive oligopoly, and you need to provide a state-issued identity document to get a phone number.
That is not at all reasonable for normal usage - unlike well-known non-abusive authentication methods, such as a keypair; or its even simpler cousin, the username/password.
I guess it depends on what you consider normal. Most of the humans I know find it vastly easier to produce a state issued id to an authority than to generate a public/private key pair.
Well, I and a lot of the people I'm going to talk to through things like Signal are going to have a state ID regardless as I live in a country where one practically needs to drive a car to function in society.
On top of that so many other things just inherently expect one to have a phone number. It would be somewhat odd to not have a phone number for most of the people I know and talk to through platforms like Signal.
So to your question of which is easier, having the state ID and a phone number is easier because I'll already have that for a multitude of reasons.
If you live in a place where its rare to have a phone number, then yes I agree Signal probably isn't a good choice.
You asked which is easier, and I gave my answer. It's easier for me and many many many millions (billions?) of others to have a phone number and state ID, because we'll have already had a phone number and state ID on hand for decades beforehand and have shared that number with the people we're already talking to while making a new identifier and sharing it would be quite a bit more work.
What's easier, using a tool that's already in your hand or going to the tool store, searching for a new one, and swapping to that one? Just using the tool already in your hands, that you're already using, that you've been using for a long time.
It's exactly what you asked, just not the perspective you cared to look at.
In the time it took you to selectively bring various outside context "for perspective" (instead of answering the question as asked) you could've registered a brand new account with username, password, email confirmation, and OTP 2FA, on any service that supports those.
If you insist that 2+2 equals "3 or 5 depending on perspective", ok sure let's work with your scenario of comparing registering a pre-existing state/telco ID with creating a brand new user/pass account (again: instead of what I asked you to compare). Well, suppose you were to lose your ID and/or your SIM - do you think you'd be able to renew them and regain access to your stuff in the same amount of time it's taking me to write this now?
Plus, I guess you've never seen bad actors buy fake ID/SIM accounts faster than you can block 'em - and much more quickly than any individual good-faith actor (with a single ID/SIM honestly linked to meatspace) would able to get out of harm's way in such a scenario.
>What's easier, using a tool that's already in your hand or going to the tool store, searching for a new one, and swapping to that one? Just using the tool already in your hands, that you're already using, that you've been using for a long time.
Hammers, nails... You're trying to make it make sense by dumbing it down.
In the end (again conforming to your framing), the "easier thing" is the one that fewer people will expend energy to prevent you from doing. And this last consideration kinda-sorta makes your reply be an answer to my question, except that I had to do the work of connecting the two, so now you owe me 100EUR.
I've answered it twice. Its easier to use the thing you already have than it is to make something new. Is that really difficult to understand?
> you could've registered a brand new account with username, password, email confirmation, and OTP 2FA, on any service that supports those
And then spend the many, many, many hours to share that new unique identifier with all the people I want to talk to. Or I can just continue using the same identifier they already know me by and have known me by for decades.
> I guess you've never seen bad actors buy fake ID/SIM accounts as quickly as you can block 'em
Whaaaa I thought you just told me a phone number is such an incredibly hard and challenging thing to get, now you're telling me anyone can easily get them anytime they want?
So phone numbers are incredibly challenging to get and yet people get them all the time easily. Otherwise, if phone numbers aren't hard to get and anyone can just freely get them what are we even really debating about?
For billions of users, having a phone number as their identifier isn't a challenge and is for sure the easier process and having to make a new unique identifier is a bigger deal and introduces far more roadblocks to effectual adoption. Its why WhatsApp uses it, its why iMessage uses it, its why Telegram uses it, its why WeChat uses it, and many others.
>Its easier to use the thing you already have than it is to make something new. Is that really difficult to understand?
I asked which is easier to make.
This is, evidently, an extremely difficult question to understand.
>Whaaaa I thought you just told me a phone number is such an incredibly hard and challenging thing to get, now you're telling me anyone can easily get them anytime they want?
>So phone numbers are incredibly challenging to get and yet people get them all the time easily.
Not phone numbers; accounts gatekept by them.
Not anyone; only bad actors.
>I thought you just told me
What I just told you is written in the parent post.
You have the right to misread it any way you like, and think whatever comes to your mind easiest. But since that's not how a conversation works, I will ask you to exercise that right somewhere I can't see you - and by the way you still owe me 100EUR, but since I'm not an actual cyberstalker, I won't be chasing you down to collect. So relax.
Which is easier to make? The one I don't even have to make, I already have.
Which pizza is easier to make, the premade pizza that's already ready to eat and is right in front of you, or the pile of ingredients in the pantry and fridge? Uhh...the pizza in front of you ready to eat? Put it on a plate and eat, it's there, it's ready to go. And practically everyone already bought their pizza and it's already in front of them.
And no, you didn't ask which is easier to make.
> What's easier: to obtain state ID, or to sign up to a website with your preferred username and password?
Where's the word "make" in that?
> Well, suppose you were to lose your ID and/or your SIM - do you think you'd be able to renew them and regain access to your stuff in the same amount of time it's taking me to write this now?
Well, I'll end up wanting to replace that ID and SIM for once again a multitude of other reasons, so having that identifier tied to that really doesn't increase any complexity. Its really not that big of a challenge for billions of users, its something they're going to already do. When the school needs to urgently get a hold of me, they'll call my phone number not refer to me by some handle on a jabber server with a population of one. This same thing applies over and over and over and over for tons of people.
Meanwhile if I've got other accounts tied to other processes that get lost in their own unique ways, I'll have separate issues to get those unique identities recovered. Sounds like more work, not less work.
You now owe me 20,000,000,000,000,000,000EUR, but since I'm not an actual cyberstalker, I won't be chasing you down to collect. So relax. Such a useless thing to add to the conversation.
Obtaining your first id is obviously difficult. But so is obtaining your first computer. If you’re on good terms with your government, obtaining the id is easier. That’s really the key. Sure if you focus on hostile states this stuff all makes sense. If you’re insistent on hiding from authorities then many things become much more difficult, by design.
I primarily use a nearly-bottom end android phone that's a few years old and just recently switched to an even older, even lower end android phone that is six years old. Neither has that issue.
Obviously, I'm not really claiming that it's not possible people are experiencing this issue, but it can't possibly be widespread.
I feel like most likely people are using android skins that aggressively kill apps in the background.
I have that exact issue on a couple of not exactly low end Samsung phones. Holding them side by side with signal open. Delivery times vary wildly. Whereas WhatsApp just works (though I hate it for other reasons)
nope, iphone here, and quite recent. But it's not just me, all the people i communicate with on this app have the same kind of problems. With a group of friends we even had a totally weird ordering of messages, making the conversation quite absurd.
There's something deeply wrong with the way signal delivers messages...
Signal's code quality is not conducive to security. They had an extremely bad state management bug that resulted in photos being sent to random contacts in your list (potentially life ruining implications if you're sending private photos).
For this reason, it's hard to trust them. The encryption quality is irrelevant if the slop coded client is blasting random photos to random contacts.
Send a GIF to Contact A, Contact B receives random private images? Absolutely inexcusable slop code project. This class of state management bugs should not be possible with a well-architected client, period.
Signal's E2E encryption is more like End 2 Random End.
So 7 months of their users getting rinsed by an extremely serious issue exposing your private photos to random contacts. Seems like slop code to me. Those kinds of state management bugs should not be possible. It indicates code divorced from best practice state management.
Knowing that bug COULD exist, means that you cannot be sure that messages you send in Signal will make it to the recipient you intend given the poor quality. This means the E2E encryption is fundamentally broken, by the way. Because the client is lying to you about the true state of who it's about to send to.
The recipient text has fundamentally zero relationship to the true recipient of the message given that bug.
Having the UI and message sending code reference two different versions of state is incredible incompetence.
The unit economics at this point are about utilization. Their cost is well below what they’re charging, but only when there is enough traffic to keep the GPUs busy. So the game is about increasing demand to level the load.
GPT has negligible moat because they gave up on all their integrations. Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LLM.
> Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LLM.
I hate to be a "source?" guy, but I'm curious if you have any examples of this. Skills and MCP are really the only extensions on CC itself I'm aware of, and these are both supported in Codex.
Things like Dispatch / remote sessions is something CC has that Codex does not, but these features are quite easy to replicate (and I expect Codex to do so in short order).
I agree that’s a great question which I don’t really know the answer to. These tools have been moving in lock step for some time now. One will innovate and within 2-3 weeks the others have that feature. Where I sit the mind share all seems to be going to Claude though. The moat develops when people build something that only works on one - even if the others have the same features it doesn’t matter unless they’re literally binary compatible. Skills are just prompts at the end of the day with nothing more specialized than a file naming convention.
Having written several orchestrators I’ll say that the code to invoke the tool is pretty equivalent but it’s the details that matter. Exact CLI flags and json fields.
Also not like it’s a particularly good piece of tech. It was the first to show a new category. But jeebus the design and security are a nightmare. Any of the numerous other claws are better choices for anything serious.
Classic SV hubris. Talk to OpenAI people and they’re so convinced they’re untouchable, they don’t bother worrying about things like revenue, or product strategy. All they cared about was being the first to AGI. Well it looks like that isn’t happening soon enough. And now they have zero moat except brand recognition, which is quickly getting eroded.
The idea that they don’t learn from experience might be true in some limited sense, but ignores the reality of how LLMs are used. If you look at any advanced agentic coding system the instructions say to write down intermediate findings in files and refer to them. The LLM doesn’t have to learn. The harness around it allows it to. It’s like complaining that an internal combustion engine doesn’t have wheels to push it around.
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