• 5 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I asked nicely why do I need to give my phone number and I was told that to register me as a member so I can get the discount.

    I declined and said I don’t want to join and would like to just pay.

    I’ve just said “I don’t have one” when asked this for awhile. This never seems the phase the cashiers, I’m guessing they know what that really means. Half the time I still get whatever discount, though I’ve never tried to sign up for a membership saying that.

    If it’s an online form my phone number is just (local area code)555–5555. I’ve never had that not take, except for one case where it automatically enabled 2-factor auth and I had to create a new account.




  • It has definitely changed, I don’t know when, but it’s been like this for at least the last decade.

    Though, in my experience (NB: I’m a software engineer, which is a notoriously lax field.) only what the piece of paper says has changed. Hell, most of my employee handbooks have claimed that “full time” is 50 hours a week. They get away with it because I’m classified as a “computer employee” (lol) and make more than $35k/year (super lol) which means my employment is exempted from minimum wage and overtime pay laws.

    Nobody that I know actually works that consistently. Most people I know don’t even do 40. I do 9-5 (or 8:30-4:30 usually), I take breaks when I need them and nobody has ever complained to me about the amount I’m working.

    My only guess for why it’s this way is that having that be the official working time means it’s easier to fire anyone for no reason because they’re not working their “contractually obligated” amount of time.







  • [edit: To be clear, I assume the part that OP is not sure if it’s satire or not is “or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.”] The emphasis in

    Firefox is worse than Chrome

    is in the original. To me that clearly implies that they are of the opinion that in general Google & Chrome are worse on privacy than Mozilla & Firefox. The comment at the end is just tongue in cheek snark alluding to the fact that in this particular case google did better for privacy in Chrome than Mozilla in Firefox.

    or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.




  • I am still interested to know the details of how they came to this decision. Why Signal instead of Matrix.

    AFAIK, signal doesn’t federate, There is no “signal server-to-server” protocol. When people say “The Signal Protocol”, they are talking about a cryptographic protocol, not a network protocol.

    As for why they wouldn’t use Matrix, I would assume it’s just too heavy of a protocol for the scale they operate at. IIRC, Matrix isn’t just a chat protocol. It’s a multi-peer cryptographic state synchronization protocol. Chat is (was?) just the first “easy” application they were going to apply it to. (Now I’m curious if they still have plans for that at some point.) They’ve been making great strides in improving the efficiency, at least in the client-server API (I haven’t been paying attention to the server-server API at all), but it’s still going to be a heck of a lot more compute heavy than whatever custom API they’re providing.