trailee

Actually I’ll agree with you that a spreadsheet could do a lot, but that’s a niche solution. Building a good one requires a fair bit of technical know how, and even using one well requires a lot of understanding.

Why would you assume the cycle is regular? It’s a biological process that can vary quite a bit, which is part of why you would want to track it in the first place. There’s also much more to track that just the expected start date of your next cycle. The various tracking apps are quite a bit more involved than just a calendar.

This had never occurred to me before but it’s great, thanks! I expect that alarms don’t run until after first unlock, so 3am wouldn’t be great if I use the phone to wake up but later in the morning should be good.

The article is very misleading. It says

The research paper…notes that the human body is particularly efficient at generating 40 MHz RF energy. Tapping into that through a 'worn receiver' provides power without using any invasive means.

But I read much of the pdf linked at the bottom of that link, and there’s nothing about the human body generating energy at 40MHz. The trick is that skin is pretty effective (sort of) at conducting energy at that frequency, so the authors hooked up a power transmitter worn on the forearm, 5 or 15cm away from a receiver on the hand.

This isn’t about powering anything by body energy, it’s about strapping a battery-powered transmitter somewhere on your body and then having another device pick it up when strapped somewhere else on your body. No thanks.

Oh and it’s actually pretty inefficient and won’t provide much usable energy.

This is super cool and looks quite polished in the video. It’s awesome that we live in an era where it’s possible for one guy to create this as a solo hobby project. Too bad it’s Android only but that’s a me problem.

Meta: I’ve noticed a lot of VOA links on Lemmy lately, and I’d like to understand why. As I understand it, VOA is essentially a national propaganda news organization targeting an international audience (similar to RT). Why is that a good source for article sharing? Especially in the case of the article at hand, which is just a VOA republication of an Associated Press piece that could have been linked originally.

They don’t store anything about your association with other numbers; that stays on your devices. Your phone number is used as your identifier for account creation and originally for finding other people to talk with, but the only data Signal keeps associated with your number are registration timestamp and last connection timestamp. You can see that by reading the redacted subpoenas and responses that they publish.

They have recently introduced usernames so that you can avoid having to share your number to communicate with someone else.

I don’t have a good citation for this, but I believe the phone number registration requirement will remain indefinitely, likely to cut down on spam and bots. But there’s a difference between privacy and anonymity - I’m looking for privacy in my communications, not anonymity from my friends. State actors can know that you use it but not what you’re saying or to whom (unless, say, the NSA is specifically targeting you, but that compromise will be of your device as a whole rather than breaking Signal or getting data from them).

I just finished Where the Water Goes, by David Owen. He gets a little rambly at times, but overall it’s a great look at the history of water use and development in the western US as seen through the lens of the Colorado River. The author chronicles several road trips he takes to follow the entire length of the river and several tributaries, and he weaves in a great amount of history along the way.

I particularly enjoyed the part about Arizona’s governor sending out the National Guard to prevent construction workers from accessing the East bank while trying to start building Hoover Dam. He also appointed someone to be the admiral of the Arizona Navy so that she could harass them in boats.

Ultimately it’s a story about just how fucked we all are, but I really enjoyed it and the specificity of why.

A free app with no advertising doesn’t make that kind of money, it gets progressively deeper into debt to a good Silicon Valley rich guy who got it off the ground, Brian Acton.

His biography on the Signal Foundation website:

Brian Acton is an entrepreneur and computer programmer who co-founded the messaging app WhatsApp in 2009. After the app was sold to Facebook in 2014, Acton decided to leave the company due to differences surrounding the use of customer data and targeted advertising to focus his efforts on non-profit ventures. In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike. Signal Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous.

Prior to founding WhatsApp and Signal Foundation, Acton worked as a software builder for more than 25 years at companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Adobe.

The Wikipedia article on the Foundation says the loan balance was up to $105M later in 2018. Meanwhile, Acton is still worth $2.5B according to Wikipedia, so things are probably fine for now, even 6 years later.

But you’re right that Signal eventually needs revenue to keep even a small team of high caliber software engineers and devsecops folks around. You very much want excellent engineers to continue to be involved with critical encrypted communications software on an ongoing basis, so it will cost money indefinitely. Presumably Acton does not wish to bankroll it indefinitely.

Again back to the interview:

I wouldn’t imagine that most nonprofits pay engineers as much as you do.

Yeah, but most tech is not a nonprofit. Name another nonprofit tech organization shipping critical infrastructure that provides real-time communications across the globe reliably. There isn’t one.

This is not a hypothesis project. We’re not in a room dreaming of a perfect future. We have to do it now. It has to work. If the servers go down, I need a guy with a pager to get up in the middle of the fucking night and be on that screen, diagnosing whatever the problem is, until that is fixed.

So we have to look like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.

I’m really glad they pay those engineers that much, so that Zuckerberg and his ilk can’t entice them away with oodles of money. One presumes they also believe in the cause, but I think this currently looks like Acton fighting surveillance capitalism with what capitalism got for him earlier in his career.

Cofounder Moxie Marlinspike is clearly a brilliant hacker and coder who was crucial to Signal’s creation, but I think it makes sense that he hasn’t stuck around to try to solve the long term business problem of keeping it aloft infinitely.

So what to do about it? The OP interview is with Meredith Whittaker, who’s entire job is figuring that out:

Since she took on the presidency at the Signal Foundation, she has come to see her central task as working to find a long-term taproot of funding to keep Signal alive for decades to come—with zero compromises or corporate entanglements—so it can serve as a model for an entirely new kind of tech ecosystem.

I’m a recurring donor because I want Signal to succeed and I want to vote now with my wallet, but fundamentally it’s on Whittaker to figure out how to make the long term work. Here’s what she says:

I see Signal in 10 years being nearly ubiquitous. I see it being supported by a novel sustainability infrastructure—and I’m being vague about that just because I think we actually need to create the kinds of endowments and support mechanisms that can sustain capital-intensive tech without the surveillance business model. And that’s what I’m actually engaged in thinking through.

Don’t forget voice calls! It has some rough edges there (my audio doesn’t always connect successfully, etc), but when it works the codec sounds better than a standard phone call and there’s no mass surveillance. I use it in place of phone calls for all the people in my network who have it, including my immediate family.

Signal is the best thing going on in tech these days. I’m very glad it’s being led by Meredith Whittaker.

Did you know you can get a cool badge on your profile pic if you’re a recurring donor? $5 a month is far less than the value I get from it, but that’s all it takes for a cool badge (and knowing that you’re doing something active against the awful state of big tech today).

That article describes exactly what I would not want to do - subject my expensive vehicle to additional discharge/recharge cycles thereby shortening its battery’s useful life prematurely.

Lithium batteries are pretty great (except for when they catch fire and are nearly impossible to extinguish), but their performance degrades slightly with every charging cycle. You may have noticed that after a year or two your phone no longer makes it through the day without extra charging, because its total capacity is reduced.

The same thing happens with EV batteries (translating into shorter driving range) but they’re much larger and more expensive to replace. Moreover, when replaced, the old batteries are still capable of useful work with lower capacity, so it’s excessively wasteful to dump them into the hazardous e-waste stream for whatever passes as recycling.

There are companies that are collecting those used EV batteries and using them for electric grid storage, which sounds like a great way to extend their lifecycle and to acquire useful equipment at bargain basement prices. That’s what I meant about only ever seeing it at grid-scale. It would be nice if somebody sold a controller for those to be repurposed for use as energy storage for a single home, at much lower equipment cost than a brand new home battery.

There will be many more used EV batteries available in the next several years as the first wave of widely adopted electric vehicles ages out, and the oversupply should drive down their costs further.

That said, being able to use a vehicle battery as an emergency backup during a storm event is a wonderful side benefit. It’s just no substitute for a full time home battery (that’s actually connected during the day when the panels are producing, instead of being parked at work away from your house).