ArcaneChat is dope. I'm testing it out with my partner right now. The built-in Jitsi button is super helpful. My extended family (about 30 people) switched over to signal a few years ago, so there is some inertia there, but for any new chats, DeltaChat (and ArcaneChat for Android users) is what I'm going to push for.
Yeah, that is a serious problem. Thankfully, my local transit agency still offers the ability to use a card instead of an app, but you have to request it online to be sent in the mail. It took a month to get mine. Really not ideal.
Linus is definitely not American. That is no excuse he way he just ignored the dma maintainer's behavior and that is no excuse for why nobody in leadership did or said anything even after the connotation of the phrase was explained by another in the thread. The only thing that brought enough attention for any comment was marcan's responses, and Linus just basically came in and said to stop making noise.
Yeah, this looks like trying to avoid conflict by shutting down a person pushing back against bad behavior, instead of trying to mediate the situation to come to a just resolution. It's shallow and gross and not sustainable.
I've been focused, lately, on separation of concerns. Yeah, using FOSS tools is great, but I'm also asking myself how much losing a given tool will impact me if I start to rely on it.
This past weekend I finally broke away from ProtonMail. After what the CEO has been saying, and because of other annoyances like being unable to use anything but their clients, it was finally time to rip that bandaid off.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of using a standard protonmail.com email address, so now I have to tell everyone to stop using that. Also, I was a heavy user of SimpleLogin for creating email aliases for basically every service I signed up for, and now I have to switch all of those.
I should have learned this lesson when I left Google, but this time I will be using my own domain. I also took this opportunity to leave Cloudflare entirely.
Now I have a domain for my email address and my website through porkbun, but can transfer that to another registrar if they start to suck.
I use desec.io for my DNS needs instead of the built-in porkbun DNS tools to make it easier to switch to a different registrar if I need to. They're a non-profit, and it's open source software that I could potentially selfhost in the future. This also replaced Cloudflare.
I use fastmail.com for the actual email service, which let's me use the apps I like on my phone and PC to interact with email the way I want.
Fastmail also has a service like SimpleLogin, but instead I went with addy.io (also FOSS; also potentially selfhostable) with another custom domain at porkbun.
My website is a blog hosted by write.as, which is, again, built around FOSS and selfhostable software.
All of these pieces can be swapped out without affecting the others if need be, bringing switching costs to near-zero, and making it very customizable in the process.
What a shitty take. New, systemic problems put upon young people do exist and they cannot be explained away by your retelling of the tired "just stop buying avocado toast" bullshit.
On your other points: Carbon bike frames can be repaired, so even though they aren't recyclable, they can still last a long time, so they're not the worst. Electronic shifting feels a bit gimmicky to me, but all the mount points for the shifter and derailleur are standard and they can probably be swapped out for a standard cable shifter in the future without changing other parts on the bike.
Oh, I'm definitely upset about ebikes with motors and batteries integrated in the frames, with no replacement parts available. Often you can't even install used parts because the firmware needs to be flashed by a dealer for your specific bike.
I own an ebike now and I've built one in the past. The one I built had a powerful mid-drive motor and could easily have been reverted to a normal bike (I got hit by a car before I ever got to think about that) and the ebike I have now has a basic bafang hub motor with a bolt-on battery, all of which I could easily replace if they failed.
The motor controllers on both bikes are/were also able to be reflashed or replaced without going to a specific dealer.
There is no reason that companies could not design ebikes and their components to be repairable, replaceable, and reprogrammed by users except for profit, and it's gross as hell.
This is e-waste. This could just be a decent bike computer and a light that you could slap on to any bike, but they had to go and make a thing that forces me to replace the handlebars that I picked to match my body and riding style? An expensive electronic thing that i can't remove from my bike? No thanks.
First, the ESP32 only has firmware because it is a microcontroller and does not have an operating system. It is also primarily a network client that requests data from a service running on a network host. And it also acts as a server on initial boot to host a web UI for configuring WiFi credentials.
Second, Home Assistant is a whole can of worms, but big parts of that are services that run continuously on the machine you install it on that are listening for requests over the network. This is how you access the web UI from a browser. This is how you access the UI from a Home Assistant app on your phone. This is how networked IoT devices send data to Home Assistant. Home Assistant is fairly useless without these services running continuously and doing that makes the machine you run it on what we would colloquially call a "server" or "host".
That's it. That's what self-hosting is. Yes, sometimes you could be also serving data over the internet or have something to do with "the cloud", but that's not necessarily the case, and with the stuff that I host at home, often not.
Your laptop could be a server, depending on what you install on it, but this dichotomy you laid out of "either hosting is only for cloud stuff or, if you have any computer, you are always self-hosting" is just not based in reality. There are fuzzy edges to what it means to be a server, but they're not anywhere close to that fuzzy.
Also, you're making "modify the firmware" into this big monster that it is just not. You don't have to learn a programming language. You don't have to maintain a fork. You're changing one line and running a few commands. They have a tutorial that walks you through it. It's really easy.
On top of that, like I said in another comment responding to you, the need to modify firmware is temporary.
ArcaneChat is dope. I'm testing it out with my partner right now. The built-in Jitsi button is super helpful. My extended family (about 30 people) switched over to signal a few years ago, so there is some inertia there, but for any new chats, DeltaChat (and ArcaneChat for Android users) is what I'm going to push for.