LainTrain

I feel like even the prefix -tan is very uncommon to hear these days.

Why?

There is no policy that "works for everyone" when we cannot agree on the basic facts of reality. If one side says "we shouldn't pollute the sky so much that we can never see the sun" and the other side says "there is no sky", there is no way forward, only upwards, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

Another Nintendo classic. Never given em any money and ain't about to start.

They disabled desktop registration

Huh? Worked for me.

then can randomly ban people who try to make their usage of the platform more private/anonymous...

Telegram literally only banned CSAM.

Then there is censorship, at least here. And I have heard of at least one case of cooperation with German LE, so it's not "untouchable" for Westerners too.

Source? Because they're pretty transparent about it and have only ever banned CSAM. If that's what you mean by "censorship" please KYS

It was never safe with such an approach of "I can close my eyes and pretend the law doesn't apply to me" even in the West

Except that it was, and that's why people used it.

If it was hostile to privacy and anonymity by design

No it wasn't? It was literally the private anonymous messenger and that's why people used it.

it was a matter of time until it became wide open to Western LE too

No it wasn't, or they wouldn't have had to arrest Durov.

The sheer amount of compromate it had on users was a ticking time bomb.

Yeah, but so is every good thing.

"Highly decentralized complexity" - what does that even apply to?

The subject matter at hand - Telegram. It was legally a complex mess of shell companies in weird jurisdictions. That's why the glowies couldn't touch it, the level of international cooperation it would require is far beyond the realistic means of any government. This is why they had to arrest Durov and offer him life in prison or to open up, there was nothing else they could do.

That would apply to Matrix, XMPP, Simplex, especially Briar.

It would if any of these worked, or were used by anyone at all.

Even Signal can technically be selfhosted (whether it is feasible is another question)

I don't want to self-host my criminal messenger, i live deep in five eyes shit.

in Telegram you can't have even that because the server is closed.

I'm fine with that, as long as it's out of the glowies hands, but fella couldn't stay away from the hairy pits I guess

(1) shouldn't be paywalled in a way unfair to authors and reviewers -- they pay the journals, not the other way around --

Yes of course. It's not at all relevant?

(2) closed-source artificially intelligent word guessers make money off of content that isn't their own, in ways that said content-makers have little agency or say, without contributing back to the sum of human knowledge by being open-source or transparent

Yeah that's why I'm pro-AI, not only is it very literally transparent and most models open-weight, and most libraries open-source, but it's making knowledge massively more accessible.

I used to teach people to Google, but there is no point, now it's like a dark pattern, with very little reward for a lot of effort, because everything, especially YouTube is now a grift. Now I teach them how to proompt without also rotting their brain by outsourcing actual intellectual work rather than pure fact-finding.

Yes it is a bit shit at being correct, it hallucinates, but frankly to paraphrase Turing, infallibility is not a quality of intelligence.

And more practically if Joe Schmoe can't think critically and has to trust unquestionably then I'd rather he trust gippity than the average Facebook schizo.

With that in mind I see no reason not to feed it products of the scientific method, the most rigorous and highest solution to the problems of epistemology we've come up with thus far.

but about the lack of self-determination and transparency

Because frankly if you actually read the terms and conditions when you signed up to Facebook and your weird computer friends were all scoffing at the privacy invasion and if you listened to the experts then you and these artists would not feel like you were being treated unfairly, because not only did you allow it to happen, you all encouraged it. Now that it might actually be used for good, you are upset. It's disheartening. I'm sorry, most of you signed it all away by 2006. Data is forever.

an artist getting their style copied

So if I go to an art gallery for inspiration I must declare this in a contract too? This is absurd. But to be fair I'm not surprised. Intellectual property is altogether an absurd notion in the digital age, and insanity like "copyrighting styles" is just the sharpest most obvious edge of it.

I think also the fearmongering about artists is overplayed by people who are not artists. For all it's worth I've never heard this vehement anti-AI take outside of like Twitter and Reddit comment sections and I know plenty of artists, and those I do actually follow e.g. on YT are actually either skeptical but positive or using it already as part of their workflow even if they do have criticisms of the industry.

(Which I do of course too, in the sense that there should not be any industry for as long as the oppression of capital reigns supreme.)

Actually the only prolific individual of any kind that has voiced this opinion that I'm aware of is Hbomberguy who is self-admittedly a bit of an idiot, and it is obviously a tacked on claim with no real nuance or addressing of opposing views or sources for even the basic claims (which are completely wrong) at the end of a video about a completely different topic that makes the video seem more relevant and topical than it is.

You expect me to bust out my actual debit card every time I make a purchase like the the Flintstones? lol hell naw, what next, send it via pigeon mail too?

If it don't even got Google Pay or PayPal I just ain't paying. If I have to type in a password ever, I'm not paying (thank god for autofill and fingerprint). If IRL, they don't take contactless, over Google Pay ofc, I ain't paying. Even the homeless got contactless readers now, capitalist bastards got no excuse.

Thankfully almost everything supports it now. I've not seen my card in years and I don't even like, know if I still have it, nevermind a cash note.

You can't. You either go into work and learn to solve complex problems or pivot to something else. For me it was the latter, I'm IT brainlet now,, but every time I come back to brushing up on programming there's like no middle ground with projects, I don't have the time or really energy to commit to building a 3D video game engine in C or an OS, and learning pointer arithmetic for multiple iterators all just to make a palindrome checker CLI feels lame and building a clone of Spotify but in some new webdev thing of the week to some tutorial is hard to be excited about.

I have in my life met two people who used signal. They did it because I suggested it. They are both senior cybersec folks.

No? There's a pretty good reason every criminal used telegram. I've never seen any attempts at combatting anonymity much less censorship.

Likely TG got unbanned in Russia for cooperating with LEOs there, but while awful, that doesn't really matter if you're a westerner, even Ukrainian armed forces used it, and for the average substance enjoyer it was still much safer to use than any Five Eyes app due to its intentional highly decentralised complexity, and unlike Signal it actually works and is pleasant to use. Now they are straight up handing data over to British cops.