Woah, how did I miss that?! Thanks for the heads up :)

It looks like it still doesn’t do group calls, but 1 on 1 is still great to have for sure.

Maybe I’ve only ever had good carob, but the carob cookies I made were delicious IMHO. The carob chips I used tasted like a cross between chocolate and raisins.

Ah darn, I didn’t know it was just an AI built site :(

I wouldn’t go back if they re-enabled it, this place is better now, and isn’t supporting a user hostile mega corp.

Oh it’s wasting water and electricity? The water and electricity were already wasted by training, you can’t un-waste the water or electricity.

Water and electricity are wasted running the data centers on really inefficient power generators at the plant.

The most effective supplement with the biggest impact I’ve ever tried is plain old magnesium oxide (the expensive forms are a waste of money, and you’ll actually absorb less elemental magnesium from them. Just take the oxide form with a meal to avoid the shits).

It’s difficult to get enough magnesium in most diets, and I found that ensuring adequate magnesium intake had the effect of making my mind just feel sharper (that effect is especially prominent if you’re supplementing vitamin-D as well, since that tends to use up magnesium in its conversion process, IIRC).

nothing else has had such a noticeable, non-placebo benefit (except Vitamin D if you’re deficient, which will make you crazy depressed without getting sun or supplementing).

Deltachat has an extremely smooth on boarding process and is the same app for all platforms, but it cannot do voice calls or screen share (you can leave voice messages though).

Jabber/XMPP generally has a less smooth UX, and different apps across different platforms (except the Movim client, which is a web app that works on all platforms, but doesn’t do reliable notifications on mobile).

With the Movim client, Jabber/XMPP is basically a complete Discord and Signal replacement. It can do group video calls, screensharing with audio (only with chromium based browser for now), as well as voice and text channels under different servers.

Regarding metadata, you may want to read the FAQ.

It will have forward secrecy after they finish implementing Autocrypt2.

A person also has to determine their security threat level. If they think a state actor may take a personal interest in them, then they’re probably best using in-person offline communication. If they must communicate online, then IMHO I don’t think Signal is a good choice due to it being centralized (everything goes through their servers, and they are a single entity making them easier to infiltrate or coerce by governments) and requiring you to link a personally identifying number or credit card.

If they just don’t want a corporation datamining them to sell to advertisers, Deltachat is more than good enough.

Deltachat and Jabber, both decentralized encrypted messaging apps (as opposed to Signal, which is centralized), don’t even require an email to create an account, let alone a phone number or payment.

Hacker news generally flags and shuts down posts critical of tech bros, capitalism, or the right wing.

Lobste.rs is a better alternative to HN.

Removing access to the sources giving them their opinions appears to be pretty effective at drastically reducing their focus on hating things and getting riled up. This was explored in The Brainwashing of my Dad documentary.

I was able to do this with my own mother, who only watched right-wing news from clips on YouTube. When she wasn’t at her computer at an appointment, I installed a browser add-on called Blocktube that let’s you selectively block YouTube channels or videos from popping by a list of keywords. I also then subscribed her account to left-wing news sources like pbs and more perfect union.

From that point onward, she was never recommended right-wing news or interviews, and within a few months her views on things noticeably changed, she no longer brought up all the fear-porn from fox, and even finally believed in climate change thanks to PBS Terra.

I was fortunate she didn’t watch TV, where blocking a whole station would probably be more noticeable. But for those who have the opportunity to limit parent access to right-wing poison, I can attest to its effectiveness.

Deltachat and Jabber/XMPP are good decentralized/federated alternatives to Signal.

Unfortunately it is :/

If you have a VPN and use a US server you may be able to get around it (maybe Mozilla’s free VPN in Firefox would do the trick?)

Otherwise, there’s always yarr 🏴‍☠️ :)

Fantastic book. Archive.org has a good audio book version of it for free.

The creator of Babylon 5 has recently begun uploading every episode of the show to YouTube to watch for free, they release a new ep every 3 days

For anyone who wants to give it a try, here’s the season 1 playlist: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGTv90eS-e4I

For anyone else scrolling by, you can read The Dispossessed here for free! :D

The Wing Commander movie by Chris Roberts (yeah, of Star Citizen scam artist fame).

It’s loosely based on his older Wing Commander games, and I think he funded it with some of the money Microsoft gave him to develop Freelancer.

It’s a deeply mediocre movie, but the soundtrack, in particular the main theme, was pretty darn good.

I have a pretty dim view of LLMs.

1. Simply using an AI that’s run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEO’s who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

3. I’m wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).

4. I do not think LLM’s can be “just a tool” as many claim.

5. 99% of LLM’s (the ones virtually everyone use) are trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLM’s have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.

6. Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

Virtually the entire industry is not profitable, but that current reality does not affect the massive investment money they continue to receive, as they are pitching the concept to investors that many of the free users will eventually become paying users, and that their overall userbase will continue to expand, with projections of huge profits a decade from now.

For investors, the lack of profits now is not a blaring alarm bell, because Amazon also operated without a profit for many years by undercutting their competition until the competition failed, then Amazon was able to be a monopoly and jack up their prices.

A similar thing is happening with AI companies, where the prices they are currently charging is putting them at a net loss, but each one is hoping to out survive the other so that some day they can be a semi or total monopoly, and jack the prices up on a userbase that has become totally dependent on them to do their jobs.