ᗪᗩᗰᑎ

Last I checked Threema was at least just as good as Signal. Unfortunately Threema is a paid app, which makes it really difficult to for me to recommend as there are many opposed to paying for apps for various reasons. I stick with Signal and even being free (I do donate monthly) I’ve struggled to get people to switch. I find Signals approach of being donation funded to be more equitable and accessible.

deals with Microsoft or any other competitor who may want to silence alternatives.

XMPP only does message encryption. Signal has spent tons of engineering time and effort to minimize the collection of metadata, not just encryption of message content.

Privacy and security is all about threat modeling. Signal meets 100% of the security needs of everyone I communicate with in my region of the world. There’s no need (especially now that you can hide phone numbers) for the added security benefits of SimpleX.

Additionally, my experience in using SimpleX over the last year+ is that message delivery is not reliable yet. This has forced me and the few people I’ve been testing it with to fall back to Signal multiple times. Because of these reliability issues and lacking UX, I don’t feel comfortable pushing it on others, knowing the tolerance level is low for message delivery failures and UX that isn’t yet up to par with other messaging apps.

You’re right! not sure why I thought SimpleX was a fork, it’s definitely just using the Signal protocol. Thanks for the clarification. That said, I would objectively state the UX needs some work to get to where Signal is at. SimpleX is oddly both easy to use but confusing and unreliable. I’ve been using it for a little over a year now and very often messages just stop getting delivered or received, forcing a fall back to Signal.

SimpleX is still very promising and more secure than Signal if your threat model necessitates it, but I continue to champion Signal for its ease of use, reliability, and security compared to more mainstream messengers.

The day security researchers say Signal is bad is the day I’ll stop using it. Until then, it’s the best option we have that both provides both great privacy and UX. The only thing that comes close - and it still has a ways to go - is SimpleX, but it’s basically a signal fork and it’s devs still support Signal.

With your first sentence, I can say you’re wrong.

except i’m not wrong. the model they ran is 4 orders of magnitude smaller than even the smallest “mini” models that are generally available, see TinyLlama1.1B [1] or Phi-3 3.8B mini [2] to compare against. Most “mini” models range from 1 to about 10 Billion parameters, which makes running them incredibly inefficient on older devices.

That doesn’t mean it can’t run it. It just means you can’t imagine that.

but I can imagine it. in fact, I could have told you it would have needed a significantly smaller model in order to run at an adequate pace on older hardware. it’s not at all a mystery, its a known factor. i think it’s absolutely cool that they did it, but lets not pretend its more than what it is - a modern version of running Doom on non-standard hardware.

[1] https://huggingface.co/TinyLlama/TinyLlama-1.1B-step-50K-105b

[2] https://ollama.com/library/phi3:3.8b-mini-128k-instruct-q5_0

[3] https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-card-runs-linux/

but the hardware is not capable. it’s running a miniscule custom 260k LLM and the “claim to fame” is that it wasn’t slow. great? we already know tiny models are fast, they’re just not as accurate and perform worse than larger models, all they did was make an even smaller than normal model. this is akin to getting Doom to run on anything with a CPU, while cool and impressive, it doesn’t do much for anyone other than being an exercise in doing something because you can.

they think because he inherited a recovering economy, that he himself had some major part in it.

its more about what he represents

Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.

billions in dollars taken from billionaires to help them for a few more years would absolutely help. maybe not all of them, but any that it does help would be well worth it. billionaires don’t need more than one yacht.

100% agree.

For anyone who may disagree, consider thinking of excess wealth as excess food.

If you were in a stadium full of people that represent all of humanity, and you have more food than you could ever even eat in multiple lifetimes are you not an evil person for not sharing with those who are literally starving to death?

These are people with the amount of wealth who could easily subsidize paying a team of people to plan out how to appropriate give away most of their wealth so they don’t have “excess food” by the time they die - and not have it impact their day to day lifestyle. Instead they let others starve.

anything specific you can call out for those of us who have zero interest in moving to another centralized platform?