Some projects that kind of do that come to mind:
Beeper, which is a hosted Matrix server (probably Synapse) with bridges to other messengers, and a client (probably derived from Element?). But it’s all called Beeper to be more “normal”.
Snikket is a “rebranded” prosody XMPP server, Conversations client for Android and Siskin IM client for iOS. Also, all are Snikket, no scary abbreviations and different app names.
So did “Amazon”… :/
The most obnoxious case of needy apps I witnessed was when I disabled Google Play Services on a OnePlus phone. Every default app (including Phone and SMS!) would spam notifications saying something like “Google Play not found, functionality is limited” every minute or two, while the real impact was minimal.
IMO not as good as The Circle. Although it follows one character, they move between so many departments, it reads more like a collection of short stories.
Did you read The Every yet? It’s a sequel, but instead of anti-privacy, it leans more into greenwashing, and how only the powerful corporations can save us from a climate disaster.
Welcome to Gemini!
There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background
This was the trend circa 2012 too, at least I recall Microsoft’s pages and software becoming less legible. Not sure if I got used to it, screens got better, or it went back to higher contrast.
.kkrieger for those who want to look it up
Yeah, after seeing plenty of “quirky”/“edgy”/“ironic” culture in 2010s, and given the absurdity of current world and tech leaders, I cannot tell if something like this is genuinely delusional or just satire.
Looks like BM818 in Librem5 supports VoLTE, but might have issues with some networks.
PinePhone’s (and one of Mudita’s phone’s) EG25 modem technically supports VoLTE, but was very flaky for me (in a mid-low signal area)
FuriLabs (FLX1) seems to have VoLTE working.
Ubuntu Touch explicitly states that it does not support VoLTE.
When I last used Dino (a few years back, on a PinePhone), I had to build it with notification sounds flag. Not sure if this is still the case, or if that is the same for calls.
./configure --enable-plugin=notification-sound
While looking for above, also found a GitHub issue with your problem
Osmin on PinePhone was… Tolerable. I’m just pleasantly surprised it worked okay with GPS being integrated into the modem.
Takes a long time to get a GPS fix (like old standalone GPS units), but it’s possible to provide A-GPS data to it.
How good is LLM training data for a language spoken by less than 10 million people? Keep in mind that most of those people are probably multilingual (i.e. categorizing which language is which by person is harder), and language itself is similar to its neighbors. And then, again, terms.
I know someone who was a translator between two (less widely spoken) languages, and some specifics I recall from our conversations about work:
None of those would be addressed with LLMs. Small training set for language (and language being similar to a few others) is an issue. Anything technical or non-existing would be prone to hallucinations. And tone is difficult enough to convey through text to begin with, let alone with LLM translation.
Imgur had the social media element since mid-2010s at least, maybe longer.
If we can get food by going to the grocery store, who needs farms?
Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.
But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.
XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)
Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)
That is also the premise of one of the stories in Asimov’s I, Robot. Human operator did not say the command with enough emphasis, so the robot went did something incredibly stupid.
Those stories did not age well… Or now I guess they did?
What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.
Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.
Some years ago, mentioning Linux for daily non-gaming use:
Guy: “Installing Linux is complicated though”
Me: “It wasn’t bad 10 years ago, and now it’s as hard as clicking Next a few times, even faster than Windows”
Guy: “Well duh, you have ten years of experience installing it!”
Difficult to argue with this non-logic.