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H.265 is patent encumbered. Blame the 2 or 3(?) patent pool holders (for-profit corporations, unlike non-profit -and-slowly-losing-market-share Mozilla) for not making it free to use for everyone.

This is why AV1 is preferred, it saves bandwidth and there’s no threat of being sued into oblivion.

But then you’re indirectly giving the enemy (Google) power by increasing their browser market share, which in turn lets them dictate the future of the web.

Just a reminder for anyone not in the know:

While Bluesky is better than Xitter right now, don’t forget that it’s still a centralized service that has censored - and will continue to censor - content they disagree with. Bluesky Relay servers costs so much to run that it’s only financially feasible for big corporations to run them. This forces centralization, although technically can be decentralized, and puts it’s end users onto the same path of enshittification that Xitter and other social networks have gone through.

Mastodon, while imperfect, is actually decentralized (including DM’s - all Bluesky DMs are centralized amd can be viewed by its admins) and cannot suffer this type of censorship.

just tell people to join mastodon.social. problem solved

Which is a great workaround but then all your private notes are on Google’s servers, accessible to anyone with enough admin rights on their end. All apps should be end-to-end encrypted going into 2025. There’s no reason security AND privacy shouldn’t be included.

I’ve never seen constant login reminders, but I’ve only used it in a browser, and the Android/Window/Linux apps are you seeing it on iOS? Maybe its a bug? If you go to settings in the app and then click “Help and support” > “Report an issue” you can open a github issue. I’ve had really good success in getting issues resolved.

technically yes. they just recently made the sync server open source - https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook-sync-server - but their documentation for it is still pending.

I’ve been following their progress for a while and can say that they appear to be following through on all their goals. and are very responsive to issues on GitHub. but don’t take my word for it, check out their roadmap to see when they release the self hosting documentation- https://notesnook.com/roadmap/

but I thought apple were the good guys /s

I couldn’t get work to pay for it so I found a better, cheaper alternative, Notesnook. It’s open source (client and sync server), you can publish notes, and it’s end-to-end encrypted.

https://cryptpad.fr/ as an alternative to Googles online office suite.

end-to-end encrypted and open-source collaboration suite.

still really early in development but if you primarily work from the browser on a desktop/laptop, it works well enough. I’ve struggled with getting sheets working on a mobile browser but I really like that you could completely self host if you want or just pay them to do it for you.

alien invader

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.

Checkout Notesnook. I’ve tried most of the ones you’ve listed and have been really enjoying how well it works compared to the competition considering its end-to-end encrypted.

A few features:

• Clients and server are open source.
• End-to-end encrypted note syncing.
• You can publish public notes.
• You can publish privates notes that require a password to view.
• You can self-host the sync server.
• You can self-host the publishing server.
• Full offline mode.
• At rest encryption.
• Multi-platform clients with feature parity (Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, MacOS, Web).
• Most if not all of the general features you’d expect from a notes taking application.

One thing I really like about the project is how open they are about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and what the future holds. It’s been great seeing their roadmap (https://notesnook.com/roadmap/) and seeing promised features land with new ones being added, and I’ve only been using it for less than a year now!