Me, at work, looking at my backlog of Baldur’s Gate 3, Armored Core, Blasphemous 2 and countless indies on Steam

Tbh I’d not be surprised if that’s the case. Last time I had enough time to spare to rice me some arches was all the way back when I was in uni :(

I barely have enough time to hotfix my dotfiles nowadays :/

Good

Texts are securely stored

Right, must be military grade encryption

Indeed

Books, online courses. Education in depth, ideally.

Books, online courses. Education in depth, ideally.

Yeah but… Brilliant has… a trial period. Seven days is plenty to realise that there’s next to zero educational value in that platform no matter how hard it is shilled online.

They are pretty poor courses anyway, why would you want them?

I’ve never heard of that project, looks pretty cool! To be clear, I do not say that “one guy” cannot possibly make great software. Passion projects are a thing. What differentiates them from the Abode situation, in my opinion, is that passion projects rarely have strict deadlines and paying backers who expect software that is Adobe-level in terms of quality and polish in a roughly 1 year.

I’m highly sceptical of this shipping in a state that can compete with Adobe at the end of it all. The branding itself is asking for trouble, which is just plain stupid if you are serious about long-term and sustainable development of the whole suite, and 180k is not enough to even put together a competent alternative to Illustrator, not to mention Photoshop and InDesign.

And before people start claiming that you can fund this by outsourcing to Eastern Europe / India etc, please bear in mind that you usually get what you pay for. A competent developer with enough experience to actually make this happen won’t come cheap, and opportunistic juniors with big ambitions won’t deliver.

I wish this project all the luck it can get, but I’m personally banking on Graphite and Inkscape from the FOSS world and Affinity suite from (as of yet) less corpo commercial offerings.

Done

The last paragraph doesn’t have to be a problem though

It is not yet, but the trajectory implies it may become a problem down the road. We’re, sadly, living this decade, where you can no longer ignore where a certain service is heading and how it monetises itself.

Mandatory “don’t put Signal and Telegram in the same sentence” notice. Not to be a snob, but Telegram is not “secure and private”, all chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default, everything is stored on Telegram’s servers with “forever-ever” retention. The end-to-end encryption is opt in, uses a dodgy encryption algorithm and has some limitations in terms of who you can contact and from what device etc.

Telegram is owned by Pavel Durov who also created the largest Russian social media platform VK, which later was overtaken by Russian state as a tool for crowd control and propaganda. Even if we assume that Pavel no longer has any ties with Russia and its “government”, his biography should still raise at least some questions around whether one should trust Telegram.

And finally, Telegram seems to be going the “everything app” route lately, which makes it a one stop shop of personal communication, public channels, news, bots, stories etc. (you name it). While it is not a bad thing in objective terms, these features are not built with privacy in mind, as that would pose quite a technical challenge. This means that Telegram’s privacy and security will only be sacrificed more and more to get more of the social features out of the door.

/rant over/

All good, the downvotes are not my doing :)

I tolerate it, though barely. But that’s not the reference I was trying to make :)

Literally uninterjectable

Welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of left wing propaganda

In all seriousness though, this is one of the podcasts I tune in to religiously. It’s just too fun and serves as a great high level of “what’s up in big tech” even when my brain is mush.

Tbh the idea does sound interesting, especially if there’s a way to do Shamir’s secret sharing on top of the encrypted snapshot or something. Cause I’m not too worried with exposing my stuff to the internet, as I at least partially do that for a living, but rather make sure I do not existentially send all my family’s documents in plaintext to some stranger on the internet.

This does sound interesting! Would need some tooling to lay my paranoia to rest though, and some trust towards the other person.