What is the unique selling point that it has over Matrix?

Matrix addresses have a similar format, anyone can run a host, open protocol, domain ownership, interop... Threaded messages are supported AFAIK, the details of the crypto will be different but overall it feels like it is close enough that a new protocol will have a hard time having enough advantages to overcome the huge network effect (Matrix being one of the few open messengers that actually have some following already).

You're absolutely right to pick up on that, I did study the landscape and Matrix is closest.. biggest difference is fmsg is just messages - group like chats evolve naturally in the threads - but to get a message someone has to send you one. Group messaging platforms like Matrix, Rocket.Chat etc have concept of rooms/forums/channels i.e. groups, then have HTTP APIs to manage membership and sync messages.. fmsg just messages someone has to send you

Also fmsg being its own protocol can do novel things like to auto challenge during sending back to sender - can't do that with HTTP

You wait it out. You can also take some alternatives (e.g. Sinupret) that may or may not have any effect, while waiting it out.

Turns out that identifying a problem doesn't help without a workable solution/alternative.

The first step in solving a problem is identifying it.

The whole "don't point out a problem unless you have a solution" trope is bullshit.

I hate this trite and the managers that say "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" nonsense. I'm not the person to be able to fix it so the solution is make the problem known so others responsible can fix it. If I could fix it, I wouldn't be telling you about the problem. If anything, I would tell you how I fixed an issue in some stand up or other of the many meetings scheduled keeping me from working.

I am only aware of two solutions:

1) proof of identity, tying accounts to real-world things that are hard or impossible to replicate

2) proof of work, tying accounts or actions to the ability to run computations

Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy.

Proof of work can be defeated but has the possibility of preserving privacy.

3) micropayments

There are many issues with those, like the wildly different standards of living across the globe. OTOH anyone can acquire Monero if they want to. But someone from a rich country will likely be able to pay for more fake accounts/visits than someone from a poor country. With the ad market the difference between where the visitor is from is very important. Some ad clicks may cost a dollar if they're coming from a rich country and 0.01 cents if they're coming from a poor country.

I'm not suggesting cryptocurrency micropayments for accessing the web but it's on par with PoW in that it only requires money, not privacy.

Perhaps the way forward is for people to wake up and stop visiting sites that infringe on their privacy.

Fair enough, I didn’t think of that one. I suppose macropayments could be in the same bucket.

Analogous to hardware disparities and POW, wealth disparities make payment a toll but not a roadblock.

>Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy.

All current implementations: yes. I do think there are some privacy preserving solutions, but they're obviously imperfect. But assuming you have a central authority that can validate and sign valid government identification, it seems like some sort of ZK scheme could allow one to verify that they have a valid government issued ID, but without disclosing which one it is.

I still don't love the idea, but it sure seems better than everything else I've seen proposed.

From what I've seen no such solution guarantees privacy to the user if the signing body (or the government) and the website collude to deanonymize the user.

What if the the government signs your private key but doesn't store the list of people who requested this?

Can you elaborate on how that would work exactly? What would the flow be - which party would request what from whom? Would there be technical assurances that no list is stored by the government?

Why are you skipping entirely over good old legislation and law enforcement against offenders, including diplomatic pressure for foreign offenders.

Not everything calls for a purely technical solution.

nonsense on all levels.

RMS has offered broadly solutions/alternatives since the beginning, along with reporting early on trends that other people ignore.

What is his solution to combatting botnets at scale?

His solution would be taking democracy and freedom above interest of couple of botnet attacked websites.

What does that even mean?

I don’t mean to be rude but every single person who references RMS here seems to only have platitudes rather than solutions.

His solution is don't. Why would you? In fact, if you don't block the script that's running on one computer, the script operator won't need to run it on a botnet.

I don't know RMS's solution to spam or DDoS which are the real problems.

> Why would you?

Because controlling a large number of accounts can allow you to manipulate the algorithms on Web2.0 websites. For example, this one. If you don’t combat spammers the front page quickly gets filled up with garbage.

Most split A/Cs can also heat.

"Heat pump" can mean many things, from essentially "split A/C" (air-air heat pumps) to ground-source heat pumps, using floor heating for the output, warm water production from the heat pump, etc.

Split ACs which can heat but are not billed as heat pumps will very often use resistive heaters.

The ones I saw all promised heat output significantly higher than the electrical input in heating mode, so I'm sure they were actually heat pumps.

Another big problem is NIMBYism and ideological opposition to air conditioners.

Installing a heat pump can require (city) permits, permission from your landlord (if renting) or HOA/condo association (if you own a flat in a shared building) which can either be or feel impossible to get.

Some cities have either actually or de facto (through requirements/regulations that are impossible or unaffordable to meet) banned air conditioners, resulting in people buying inefficient monoblock units that can't be used for heating.

Edit: Other regulatory hurdles come from rules about refrigerant handling. Refrigerant must only be handled by experts who are certified in proper handling and recovery (and who, of course, are now in high demand and charging princely prices for their work). This made a lot of sense in the times where 1 kg of refrigerant had 10 tons CO2e in global warming potential, ozone depletion potential or other dangers.

Nowadays, a skilled layperson can probably set up an air conditioner with quick-connect couplings by themselves, but they aren't legally allowed to. These cost something like 500 EUR, contain less than 1 kg of R32 with a GWP of 675, so let's say 500 kg CO2e of harm if it leaks. If you passed a law that landlords cannot prohibit installation, and any electrician that passes a quick online training can install them, you could have them all over the place very quickly.

These could then be used for covering some or all of the heating load in winter, but they'd also alleviate suffering in summer, and that's luxury, and we can't have that (especially as it uses energy to provide the "needless" luxury!)

Why are you replacing it if it is perfectly fine?

Because I lose the manufacturer-provided five-year-guarantee if I don't.

The big question is, what happens when the manufacturer claims it can survive a reasonable number of cycles, then it turns out it can't. By the time this becomes obvious, the phones will be out of warranty.

Will the manufacturer simply be prohibited from selling those phones (which are probably no longer sold by that time anyways), will they be fined a "cost of doing business" level fine, or will customers have an actual remedy (e.g. full refund even after the 2 year warranty period)?

Why is everyone debating some theoretical advanced heartbeat or otherwise people detection tech rather than the absolutely obvious answer - some kind of advanced, specialized transmitter that's designed to be hard to detect and simply transmits the encrypted GPS coordinates of the pilot?

Because the NY Post ran an article that said

"The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned. The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat"

Note, I agree that it was probably some novel beacon technology. Just answering your question about why people are debating whether it was a device that could detect a human heartbeat from long range.

We literally know what beacon device was used: Boeing CSEL

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/in...

Almost all of those words could be true if the beacon is disguised as an implanted medical device that creates some EM "interference" on each heartbeat, or every X heartbeats. From the outside it would look like sloppy design or a minor malfunction, in reality the signal is designed to be highly trackable

Not that I believe any of those words are true beyond the code name. The incident is exactly the kind of thing you'd want to create false rumors about

I get the NY Post article, I'm just surprised that even people who assume the Post is full of shit still run after the "heatbeat" claim rather than ignoring it completely.

it just sounds like the submarine communication technology, very low baud rate, used to transmit the pilot's location and liveness, using quantum magnetometry to measure a magnetic field without huge coil areas.

Or just rocking up to the nearest village with a thousand dollars in cash and asking where the pilot is.

I think the fear of being located isn't based on the fact that someone can decrypt an encrypted transmission, its simply because someone can trace that a particular location is transmitting some radio waves.

You encrypt it because encryption is cheap and gives you confidence that the message content won't be intercepted.

The transmission itself would need to be stealthy or separated (by distance and/or time) from the pilot. For example, the pilot might leave a transmitter to send a message "moving south, will hide on X hill" hours after the pilot leaves, or even toss a transmitter into a river. But most likely just very spread-spectrum/CDMA to make it indistinguishable from noise.

That's a complicated way of describing Professor Xavier's Cerebro, but that's basically how it works.

I care much less about bitrates than about hopefully finally settling on one series of "standards". It looks like H.266 is dead in the water (I haven't even heard of it existing) so we might finally settle on AV2 as "the" new standard, rather than having the infight with half of hard/software only supporting either the state-of-the-art codec from the H26x or the AVx series...

Don’t worry, hardware manufacturers are going to keep ripping us off with HDR encoding. HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and so on.

Exactly this. Most of the time you get poorly researched articles (or nowadays, AI slop) about some topics only very remotely related to what the company actually does.

Here, the article is about something interesting that the company has expertise in (and even "insider info"), shows off that they do serious engineering, and is interesting to the target audience.

If I'm buying a 12V or 5V fan, it'll almost certainly be a Noctua. I don't know if they're the best, but they certainly seem to be among the better brands, and at something like $25 for a fan, they are certainly not overpriced enough to justify the effort of researching something better.

So whoever you are at Noctua, congratulations! This + the 3d model release are likely really paying off.

Noctua are pricey but they also provide service that is in my experience unmatched.

We have a few hundred of their coolers in use and I have never had an issue getting warranty replacements from them with fans. The process is simple and they ship out a new fan ( I have warrantied probably 10 - 15 of the fans)