I assume you’re not using iMessage anyway then because Apple’s Messages stack isn’t open source. If you’re not using iMessage anyway, it shouldn’t matter to you what Beeper Mini is doing. This app isn’t for the ultra paranoid. Neither is Google’s RCS in Google Messages. This is where Signal and Matrix would be better choices. If you are using iMessage on an Apple device, you’re choosing to trust Apple despite their app being closed source and you’re not choosing to trust Beeper, which is fine and I don’t judge you at all for that stance. But at that point, your qualms aren’t simply about Beeper Mini being closed source, the implication is that you don’t trust Beeper as a company and/or its developers which, again, is a valid stance even if it’s one I don’t share.

But I am personally pretty sure I can trust Beeper and Apple enough with my relatively meaningless conversations.

I think you got hit hard by Poe’s Law here. Except it’s more like people couldn’t tell if you were jokingly or genuinely getting your math wrong… Even after you explained you were joking lol

I would encourage people to code switch rather than adhere to one style of language over another in every case. Imho, it’s kind of problematic that language itself has become racialized in America to the point where people can actually be criticized or made fun of for speaking in the “wrong” style associated with their perceived ethnic background.

By that logic, there’s nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it’s closed source. If you don’t want to trust Beeper mini, you’ll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they’re promising to do (and you still won’t know that Apple isn’t scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it’s because I look at what they’re transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren’t going to release the source for their client ever because that’s the only way they make any money.

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Thank you for laying it all out there. It sounds like you’re doing it the right way 🙂

Thank you for providing some context for this. It kind of sounds like a fork might not have been necessary if Ernest was willing to make @melroy a maintainer. Do you know if there’s any philosophical reason he wasn’t willing to do that? Real life stuff comes and goes, but it seems silly to halt the “official” project that others are relying on and still wanting to improve upon and thereby force a fork. As it stands right now, it sounds like it will be awkward for Ernest to come back in and try to restart work on kbin and will be increasingly awkward the more that mbin progresses, becomes the standard, and the code bases diverge.

It’s kind of interesting to watch in open source which projects survive and which get forked and essentially made irrelevant. It basically becomes a referendum on the vision of the original individual or team and how well they’re serving the collective user base. If they aren’t accepting PR’s and competently managing development, they’ll likely be forked. So I’m glad to see that folks are making progress with mbin and I can’t help thinking that its entire existence is probably due to individuals not being able to agree on a roadmap for the platform. If anybody has any info on any drama that led to this, I’d be curious to read about it.

I agree, any loss of votes in a swing state could theoretically be significant.

Well it’s not really numerically the same as voting for the candidate you hate the most, it’s numerically the same as not voting. And to be honest, it really only matters if you’re in a potential swing state. And I’m saying this as someone who still votes despite having lived in a deep red state where my presidential vote always doesn’t matter (but I go anyway because down ballot votes do matter and I might as well vote the whole ballot).

What you’re describing is only possible on de-anonymized platforms that essentially have “know your customer” type policies where users have to provide some kind of proof of their identity. While I agree that there is value in social spaces where everyone generally knows the people they’re interacting with are who they say they are, I don’t think this is ever going to be feasible in a federated social platform. I think Facebook is the closest thing we have to what you’re describing, to be honest, and I believe Meta has even kicked around having a more sandboxed Instagram for minors (though I don’t use Instagram, so I’m not certain on the details there).

For me, in most cases on a platform like Lemmy, a person’s age is not something I care about. I care about what people are sharing and saying. But then again, none of my interests for online discussion at this point in my life are really age centric. I think there are clearly better platforms than Lemmy if people want to guarantee they’re only interacting within their age specific peer groups.

The event staff fucked up thinking they were ejecting some no-name punk. This young man has a platform and the ability to do damage to campaigns that are afraid to answer tough questions and who instead toss out the people asking them. He’s built up a following online and has made a bit of a name for himself in New England.

It all starts with defining what morality means. The way I would define morality is behaviors that maximize flourishing for sentient creatures and minimize suffering. While it is clearly difficult to quantify flourishing and suffering, there are behaviors that clearly cause suffering in this world and impede the opportunity for flourishing and, by the above definition of morality, are plainly immoral. The way I see it, rejecting the possibility that flourishing and suffering can be quantified at all is the only argument that can be made against moral absolutism. Everything else is just quibbling over relevant variables across the spectrum of available behaviors to determine what makes them more or less moral. There is always a behavior that is objectively the more moral choice, but it might be difficult in practice to determine which is the more moral choice due to a lack of available relevant data. The absence of said data shouldn’t be assumed to be because it doesn’t/can’t exist, but rather that it hasn’t been collected. Rejecting the idea that there is always a more moral behavior amongst several choices is the dangerous assumption, imo.

I’ve never heard a rational defense of moral relativism that made any sense. If there are no moral truths, then serial killers have done nothing wrong for example. If a moral relativist admits that there are some moral truths, then moral relativism is completely indefensible. At that point, you’re just arguing over what is and what is not a moral truth.

Yeah, I’m holding on to the lifetime grandfathered premium and don’t foresee myself using anything else until they end it.

I stopped paying for YouTube the moment Google killed Google Play Music and forced YouTube Music on me. Now Google gets no money from me and Apple does because they still offer a true music library service.

A lawsuit when 23 states were already doing it? GOP’s voter rolls are going to grow too.

This isn’t even a new phenomenon, accusations of antisemitism were also often thrown at anti-Zionists when there were plenty of good political reasons not to establish and prop up the state of Israel. (What’s also funny about that is there were/are actually antisemites who were/are in favor of getting rid of Jews from their country by exporting them to Israel.)

He probably doesn’t deserve a devil’s advocate, but that said, I’m pretty sure Louis didn’t masturbate in public, but rather during phone calls and in private in front of unconsenting or at least not explicitly consenting company, from the accounts I’ve read. I’m not defending it because it’s abusive and wrong, but it’s also not quite the same thing as masturbating in public.

Yeah, except Bernie’s supporters voted for Hillary at higher rates than Hillary folks voted for Obama, so maybe Hillary, her dumb fucking insecure email server, her lack of personality, and the DNC who helped her cheat her way through primary debates are the real ones to blame, not the progressives. She was a terrible candidate who the right hated and independents didn’t like much better and she proved she was a terrible candidate by losing to the worst Republican candidate in the last hundred years. She had all the help she should’ve needed from progressives.