Well, that something common in Russia as a metaphor is also common in Estonia wouldn’t be a surprise, but in English seems a bit less common. Anyway, that wasn’t the point of my comment.

it’s literally the guy that runs Signal having a pop at his competition.

The right kind of pop, saying only the obvious and nothing more.

It’s a thread about comparing Signal to Telegram of all things. In comparison to Signal as anything secure Telegram doesn’t exist in any quality.

At the same time Signal doesn’t have mass group chats and is not intended for that purpose.

The first link does count, it’s a valid failure from Signal devs. Humans err.

The second link does not, it’s an unofficial centralized aggregator, not from Signal devs, and the “hack” was a direct consequence of how it worked. It’s absolutely something that no sane person would use.

There’s a commonly used Russian metaphor “to not see the forest behind the trees”.

What you are calling a device is in fact a system. It’s a local system, that you are carrying in your hand, but it’s functioning due to a very complex global system which is not. That device in itself is like a 1960s’ town in complexity. In itself, but there’s also the global system.

And these are a result of quite a lot of people employed by various organizations with hierarchies and dependencies. And most of the power in those organizations doesn’t want you to have privacy and autonomy as much and when you want. If you want those, you should produce your own hardware and everything above it. Or build organizations interested in your full privacy and autonomy which will do that. It’s about structure, so just creating a few of them (a goal hardly reachable in itself) with manifests saying “we want to be good” won’t change anything.

So, if you were wondering why contemporaries of Stalin’s regime were reluctant to divorce it with Marxism and call it something else, - that’s similar to this. They really wanted to believe there’s a Marxist superpower, just like some people wanted to believe Google is a good corporation, and before that some people wanted to believe Apple is a counterculture corporation, and so on. And, at various moments in time and space, in various dimensions, sometimes these were. Just like in some ways the British Empire was really bringing civilization to the world.

The more life and diversity there is, the likelier we are to have good things. That doesn’t mean we’ll ever have full privacy, full autonomy, fully civilized, peaceful and honorable world, and so on. We won’t.

And it will again be about someone added to the wrong group. Meaning - not a hack.

Telegram is used by Ukrainian armed forces for military actions, ruskie pests use it too for the same… so its probably hard to hack, as these REALLY want to see the messages of each other…

You see, these arguments are just impolite when made against the man in the post going out of his way to provide you with an experiment based on logic that you don’t need computer science knowledge to verify.

As far as I have heard, Ukrainian servicemen are forbidden to use Telegram. Ukrainian civilians do, and Ukrainian special services might do that sometimes perhaps.

I tried using org-mode, but eventually returned to simple plain text.

Color notation, or various enriching elements don’t help. They actually distract.

There’s the task. The task of having a TODO list. Its elements are free form by definition.

I swear, today’s tech is 99% arrogant people showing themselves how they know everything, except they don’t solve the actual task which is the only thing needed.

Like those over-engineered half-working arcane machines they portray in steampunk settings, except those at least feel cool.

It’s like that anecdote about “what buzzes, spins and doesn’t bite your ass? - a Soviet machine for biting your ass”. 2025 machines for biting your ass do everything, including almost sexual gratification of their developers from using any of a hundred of hipster libraries, frameworks and build systems, and a server component using Firebase, AWS and what not, what they don’t do is actually bite your ass. Well, they kinda scratch it.

Doing a lot is not the same as doing better.

Also I fucking hate modern UI\UX design and ergonomics (both lacking).

There’s something about the Silicon Valley and everything looking up to it. A culture of authoritarian cheap bullshit, with pretty arrogant people not capable of having a civil discussion, and when they fail that, it’s not themselves who they blame.

Honestly it sometimes feels as if all the visible things around were like that. Linux included. Also maybe BTRON for workstations not happening is a bigger tragedy than it would seem.