I'm holding off on Fluxer until they decide how they're going to implement federation

Seems wise. They seem competent in the front-end/client space and complete amateurs in the (difficult) protocol space. There is no example of successful tech (that I know of) that successfully added federation/P2P after the fact. It's not an afterthought, it probably won't ever happen.

If you want notes "sometimes on the web, sometimes local first", and possibly more than just notes (with the tools to extend into an actual knowledge base), you might be better served by https://triliumnotes.org/

Don't do Element, Matrix is a nightmare (and a significant commitment) to self host. Other servers (recently, continuwuity) are a bit better on that front, but then you run into compatibility issues and edge cases as a forever second-tier citizen.

My advice is to just go with XMPP and ejabberd, and you will find clients for all kinds of usages and people (a free-er WhatsApp takes you to Conversations/Quicksy/Cheogram/Monocles/Monal, a better banquet/IRC-style rooms takes you to gajim/fluux, social networking and group calling takes you to Movim, etc).

Personally my needs are covered by Monocles on Android, Gajim on the PC, and Movim on occasions. Using multiple clients around the same protocol and account is a strength, not a weakness.

To add to the collection of chat apps enabling that, there is XMPP, too: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.monocles.chat/

I mean, the elephant in the room is the blatant licence violations orchestrated by LLM vendors. If your codebase is GPLed and serves to feed a LLM, it should extend to all the code produced by that LLM.

For decades, the FOSS community has been at each others throats about those licenses, and now that we contemplate the largest IP theft/reappropriation of all time, it's like, not big a deal. I can't tell that I'm a prolific OSS contributor, but enough to understand the sentiment: "I put code in the open to help humanity, not to make oligarchs better off with a newfound mandate to pollute".

A more accurate title could be "Privacy is Priceless, but Centralization is Expensive": with the era of cheap money coming to an end, grows a lot of uncertainty regarding the future of some large internet services. Signal is no exception and this emphasises the importance of federated alternatives (XMPP, fediverse, …) for the good health of the future internet.

A truly better signal is one that's not using a centralized service.

People don't choose, people use whatever most people around them use. Whatsapp and telegram are both centralized, and shouldn't be trusted because, by the nature of it, they can (and eventually will) turn user-hostile.

Messengers come and go, if we really want to make some progress in this area, we should embrace federated and p2p protocols as the logical evolution. Anything else is just wasting time and user privacy.

Or, you know, just use key auth only and fail2ban. Putting sshd behind another port only buys you a little time.

France, Germany and The Netherlands are co-developing an open source suite of collaborative components for their government employees. La suite numérique is the French version, Opendesk is the German, and Mijn Bureau is the Dutch. I find that pretty amazing and I wouldn't have hoped for anything better!

Telegram never was private, group chats never were encrypted (and that's not an opinion: the feature simply is missing). If anything, they are just removing their false and deceiving claims. That they remained there for so long is something I can't wrap my head around.

😂

IMO Scala is one of the best programming languages out there. I know it might sound like zealotry because Scala is already way past its hype curve, and the "Through of disillusionment" already caught a fair bunch in ways that more recent and hyped languages haven't yet, but it's not only still very relevant today, but more and more so (IMO).

So, what's to like about Scala? Like most of things, those are two-edged swords:

1- multi paradigm

To my knowledge Scala is the only language that unifies object oriented programming and functional programming so seamlessly. You can pick the right tool for the job, opting for imperative-style where it's fit and choosing elegant composable/curried when appropriate, without having to bend your mind as much as you would with Haskell/clojure/OCaml/F#/… where things are more one-sided. The downside is that different programmers will have different takes and preferences as to what's the most adequate style might be, and a same codebase might look very different from one place to the other.

2- type system

Scala has one of the most advanced type system. Nothing Rust or Kotlin might match any time soon, or ever. Scala's implementation of GADTs, combined with its powerful pattern matching enables concise and idiomatic abstractions. Many of which are zero-cost thanks to things like opaque types, inlining, tail recursion, … There is a whole area of the Scala community striving to make invalid states irrepresentable (your code won't compile if your instance of a pizza is missing a topping), which makes such libraries self-documenting and easy to use. The downside is that nothing prevents you from climbing the abstraction ladder and encoding everything in the type system when all you need is a simple trait/generic, and that's a human/complexity management problem tooling and the language can hardly mitigate.

3- scalable

The author of Scala (who was a long-time Java compiler architect) wanted Scala to scale from shells one liners to complex multi-cluster distributed systems, and delivered on that. You can start small with a scala-cli proof of concept, transition to a mid-scale "python with types" kind of project, and grow up to very large and complex projects. Beyond the JVM, you can target the browser with scala-js and share models and validation logic between the front and back ends. You can target native binaries for instant startup/low footprint executables that are cheap to spin-up as microservices.

4- has a foothold in academics

A whole team at the EPFL is pushing boundaries of programming languages and using Scala and its compiler as a ground for experimentations. Scala 3 has a proven sound type system thanks to its foundations on the DOT calculus. Effects and Capabilities are being researched as part of the project Caprese to offer a solution to "what color is your function" (mixing sync and async), of memory management/lifecycles (more generic than rustc's), of pure/side-effectful code, etc. The downside is that this gives an impression that Scala's development lacks focus, but arguably those happen in distinct development branches and by different people.

Anyway, feel free to continue the discussion on: !scala@programming.dev

!scala@programming.dev

Pertaining to the discussion in case you missed it https://ploum.net/...

How is the Russian propaganda attempting to frame that? "Ukrainians are Nazis and so we took over their nuclear power plant because we (though we) could. Now they want to destroy it, incurring an immense ecological impact to mostly themselves, because if they can't have it, better be dead too"?

The goal is to replace religion with nationalism

It really isn't, though?

I agree with the sentiment and everything, but the whole gaming console industry has gone to crap after they started putting hard drives/storage in them with the goal of needing you to be online and not owning anything anymore. They are all equally despicable for that. Which makes emulation even more essential, just for preserving those games into the future when the online front will inexorably shut down.

As soon as you put something up online, you will de facto become a target with nowhere to hide except offline. Your IP will be known and constantly hammered by more or less serious threats.

If you don't know the basics of Linux system administration and typical security measures, I would propose 2 approaches: you can go "the NAS way" and purchase something turnkey like a Synology (or anything on which you can easily spin up containers to host your services). You can expect a large part of the administration to be taken care of with sound default settings.

Another approach is to use a beginner friendly distro like https://yunohost.org/ , perhaps more involving, more risky, bit more rewarding.

Also, don't put anything up there like personal or valuable information (except if encrypted with local-only keys), expect to be hacked, expect to be wiped, and think early on about (off-site) backups.

Last time this came up, people were quick to bring up brother, and others (and that was new) to mention that brother started to do the same crap (limiting 3rd party toners). So I really don't know what to think of them anymore.

I could be in the market for a b&w laser printer/scanner soon so I'll keep an eye on replies here.

Signal isn't a federated protocol, so even if they were incentivized to release all the server bits and pieces, it would not help. You could run your own, but wouldn't be able to reach-out to your friends running theirs.