What is lesswrong and why should they avoid linking it? It looks like a forum of sorts with a somewhat pretentious code of conduct but nothing to avoid on principle.

Best thing I did for my phone induced stress is get an old Pebble smartwatch, choose the few apps/contacts I want to get notified instantly to vibrate on the watch and set my phone itself on silent permanently.

We set the threshold of sensible protections provided by the app (signal) itself differently.

On desktop having a gallery app, as you say, or running an application like windirstat for example I expect the user to understand that anything stored on device can be “seen” by the app and that, if they dont trust it, having sensitive files deleted or sandboxed might be prudent. Messages are stored at least somewhat encrypted (albeit with the key in a config file) so a random (non targeted/malicious) scan would gt blobs there.

On mobile due to how opaque the os is I am thankful for the extra encyption and I would consider it a much more critical flaw. On desktop less so. Still I appreciate your point of view and a passkey to encrypt at least messages on the desktop app would be a welcome addition.

Hm, but wouldn’t such an application be malicious by default? Having protection against attackers on your device seems of out scope for a messaging application, at that point I would consider something like Tails. Though this may be a rare case when moving to an appimage could help matters.

We used to just get up and do the dishes while whatever injected nonsense interupted what we were watching on TV. And when it became too much we turned to DVDs or piracy. Then streaming was the “savior” until whoever funded it realized that more users do not equal more money. And now we are almost back to square one. This is just played out at this point. Google/Yt/TIktok etc are just betting on the addictive nature of instant gratification to survive.

At some point, I think, all the effords of adblocking (grayjay, newpipe, sponsorblock, ublock) will seem impractical when a download (and maybe now scan to cut out ads and sponsor segments) will achive the same. And then peer to peer is the most practical way to share that instead of redoing all the work.

Until downloading is hindered too much and someone somewhere just has OBS with some adhoc script on top running 24/7 to capture youtube videos. The conversation of when is adblocking piracy etc seems to me to be coming to a natural end (at least as far as legalilties go).

One saving grace the internet has bestowed on media is that it is easier to follow creators and fund their work (if you can afford it).

Wouldn’t having full disk encryption achieve most of the benefits of that? In case of someone having access to your unlocked machine what is stopping them from launching the app and looking though it?

I think it sort of worked on firefox for a spell a while back but screen sharing and other stuff was broken. Then I think it stopped entirely and showed a “use edge” callout.

I switched to the electron client they provided and it used to work pretty ok for years but recently they anounced they were killing it on linux for some reason (to be fair there were no updates I could discern for months).

They now ignore linux entirely in the desktop clients section and redirect to a qr code to download the android app if you go to a download page on a linux machine.

I have chromium just to be able to get on a call if needed.

There is now “Teams Classic” and “New Teams” as well.

All this to say, yes. MS enshitification is real. Sorry I know you did not sign up to get this wall of text.