Wise fits the bill.

Incredibly prescient. Although micropayments are still not a thing.

Recently I used it (some free-tier DuckAI model, not Claude) to write a Python script for pasting PNGs into PDFs (complete with Tk interface) while applying a whole bunch of custom transformations. Simple enough, but a total chore with all the back-and-forth of searching for relevant unfamiliar libraries and syntax checking and troubleshooting. Inevitably it would have taken me the whole afternoon by hand. With AI I knocked it out in 25 minutes. That was my epiphany moment.

Since then I’ve noticed a general problem with AI coding. It almost always introduces too much complexity, which I then have to waste time untangling (and often just understanding) before I can proceed. Whereas if I had done it “my way” from the start I might have got there earlier. But I figure this problem is kinda on me.

I’m a introvert even in Finnish standards lol.

“How can you tell if a Finn is an extrovert? While talking to you, he looks at your shoes and not his own.” Boom! You’ve probably heard it already.

depression

I’d be depressed if I had to endure the darkness of a Finnish winter.

They understood it, didn’t care. Meh. Fuck them, I guess lol.

TBH in principle I’m ready to give up on the Whatsapp boycott, it’s just so costly socially. I’ve lost out on a ton of connections at this point. Maybe nothing would have come of them but it’s such a high price to pay for a principle. And after all I use Telegram so I’m hardly pure.

BUT there’s a deal-breaker: WA demands physical access to a SIM, i.e. you can’t sign up with another number or even continue to use it without the ongoing SIM permission. This is just so outrageous (no other apps do it), and anyway I often change SIMs because of travel. The only workaround is to sign up for a business account (yes seriously) with a landline number, but if you try any funny business (like using a virtual landline number) you will get banned - and indeed I got banned! What a nightmare this damn app is. And also the dumbest name ever.

Whatsapp > Telegram tho, Telegram isn’t encrypted by default

This argument I have never found convincing. For all its faults Telegram is open source. Nothing made by Meta is. When they say “it’s encypted and we promise there’s no backdoor”, we are taking their word for it. I am not a cynical person but I can think of a thousand companies more trustworthy than Meta.

Uncanny. All of that is really close to my experience (I like to think I’m not bitter and miserable but I suspect you’re not either - just introverted or on the spectrum).

If I’m not important enough to my friends and family for them to install a easy to set up app, then I guess I never was that important to them.

This is the standard argument and it’s powerful. Problem is, it can easily be turned around: “if I’m not important enough for them to install this completely ubiquitous app that everybody is already using, then obviously they don’t care much about me”. Conundrum! The only way to “win” here is by playing the ethics card. But alas that argument is just not well understood by most people.

As I already mentioned, I already do not use Whatsapp. That is a massive sacrifice where I am. You may not be aware of this (I’m guessing American), but in western Europe almost everybody is now using Whatsapp for pretty much everything. Businesses are replacing the phone and email with it. The situation is even worse in Latin America.

If you meet a new social contact and you don’t have Whatsapp, that’s likely it, you will not be keeping in contact with that person. Typically they have Telegram installed but hardly use it (so the app gets killed and they won’t be notified of your message). As for Signal and the rest, most people haven’t even heard of them. I speak from experience. It’s a disaster and I worry the people who populate this forum (i.e. Americans who still use SMS) are not familiar with how dire the situation now is elsewhere in the world.

Seems a good summary even if I didn’t watch the vid. We’ve heard these talking points a million times by now.

But I’d say the problem is not that so much that it’s paranoid as that it’s unrealistic. A messenger is not a weather app. You can’t just “change” it, you first need to ask everybody else in the world to change theirs too. Which obviously isn’t gonna happen.

Just my Whatsapp abstinence alone is costing me dearly socially. Without Telegram it would be straight to the hermitage. Very few normies use even Signal, let alone all the weird and wonderful “even more private” alternatives whose names I never bother to try to remember.

This advice is completely disconnected from the reality of anyone who has, or wants to have, a social life.

First, why jump straight to insulting accusations of bad faith? Why not just be civil and respond politely to the argument made? i.e. as you did in the 3rd sentence of your post.

The web, by definition, is open source (PS: notwithstanding Wasm and unreadable minification). That is not the case of the vast majority of mobile apps. We have few means of checking what they’re up to besides traffic analysis and trusting their creators. Apps can use lower-level device APIs than web apps and they frequently demand access to them without justification. Apps are distributed by app stores, which are under the thumb of the corporate mobile OSs. They are currently turning the screws using threats of device attestation, putting the future of the open app store F-Droid in doubt.

There are reasons that tech giants and developers alike are constantly pushing us to use apps and not the web. Disappointed (not to mention surprised) to see that some members of this forum seem to be with them.

Well done for being honest and don’t be discouraged by the (predictable) hate and scorn you’re getting for your efforts. Ahh, social media! If you had said all this in person to them, these same people would be pushing back with civility and human decency, but with the barrier of a screen they feel empowered to shout and mock. We still haven’t learned.

OK but I tend to think that this kind of hopeless cynicism kinda risks being self-fulfilling. There are fundamental differences between Russia and the West, ordinary people (especially in Western countries) do have some agency, and nothing about the future is set in stone.

A logical next step in Russia’s descent into the worst kind of police state. It will never quite be totalitarian, that era is over and anyway the Kremlin is too cynical and incompetent to actually control people’s thoughts. The model is obviously China. China has successfully locked down its internet and every dictator in the world has noticed.

Exactly. Let’s wait and see.

Source is Meta itself, so perhaps not a good overview of the story.

The two third parties mentioned have not even launched yet. .And the “Join the waitlist” buttons on their websites look suspiciously similar.

Would be interesting to understand better what’s going on here. Lots of us are waiting patiently for a way to interact with the billions of Whatsapp users without accepting (as they carelessly do) a contractual relationship with Meta.

Yes, this was predictable. Breaking encryption was always a non-starter, it makes no sense even in theory. The real threat has always been client-side spyware. And technical fixes (like FOSS OSs) are band-aids, in the end they won’t be enough, given that computing solutions will always be tailored to the majority, and most people just don’t care much about privacy.

This is going to be an uphill battle given the monoculture of the mobile OS landscape - i.e. it’s a duopoly of corporate giants vulnerable to arm-twisting by governments. It’s winnable IMO but only if people resist cynicism. In the West we still have a measure of individual freedom, this is absolutely not the case in much of the world. Many people, especially younger people, seem to be unaware of this. If we’re gonna save these freedoms while it’s still possible we need to wake up and get more involved in politics. Unfortunately there’s no other choice.

Years (and years) ago, I used it for a while. I kept getting locked out of my email (GMX) account. The messages DeltaChat creates are obviously full of cyphertext, and to a spam filter they look very spammy.

The DeltaChat concept is an interesting idea, and clearly a sort of progress, but it’s also a bit of a hack. As a stopgap solution, fine, but I say the day we can replace Signal is the day that Matrix becomes usable. I wish that day would come sooner.

Because, as I said, the demands are not so much theirs as those of the people who vote for them.

That’s what I once thought but I’ve changed my mind. Concern about porous borders is not a right-wing media invention, it’s about values, it’s deeply held, and until governments get a hold of the problem they’re going to fall one by one to idiotic populists. And populist governments will be far worse for our privacy among much else.

More likely ID cards are (and have always been) the only surefire way to make his country less attractive to illegal immigrants, and rampant illegal immigration has become the defining issue in the country’s politics. Whether we like it or not, the Anglosphere’s generally lax controls on identity are a major pull factor in irregular migration.