Poor man’s TOR :).

It’s not completely inconceivable that ISPs using CG-NAT could keep logs that would allow these users to be deanonymized, but it’s an extra step and they might not have enough information between the Reddit and ISP logs to do it. But… they’d have to be talking to the ISPs anyway, and the ISPs will probably cooperate?

There’s surprisingly few standalone email clients for normal people on desktop platforms as far as I know.

There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.

I mean, I wouldn’t exactly call a company with 1000 employees “small”. It’s not the behemoth that something like Google is, but like… that’s a good chunk of people.

That’s fair, but IRC also tends to leak information about users to everybody. They’re maybe bad in slightly different ways, but frankly if you care about privacy that much you probably shouldn’t use either, at least not with additional protections.

How has fame changed you?

Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.

There’s operations that treat bits like floats and operations that treat them like various kinds of ints, but the meaning of bits is in the eye of the beholder. There’s even good examples of mixing and matching integer and floating point operations to clever effect, like with the infamous fast inverse square root. I feel like people often think mathematical objects mean something beyond what they are, when often math is kind of just math and it is what it is (if that makes sense… it’s kind of like anthropomorphizing mathematical objects and viewing them through a specific lens, as opposed to just seeing them as the set of axioms that they are). That’s kind of how I feel with this stuff. You can treat the bits however you want and it’s not like integer operations and bitwise operations have no meaning on supposedly floating point values, they do something (and mixing these different types of operations can even do useful things!), it just might not be the normal arithmetic operations you expect when you interpret the number as a float (and enjoy your accidental NaNs or whatever :P).

The difference of static and dynamic typing being when you perform the type checking is partially why I consider it to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction for a language (obviously decidable static type checking is limited, though), and projects like typescript have shown that you can successfully bolt on a static type system onto a dynamic language to provide type checking on specific parts of a program just fine. But obviously this changes what you consider to be a valid program at compile time, though maybe not what you consider to be a valid program overall if you consider programs with dynamic type errors to be invalid too (which there’s certainly precedence for… C programs are arguably only real C programs when they’re well-defined, but detecting UB is undecidable).

I kind of feel like “untyped” is a term that doesn’t really have a proper definition right now. As far as I can tell when people say “untyped” they usually mean it as a synonym for whatever they consider “dynamically typed” to mean (which also seems to vary a bit from person to person, haha). Sometimes people say assembly is untyped exactly for this reason, but you could also consider it to have one type “bits” and all of the operations just do things on bits (although, arguably different sized registers have different types). Similarly, people sometimes consider “dynamically typed languages” to just be “unityped” (maybe monotyped is more easily distinguished from untyped, haha) languages at their core, and if you squint you can just think of the dynamic type checks as a kind of pattern matching on a giant sum type.

In some sense values always have types because you could always classify them into types externally, and you could even consider a value to be a member of multiple types (often programming languages with type systems don’t allow this and force unique types for every value). Because you could always classify values under a type it feels kind of weird to refer to languages as being “untyped”, but it’s also kind of weird to refer to a language as “typed” when there isn’t really any meaningful typing information and there’s no type system checking the “types” of values. Types sort of always exist, but also sort of only exist when you actually make the distinctions and have something that you call a “type system”… In some sense the distinction between static and dynamic typing is sort of an arbitrary implementation detail too (though, of course, it has impacts on the experience of programming, and the language design makes a bit of a difference in terms of what’s decidable :) (and obviously the type system can determine what programs you consider to be “valid”)… But you can absolutely have a mix of static type checking and dynamic typing, for instance… It’s all a little more wishy washy than people tend to think in my opinion).

I get that people aren’t a fan of Google, and I’m not either, but this is a reasonable option that would be better than what the vast majority of people are doing now…

Yeah, I can agree with that. I definitely feel like Joel is quite a lot angrier and scarier than Din, which is a pretty big difference. Joel is also far more reluctant and tries very hard not to be overly caring or become attached to Ellie, which is quite different than how Din acts overall. So, fair enough, I think I feel the same way :). But they are weirdly similar rolls at a surface level at least! I don’t think I’ve seen much of Pedro’s other rolls, but I really liked them as Joel (and Bella as Ellie), felt like they had really good chemistry and it was cool to watch their relationship develop on screen. I didn’t really like The Mandalorian all that much, everything felt a bit… stiff? None of the characters really seemed to stick around that long and it felt kind of like just watching a bunch of different short films. I think that was kind of what they were going for originally, but it felt a bit weird and disjointed with how short the seasons were, and when they started introducing more continuity it just felt like there wasn’t enough of a foundation to really support that to me. Still, it’s a really technically impressive show and they definitely picked some really hard problems to solve. Just having your main character always wear a mask and the other main character being a weird alien baby makes it a lot harder to convey emotion and stuff, so it’s impressive how well they handled all of that!

Arguably their characters in The Last of Us and The Mandalorian are relatively similar, at least I thought so, but I have only seen two seasons of The Mandalorian.

I feel almost entirely the opposite about this. I feel like adding a display or inputs is fine, but if you want to say you have Doom running on a toaster then it damn well better be running on a chip that’s actually in the toaster! If you just stuff a Pi in a toaster then it’s not really the toaster running Doom at all, it’s a Raspberry Pi in a toaster suit. I feel like “can it run Doom” is interesting when it shows that common devices have more powerful chips in them than you realize and that somebody hacked it to run arbitrary code. It’s sort of an interesting metric to show how far we’ve come with computers, and how optimized Doom can be… I personally don’t find it that interesting if you’re just shoving a single board computer into a weird form factor, and it always just feels like clickbait to me.

Am I the only one super unimpressed by most “it can run doom” things? It’s either some beefy arm CPU or a total hack where it isn’t really running doom and they shoved a raspberry pi in it or something.

It’s also not necessarily that simple. You need space to route the wires for the port… You could potentially do it, but you might not have space for cameras or speakers, for instance. I suspect something like this wouldn’t work for iPhones with Face ID for instance (though maybe you could push the port to the side a bit). It’s probably not worth the compromises for most people, especially since, let’s be honest, USB-C and lightning both suck for headphones anyway. It’s just not a good enough connection in my experience.

I’m fine without the headphone jack to be honest… I kind of miss it, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy with my wireless headphones. But! Just make the phone thicker and get rid of the camera bump! I don’t like camera bumps!

Wait… was this ever good? I hate it so much on my TV.

I mean sure, but realistically if you’re worried about the government knowing when you received a push notification you should be worried about your ISP or cell provider being able to provide that information as well. Hiding this metadata completely from the outside world is really hard. You can obfuscate it with garbage packets (e.g., signal could randomly send you push notifications when you don’t have any new messages giving you plausible deniability, or maybe signal could add some random delays to push notifications to make correlation of senders harder), or you can try to hide by not using push and connecting over Tor or something, but I’m not sure the government knowing when you connect to Tor is much better than them knowing when you receive a push notification, haha.

I’m personally not too worried about this particular metadata. I can imagine situations where it could be problematic (maybe you can use timing to guess whether two people are messaging each other), but I think it’s essentially the least valuable information you can leak from a messaging service, and I think mitigating against it isn’t super easy if you consider the whole network to be adversarial. There’s definitely things you can do, but they all have tradeoffs.

What metadata are you worried about specifically?

The signal servers will absolutely have public and static IP addresses. You would not be able to connect to them reliably if they could change at any time and you had to rely upon DNS updates to find the server. AWS is not magic.

And yes, AWS has IP ranges allocated to it that they pull their public IPs from, that’s all that link is talking about — this page even provides the context that the IP ranges are available in order to identify which traffic is coming from AWS in order to allow / disallow it. Of course the AWS IP allocations won’t tell you which IP is associated with which service (and indeed many IPs, particularly in the IPv6 space, are probably not in use at all).

There’s not enough unique IP addresses to distinguish Signal servers

Why? Yes, IPv4 address exhaustion is a thing, and yes AWS only has a slice of IPv4 addresses to give, but you absolutely can get static public facing IPs from AWS that will be unique to your server. You can even pay for an elastic IP so you can hold a particular address and move it between instances. There is no way Signal does not do this.

Signal has native support for proxying via Tor in that case.

Yes, though the use case is mostly for getting around censorship. Realistically if you don’t want the government to know you’re using Signal… Do you want them to know you use Tor?