MonoGame/XNA used to be more relevant 10 years ago, but not so much any more (funnily enough, in large part because Unity ate their lunch).

Anyone can build an implementation of the Signal client, but few do already because Signal actively works to prevent them from working with the Signal infrastructure, and likely will continue to do so. It’s one of the more common complaints about Signal, but it was built on the assumption that centralized services would be easier to use and to make private if the platform holder wanted, as well as more robust against attacks. They could well be wrong, and people just haven’t thought of and deployed the right tech, but it’s neither here nor there; I’m doubtful they can be convinced on this, and I’d doubt they’d be made to open up anyway by this regulation, meaning they’re not obligated to.

Awaken from thy slumber XMPP! Bring us new and better implementations and standards, and the network effect we once enjoyed now solidified by law.

I’ve never used Edge — is it really that bad?

A bit over a year ago, I tried writing on Medium, and what I found was no, not really anyway. Medium was putting the soft paywall on all of my posts, without me asking or benefiting from it other than hosting, though I could choose to make them hard paywalled. It was my impression at the time that they would only let you unpaywall your articles on there if you paid them that ransom, instead of every reader (by being a member). You could argue that the authors choose to post there when there are alternatives anyway, so it’s still on the authors (and I do).

The article indicated that, apparently, Shorts is even more unprofitable than regular YouTube. So they don’t even have that going for them

I’m guessing it’s also not feasible to get her a visa on the other side, meaning nowhere to go. I also wouldn’t be surprised if her family being more closely watched and targeted if they leave isn’t also part of why they feel they can’t.

McBane thats the joke.gif

That’s a bit cruel to Gary, Indiana, don’t you think?

The attackers are meme stock traders.

A game where using the in-build chat is a bannable offense.

Vivaldi is fairly nice, but it’s another Chromium. Similar to Brave, they’ve said they won’t be including the Topics API, so it doesn’t quite feed into the monoculture. (Disappointingly, they seem like they won’t be disabling WEI, Google’s latest land grab. Admittedly, for understandable reasons that mirror the original DRM for the web a decade ago, the blunt fact is that they seem like they’ll go along with it anyway.) Considering the team is (supposedly) largely shared from some people that used to develop their own engine (Presto, before Opera switched to Chromium), I could also believe they could (possibly would) hard fork Chromium if they felt it necessary. If this is enough for you, then I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time with it, and I’ve enjoyed it well enough when I’ve tried it. Personally, I don’t daily it.

When I worked delivery, at multiple places, we did in fact not see a dime of this fee. Got chewed out by customers a couple of times over it though.

I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.

Most modern devices can manage the battery for you pretty well, helping with any harm it might do. But even then, it’s less bad for the battery than deep discharges and recharges (where the battery does get low). It’s honestly probably fine.