• 1 Post
  • 44 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 13th, 2023

help-circle

  • I remember multiple times my chat switching to SMS when I did not have a stable data connection, though, admittedly, it’s been years since signal dropped support and I don’t remember the specific mechanics of the situation, but I specifically remember the same message chain would have both sms and signal messages in it.

    I’ve used signal for at least 6 years now, and I remember online discourse being centered around why signal included SMS in the first place, with most of the discussion being around how people dislike the false sense of security comingling insecure data with secure data provided. The discourse didn’t change until after signal announced they were dropping support and suddenly people came out of the Woodwork talking about how horrible signal is for adopting good security practices.

    Why doesn’t telegram or Whatsapp get the same treatment?




  • I think their logic makes sense though. Signal as an SMS app is functionally pointless. If you can’t convince someone to use signal because they are just using SMS anyway, then what is the point? If you are prostletyzing encrypted communication to people, an important aspect is communicating the why’s. I think sms on the platform ultimately did do more harm than good, it confused the normal people, and presented risks for leaking data, since it was not always clear if hitting the send button would result in an encrypted message or not.

    A nice example that is always brought up with signal, is matrix, which perfectly demonstrates the issue at hand. Matrix, which is touted as a ‘secure’ platform, is actually the opposite, it requires positive action to enable and maintain encrypted messaging, and because it allows insecure communication, it opens up tons of holes, either from user error or unclear messaging from the platform. (Things like severe metadata leakage and unclear communication as to what is encrypted or not). There is a reason governments and militaries around the world use signal over other options.

    I think you only need to look at the recent Atlantic leaks to demonstrate that users don’t actually know best as well. You have a general user base that has poor security hygiene and the concept of op sec is completely foreign. Confidential group chats would be constantly compromised by one person losing a data connection resulting in the message being sent as SMS and if you don’t have automatic fail over, then SMS support offers no functional benefit, and only serves to add a workload that accomplishes nothing.

    Signal has cultivated a platform that has no unclear boundaries. If you send a message on signal, it is e2e encrypted every single time, there is no scenario where this is not the case. That’s more valuable than presenting the option to have an encrypted conversation.

    I also don’t really think that is a valid argument, none of signal’s contemporaries offered this feature and it didn’t stop them. I have never heard someone say that they can’t get people to use Messenger, Whatsapp, or Telegram because it doesn’t support SMS.

    Another counter point is that signal’s user base has only grown since they removed the SMS feature.

    Finally, I don’t think that what you are saying aligns with the previous comment anyway, in fact it seems like it was agreeing with me. The decision wasn’t done because of developer resources, it was a conscious decision they made because they believed that SMS should not be part of their product.





  • Yea, electron has flaws, but it’s basically the only way to make a truly cross platform native and web app. I would rather take a larger installed size and actually have apps that are available everywhere.

    The sad truth is there aren’t enough developers to go around to make sleek native apps for every platform, so something that significantly frees dev time is a great real world solution for that.





  • Vs code has no integrated environment though, it’s just a text editor that supports plugins, you still need to install python or node or .net or Java or gcc, etc.

    As far as vim requiring keyboard commands, that’s really only the case if you leave mouse mode off

    set mouse=a

    And of course, to muddy the water further, we have tools like https://helix-editor.com/ which, more closely approximate vs code, while happening to live in a terminal.

    I maintain that in order to qualify as an IDE and not a glorified text editor, you must be able to, out of the box, without external dependencies, run and build the code it was built for (idea/visual studio) otherwise it’s not very integrated, and I don’t think you need to have nice graphics for that qualification.


  • I would say that an IDE is something that includes build/run tools integrated into it. Everything else is just a text editor. (But that’s just my opinion of course)

    To expand on my point, I don’t think it makes sense to call vs code an integrated development environment if it doesn’t actually have the environment integrated.

    Visual studio and idea would be examples of IDEs, they actually have all of the tools and frameworks needed to run the languages they were built for out of the box.

    You can’t run node or python out of the box with just vs code for example, without their respective tooling, all vscode can do is edit the code and editing code is not functionally different from editing any other text.

    So I maintain that both vim and vscode are text editors and not IDEs




  • So you did one simple program.

    SaaS involves a suite of tooling and software, not just a program that you build locally.

    You need at a minimum, database deployments (with scaling and redundancy) and cloud software deployments (with scaling and redundancy)

    SaaS is a full stack product, not a widget you run on your local machine. You would need to deputize the AI to log into your AWS (sorry, it would need to create your AWS account) and fully provision your cloud infrastructure.



  • This is satire / trolling for sure.

    LLMs aren’t really at the point where they can spit out an entire program, including handling deployment, environments, etc. without human intervention.

    If this person is ‘not technical’ they wouldn’t have been able to successfully deploy and interconnect all of the pieces needed.

    The AI may have been able to spit out snippets, and those snippets may be very useful, but where it stands, it’s just not going to be able to, with no human supervision/overrides, write the software, stand up the DB, and deploy all of the services needed. With human guidance sure, but with out someone holding the AIs hand it just won’t happen (remember this person is ‘not technical’)