Counterpoint - I'm completely happy with signal. The useability, contrary to some comments here, is wonderful. In particular I love the desktop app, it was easy to get family to use and does everything I need smoothly and with good privacy.
That does describe me nicely (Well, sort of, my daily driver phone is an iPhone XR - so only _sort of_ new?). But. I also run Signal on a ~6 year old iPad, and I've not noticed it run badly there.
I haven't tried Signal on a budget grade Android phone though. I have a few Galaxy S4s I use for various odd projects, but most "modern" apps run fairly badly on those.
I'm also "looking forward" to a weekend or two's worth of frustration failing to get Signal for Linux desktop running on my PinePhone when it arrives... ;-)
My last test of Signal was some years ago on a Galaxy S3 mini. Whatsapp wasv running without big problems, Signal had sometimes hangs of two or three seconds. I now use a Galaxy S4 mini, didn't suppose that Signal is performing better now.
And all that with most features of Whatsapp missing(on my last test). Currently I don't see a reason to go from Whatsapp to Signal. Encryption is the same and Moxie see's the Signal-Network as his own where no other client has to connect. So the trust in him is better than in Facebook, but not as good as it could be.
I'm not a WhatsApp user, but the circumstantial evidence of every single non technical friend I have happily using WhatsApp every day strongly suggests its not a complete UX shitfight.
I like Telegram more than either Signal and Whatsapp (security and privacy issues side)
Whatsapp sucks for me because of an unusable desktop client. Their backups system is extremely slow. I've found that messages get sent and received slowest on whatsapp when comparing with other messaging apps even if the gap is almost inconsequential. There's a woeful lack of features that I love on telegram that make the app very barebones and dull. You cannot edit messages. The replying UX is a bit irritating. There's tons of stuff but this is a small gist
WhatsApp's desktop version is crippled because it requires connectivity to your phone in order to use it. I believe they're working on a client that doesn't require that, but it's not here yet.
I have been trying the beta and it's pretty decent. Still alternate between signal, telegram and whatsapp for different groups/people, but the beta definitely seems better that what was before.
Moved to Signal from whatsapp, for me (and very happy to acknowledge others have different needs and likes) signal is way better than whatsapp. Yes, I've a modern smartphone but one of my family group is on an iphone 6 is perfectly happy.
I watched a project where the starting idea was to make and IDE for lawyers, applying the many learnings from modern IDEs including autocompletion, structure the document like code, etc. The main challenge was to get lawyers to adopt and move away from MS word. It ended up applying that approach to tools and document management for lawyers: https://tryprose.com/home
“The principle of unrestricted linking between websites is fundamental to search and coupled with the unmanageable financial and operational risk if this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,”
That's a big threat, but pretty risky if their bluff is called because I think that might reveal that other companies could fill the search need if google vacates the space.
Other companies already do provide search tools. They're widely regarded as not being as good as Google's. Since other search companies are not covered by this code because they are not dominant, they will have an incentive to remain non-dominant, which implies that they will have an incentive to not significantly improve their algorithm.
Obviously leaving the market will not be great for Google, and staying in the market will not be great for Google. This is from their perspective an entirely crappy situation.
Moreover, the entire situation for Australian web users will be harmed by this.
But the fact of the matter is, the Australian government doesn't care about Australia web users, Australian businesses, or American web search companies. They do not care about free markets or equitable remuneration.
Their primary interest is in a certain American media company, because to get the American citizen who heads that American media company on your bad side means you lose government.
> How? There are other search engines to use. I don't use Google search. I haven't missed it.
Well, I think there's a lot of disagreement about whether DDG or Bing are adequate. I use DDG most of the time, only rarely searching standard Google (tho often searching Google Scholar). If Google disappeared, I'd be fine; I'd simply get more precise with my searches.
The reason I claim it will harm Australian web users is because I have argued that it will motivate web search providers to make their product no more competitive than the market average. If their product is more attractive than anyone else's, then they risk becoming dominant and subject to the restriction. Consequently, the search engine space in Australia will always lag significantly compared to the space in other countries.
It's not the absence of Google Search that will harm Australia, it is the presence of a rule that makes exceptionalism costly.
We’re in the midst of a mass exodus from whatsapp to signal.
If google pulled out the same would occur.
This is a battle between monopolistic titans (google and news Corp). If google pulls out and news corp misses out on this new revenue source, I feel thats the best of both worlds.
> We’re in the midst of a mass exodus from whatsapp to signal.
Don't you think this is just in the tech tech world? The only time I've heard a non tech person talk about signal, it was as "an app where you buy weed". :-/
Is be surprised if more than 1% of users hence left WhatsApp.
A free search engine operating under that law would have to have to be filled with allot more ads to recuperate the costs of showing links.
Seams easier to just stop indexing Australian websites.
It's not a question of indexing Australian websites - be clear about this.
In Australia, they cannot provide a search facility that shows news - whether domestic or international - if they don't sign up to the code. So they cannot provide results from the NYT or Deutsche Welle in their search results that are accessible from Australia.
What I don't get is why must Google Search completely shut down to fight this law. Can't they just stop crawling news sites that complain about revenue sharing?
There’s the restrictions on serving any news that others have mentioned, but the proposed code also requires them to advise the media organizations of any change to their algorithm that could affect the media companies at least 14 days in advance of that change. For a company that doesn’t give anyone a heads-up about changes coming, let almone specifics of the change and how it might affect their property, that’s enormous.
They could go down that path. But the law prohibits linking to news in general, including international news that is unrelated to Australia. It is vague enough to likely include blog content as "news". Should Google accidentally link to something that is considered news, then that opens them up to serious fines.
It would require an incredibly intelligent algorithm to filter all of that kind of content out.
I've said this elsewhere[0], but as I see it Google no longer simply provides links to the content, it also provides substantial excerpts. In that way they are effectively copying the original works.
[1] Added in edit: squiggleblaz[2] correctly notes[3] that it's not plagiarism, since Google is not passing off the words as their own. It's more accurately a form of fraud, or perhaps copyright infringement. Copyright laws allow for short snippets to be quoted as "fair use" (or similar) and so far the quoting by Google has been regarded as legitimate. Perhaps that needs to change.
It's not plagiarism. Words have meanings. Plagiarism is when you take someone else's work and pass it off as your own (or an earlier work and pass it off as new); it as a form of fraud.
This is closer to copyright infringement, although so far it has been regarded as legitimate.
>Copyright laws allow for short snippets to be quoted as "fair use" (or similar) and so far the quoting by Google has been regarded as legitimate. Perhaps that needs to change
From my observations Google is trying to pull out the answer you are looking for so you don't have to visit the source website, seen it with Stack Overflow answers , or list of commands to run to do X, or sometimes it can understand questions like "how I do X" and finds the correct forum post and the answer with the steps recommended by users to run.
The end result is less people are visiting the original page, so it would be similar with Google just cloning the entire Web and all the pages you browse will be on Google servers.
Australians being Australians, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Google pulling out simply led to VPN subscriptions spiking.
It's been a while but Australia used to be in a position where Australians were hungry for US-made media (TV shows, movies) but only received it several days (TV) or weeks to months (movies) after their US release. Piracy was crazy rampant through this time. It wasn't just the tech-savvy folks doing it, even the elderly would know someone who could get them a DVD of some new movies for the kids.
So circumvention of idiotic geoblocks aren't anything new.
Too late. When there is a mandatory requirement to share data with Facebook that is a hard no regardless of the details. I'd be happy to pay or get ads within reason, but to monetize my privacy, no way.
My user experience on Signal has been excellent so far, family switched without difficulty.
Great advice. The goal I set myself is consistency of doing any exercise, this builds, eventually, habits and over time you can gradually increase the quality/amount/whatever.
There is a huge variation in people's physical capacity as well as 'motivation' - find out what works for your body by trying different things and finding out what you can do consistently. Consistency as a focus helps avoid a big limiter which is injury, which often comes from doing too much too soon. Be prepared that this process might take a long time.
I love this style of physics using simple clever experiments to get new insights into seemingly understood systems. To my delight the original paper appears not be be paywalled: https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.194... now I just need to find time to read it.
Definitely. Get advice from a variety of people with different styles/backgrounds then process that to make your own decisions. Even the most amazing investor will give advice that is wrong for you at times. Great investors respect that.
My other additional advice for founders is get support from other entrepreneurs at a similar stage - that peer support is super helpful especially on bad days!
From afar, it seems to me like the big problem in US policing is a lack of calm professionalism. The de-escalation approach in the article would to me but just one aspect of taking a professional approach where safety and following rules and best practices is paramount (and prioritised over 'winning' against criminals).
I have had to patrol streets in Iraq during the surge in 2007, It was dangerous, but our ROE had escalations rules and everyone patrolled at a low ready with their helmets off. The intent was to make us a boring part of the background rather than an antagonist, and to make us look like we didn't want to be there as much as they didn't want us there.
Cop's look more and more like soldiers and I think you're right about the 'winning' being the main goal.
Where i live, the cops are very tacticool, even though we have effective gun control and hardly any civilian vs police violence.
All i think about is how much my back hurts now from carrying all that shit when I was in the military.
This is one thing I keep hearing from service members, that the rules of engagement are much more stringent and measured in the armed forces compared to standard LEOs.
What were some of the concrete rules/policies that you found effective overseas that could be effective here? I wish we as a society talked in more concrete terms around this topic.
I don't have the ROE cards anymore, but generally there was a 'wartime' and 'police or peace keeping'
In war like operations you'd still follow the rules of war, but generally you were shooting first to take objectives, there was a lot of latitude.
In peace keeping and non warlike, everything was about a force continuum.
- Ie we will patrol with weapons slung over our shoulders, with the weapons at 'action' (cocked but safe) and hands by our sides.
- If things change we actively patrol with our weapons (Still at action)-
- then you get to pointing weapons (action)
- cocking weapons (for direct crowd control, kinda silly because you lose a round at with this action but it makes the point you ain't stuff about)
- Then there's pointing with safety off, and closely followed by firing at people. (A lot is happening to get here in 'police' or 'peace keeping' scenarios)
Also our ROE had specifics such as, if your are engaged by IED or Ambush you can fire when fired upon but you can't fire at suspected targets (Like anyone on a cell phone), you have to confirm the threat. Which is pretty reasonable but in war like operations you may just fire at positions of cover because there could be enemy waiting there and you're generally trying to suppress an area. You don't want to do that in a heart's and minds kinda fight.
Anyway, I can't remember them all and they have probably changed over the last decade. But those are the main points and generally we didn't make the first move. we just waited.
I remember being shouted at by some kids and young guys for like an hour and just waiting them out. It was very frustrating but my rifle and grenades would have just created bigger issues.
Back during the 2007, when you where in Iraq, I always cmpared US forces to European forces and, yes, European police. I thought, back then, it would be best to leave policing to the police. Mainly due to training, when you are trained for war, I assumed you would be more likely to act that way.
Now, it seems that I misjudged it. What say is basically shedding a very bad light at LE in the US, when even the military, in Iraq of all places, had better ROEs for policing than the actual police.
Maybe it is related to looking like a soldier, acting like a soldier, without being a soldier. No idea, all I can say is that I don't like the situation at all. Let's hope nobody is deploying the armed forces.
I have always suspected that US police are shunted into sub-optimal patterns because there are so many guns here that the odds a simple interaction will involve a firearm are much higher than they are in less-well-armed societies. Does anybody know if I'm right about that?
That doesn't mean that they can't do more de-escalation or take other steps, but the high prevalence of guns does seem like it would be a contributing factor.
(I realize this touches a hot topic (guns) but it's an honest question, and sympathetic to law enforcement.)
> will involve a firearm are much higher than they are in less-well-armed societies. Does anybody know if I'm right about that?
Switzerland (disclaimer; I'm Swiss) has also lots of weapons around, but if the police are ever shooting someone it's usually big news with investigations on whether it was really necessary.
From my laymen point of view, police training and holding them accountable to their actions is probably even a bigger factor than gun availability (although this is certainly a factor too). If I'm not mistaken, Swiss police training strongly encourages to back off if someone draws a weapon, trying to keep it cool, talk softly/slowly etc. It seems that in the US, the first hint of a weapon will result in drawn weapons by police and a 'drop your weapon'-shouting-contest; that's at least what seems to often happen in footage that ends up in the news where something goes wrong and someone ends up being dead.
Edit: One of the more memorable examples I saw was a video via NYT, where some guy was being arrested, tried to adjust his pants and was immediately being shot because the officer thought he was going for a gun. This is absolutely unimaginable in Switzerland; I would have to look it up for the facts but I think to remember a case where someone was shot holding (and threatening with) a fake-gun, and the officer who did so went to jail if I remember correctly.
Isn't it quite difficult to get a carry permit for a gun in Switzerland though? Making it not that likely that a random citizen the police officer encounters will actually have a loaded gun.
There is mandatory military service for males, so you actually see a lot of guns being open-carried by people heading home for the weekend on public transport etc.
So the question here is: Would the response have been the same if all the heavily armored folk were black?
As a born and raised American, I'm inclined to think not. I could be wrong of course, but everything that I've seen and experienced growing up and living in the US has led me to believe otherwise.
I want to think that more protestors being armed would make a difference, but ultimately I believe it will just lead to escalation and more deaths by cop (and/or the national guard, as we're finding out in Louisville currently).
"Would the response have been the same if all the heavily armored folk were black?"
There's precedent for this. In the 60s the black panthers open carried in California to protest, of course, police misconduct. Reagan signed in the Mulford Act [1], banning open carry in CA.
If BLM want stricter gun control laws (not sure if they do), all they need to do is arm themselves at protests.
In a historical precedent that doesn't particularly clarify the situation, in 1967 the Black Panthers were able to enter the California state capitol building with guns. [1]
Apparently they were let in, then arrested, then released without charge and their guns returned as they hadn't broken the law. However, they were there protesting against the 'Mulford Act' that intended to disarm them, and it was subsequently passed. So they didn't get shot, but they didn't get what they wanted either, and they did get banned from doing it again.
Of course, there's a lot more detail than I've put into this post, and society was pretty different at the time. Reagan supporting gun control? The NRA as a sporting organisation that supported gun control? And the panthers were Marxist? So I'm not sure it's a very instructive example about how the same thing would go today.
A few of those protestors were chased through a road block and shot at, and one was killed. It is ironic that you are calling the police killing someone handling with "kid gloves" in a thread about deescalation between protestors and police.
(Don't get me wrong, what those protestors did was senseless and the epitome of entitlement.)
> A few of those protestors were chased through a road block and shot at, and one was killed.
This is a highly misleading way of describing the situation.
The police set up a traffic stop to arrest them. They fled the stop. Finicum told the police he wasn't going to surrender and that they'd have to shoot him. He reached for his gun in his pocket, and then he was shot.
If black men were only being killed by police after fleeing arrest, refusing to surrender, challenging the police to shoot them, and then reaching for a gun...then we wouldn't have much of a police violence problem.
Given that one of the subjects of the protests is whether police can murder on mere suspicion of a weapon, I suspect not. The chances of a comparable hypothetical BLM armed occupation being allowed to live are small. If they surrendered they would likely be shot in the back of the head while handcuffed.
Of course you’re right. It’s why people-police statements are constantly pointing out how these guys “put their life in the line every day” in reference to the dangerous criminals out there (while ignoring that most crimes are non-violent offenses, or at least offense that don’t involve a gun). The 2A people want the government to fear its citizen’s (in their mind this somehow prevents tyranny) and then complain when the state responds to violence with fear and violence.
It’s almost as if the American gun lobby wants both sides to need lots of guns and bullets for some reason...
Their aggressive approach is difficult to justify with statistics.
Despite the much higher relative levels, the amount of gun violence in the US still isn't all that high in an absolute sense, and police are not particularly the target of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
200 cities have had protests. Out of the probably hundreds of thousands of people protesting, guns have been responsible for one death of an officer (as far as I know)
