pitninja

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.

I think they’re great for giving OEMs extra incentive to ensure that Linux runs well on the hardware and providing consumers a slightly cheaper option. If I knew I wasn’t going to need Windows at all, I’d definitely go the Ubuntu route, but there’s software I use that doesn’t run on WINE, so I’d personally be more inclined to get a laptop with a Windows license bundled in.

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.

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.

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.

Ah, I’ll be honest, I don’t actually read these emails closely often, but you’re right. Looking now through my inbox archive, I see that Amazon added an “I don’t know the answer” link in their email sometime between April and May of 2019. It looks like initially they had the text somewhat smaller for the “I don’t know the answer” link, but they seem to have increased the text size to match the “Answer/Respond to this question” link sometime between February and March 2020. At any rate, those emails were going out for many years before 2019 without an “I don’t know…” link and I think they could still probably make it clearer to people what they’re actually doing by posting “I don’t know” as an answer.

Yeah, I would really like to see them either stop doing that or make it very clear in their email that you should only respond if you know the answer to the question.

I would highly recommend the recent Freakonomics Radio series about whaling. It’s Episodes 549-551 and the bonus episode from 2023-08-06. If you’re firmly against killing any living creature (or at least sentient creatures), I highly doubt it will change your mind (and I don’t think that it should or that it tries to), but I also think it is really fascinating learning about the history of the whaling industry and hearing the perspective of a modern whaler in the bonus episode. Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with killing sentient creatures, it’s interesting to consider things like whether there’s a sustainable level of whaling, what a sustainable quota would look like, and how much we’re in competition with certain whale species for harvesting fish as food for our own species. I personally appreciated how unbiased Freakonomics tried to be in their discussion of the topic.

Tell me you’re Gen Z or Alpha without telling me you’re Gen Z or Alpha.

If the Boston marathon bombing had happened within a year prior to this I might understand, but come on…

If it came out today, it might hit that sweet spot of being too edgy for liberal parents and too “woke” for conservatives

If people give me shit about my Android phone, I point out that their phone can fold exactly once before they’ll need a new one. Android is still the only option for power users.

This lawsuit is not going anywhere because of Section 230.

Google Photos nags me to let it clean them up and I usually let it 🤷

While I agree with everything you’ve said, it’s also fair to acknowledge that losing one’s job unexpectedly is a disruptive life change that not everyone is adequately prepared for financially or emotionally and we can empathize with them.

Edit, seriously what have I said here that’s downvote worthy?