Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions. Maybe this also correlates with qualities like blind optimism, or disbelief in institutions like capitalism?
> Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions
That's not a reasonable definition. The distrust in the institution is actually a side effect of questioning the authority for authority sake. Anarchists aren't a bunch of individualists that want to burn down whatever we've got in terms of mechanisms in the society regardless if they are necessary. It's just the manifestation of the dialectical opposite of the expression of power and authority.
And privacy enthusiasts just know very well that power shifts and what once was a necessary mechanism can be abused by an elected authoritarian leader.
I like the idea. But I’m pretty happy with Signal. Signal does require a phone number I think, but otherwise seems very similar.
Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage. It makes recovery simple. It does block the ultra paranoid use cases though. Oh well.
>Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage
In many jurisdictions, telecoms form an abusive oligopoly, and you need to provide a state-issued identity document to get a phone number.
That is not at all reasonable for normal usage - unlike well-known non-abusive authentication methods, such as a keypair; or its even simpler cousin, the username/password.
I guess it depends on what you consider normal. Most of the humans I know find it vastly easier to produce a state issued id to an authority than to generate a public/private key pair.
Well, I and a lot of the people I'm going to talk to through things like Signal are going to have a state ID regardless as I live in a country where one practically needs to drive a car to function in society.
On top of that so many other things just inherently expect one to have a phone number. It would be somewhat odd to not have a phone number for most of the people I know and talk to through platforms like Signal.
So to your question of which is easier, having the state ID and a phone number is easier because I'll already have that for a multitude of reasons.
If you live in a place where its rare to have a phone number, then yes I agree Signal probably isn't a good choice.
Obtaining your first id is obviously difficult. But so is obtaining your first computer. If you’re on good terms with your government, obtaining the id is easier. That’s really the key. Sure if you focus on hostile states this stuff all makes sense. If you’re insistent on hiding from authorities then many things become much more difficult, by design.
I primarily use a nearly-bottom end android phone that's a few years old and just recently switched to an even older, even lower end android phone that is six years old. Neither has that issue.
Obviously, I'm not really claiming that it's not possible people are experiencing this issue, but it can't possibly be widespread.
I feel like most likely people are using android skins that aggressively kill apps in the background.
I have that exact issue on a couple of not exactly low end Samsung phones. Holding them side by side with signal open. Delivery times vary wildly. Whereas WhatsApp just works (though I hate it for other reasons)
nope, iphone here, and quite recent. But it's not just me, all the people i communicate with on this app have the same kind of problems. With a group of friends we even had a totally weird ordering of messages, making the conversation quite absurd.
There's something deeply wrong with the way signal delivers messages...
Signal's code quality is not conducive to security. They had an extremely bad state management bug that resulted in photos being sent to random contacts in your list (potentially life ruining implications if you're sending private photos).
For this reason, it's hard to trust them. The encryption quality is irrelevant if the slop coded client is blasting random photos to random contacts.
Send a GIF to Contact A, Contact B receives random private images? Absolutely inexcusable slop code project. This class of state management bugs should not be possible with a well-architected client, period.
Signal's E2E encryption is more like End 2 Random End.
The unit economics at this point are about utilization. Their cost is well below what they’re charging, but only when there is enough traffic to keep the GPUs busy. So the game is about increasing demand to level the load.
GPT has negligible moat because they gave up on all their integrations. Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LLM.
> Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LLM.
I hate to be a "source?" guy, but I'm curious if you have any examples of this. Skills and MCP are really the only extensions on CC itself I'm aware of, and these are both supported in Codex.
Things like Dispatch / remote sessions is something CC has that Codex does not, but these features are quite easy to replicate (and I expect Codex to do so in short order).
I agree that’s a great question which I don’t really know the answer to. These tools have been moving in lock step for some time now. One will innovate and within 2-3 weeks the others have that feature. Where I sit the mind share all seems to be going to Claude though. The moat develops when people build something that only works on one - even if the others have the same features it doesn’t matter unless they’re literally binary compatible. Skills are just prompts at the end of the day with nothing more specialized than a file naming convention.
Having written several orchestrators I’ll say that the code to invoke the tool is pretty equivalent but it’s the details that matter. Exact CLI flags and json fields.
Also not like it’s a particularly good piece of tech. It was the first to show a new category. But jeebus the design and security are a nightmare. Any of the numerous other claws are better choices for anything serious.
Classic SV hubris. Talk to OpenAI people and they’re so convinced they’re untouchable, they don’t bother worrying about things like revenue, or product strategy. All they cared about was being the first to AGI. Well it looks like that isn’t happening soon enough. And now they have zero moat except brand recognition, which is quickly getting eroded.
The idea that they don’t learn from experience might be true in some limited sense, but ignores the reality of how LLMs are used. If you look at any advanced agentic coding system the instructions say to write down intermediate findings in files and refer to them. The LLM doesn’t have to learn. The harness around it allows it to. It’s like complaining that an internal combustion engine doesn’t have wheels to push it around.
But how will I make ad-supported youtube videos about how I automated my life with OpenClaw using a $10M boutique AI server to make a few thousand in ad revenue while burning tens of thousands per month on API cost.
These specs look enormously cheaper than doing it with dell servers. The last quote I had for a bog standard dell server was $50k and only if bought in the next few days or so. The prices are going up weekly.
These are "unsupported" configurations. Nvidia/AMD discourage running multiple gaming/workstation cards and encourage customers to buy $500K SXM/OAM servers.
/s
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