Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged

(This is from October 14, 2022.)

Note: I meant to write FSF Foundation wherever I wrote “GNU Foundation” below. I wanted to correct this mistake below, though I also didn't want to go and correct every instance of this with a Git-synced copy. However, the rest of my ideas still stand (along with the executive decision for this post to refuse becoming distracted with excessive journalistic/Markdown hyperlinking).

Such experts, like in the GOS team, are not too different from institutional Buddhists from Thailand or mediocre physicists at underfunded universities: they all have the mental disease of acute nationalist sentiments of other experts (even fellow experts).

None of these people will ever make genuine attempts to communicate clearly or concisely — forget about advising them to not use this speech to both make themselves sound smart and to impress non-experts of their fields.

Let us get real with this apt analogy: is using a sleight of hand magic trick with playing cards to impress a mere monkey truly an incredible feat, or worthwhile as a benchmark of one's success? I hope not! That is such a disingenuous measure of success. (I hope others will fail to impress you with this equivocation on how qualified each and every one of these cranks are after realizing this bit of conventional and earthly truth.)

Only those who has opinions (because everyone inevitably holds them) leading nomadic traveling lives are free from the prejudice and discrimination of the equivalents to xenophobia, racism, and segregation of other experts.

Let's decipher some of this mess, and then I will no longer read the Twitter feed of the GrapheneOS account, which is simply a soapbox front for Daniel Micay's untreated and unhinged narcissistic paranoid schizophrenia. (As if I have any right to discuss on how others are unhinged... “Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged” automatically disqualifies me from “gossiping” about others, but regardless I will push on)

As I always, say: the internet is inappropriate for those with serious underlying mental health issues — however, this is neither the time nor the place to elucidate further on this matter.

Signal moving to remove SMS on Android (October 2022)

Signal made an announcement stating that SMS messaging will be removed.

I had actually stopped this behavior on my phone a long time ago — at least in mid-2021? This was because I actually thought that SMS had already been removed from Signal, but maybe that's my déjà vu taking advantage of my easily impressionable subconsciousness.

Micay made a Twitter thread on this reasoning, but honestly I think the summary of this answer should be given in the Matrix room, instead of the (already abridged yet still too long) version dumped into Twitter, which is a horrible medium for making the Semantic Web function properly (let alone preserve).

Also, what is the point of trying to tweet at these barely literate cryptocoin shilling techbro fuckbois actual information if they literally cannot comprehend tweets fewer than 140 characters in length? Please see how a certain techbro erroneously believes iOS allows users to use a different SMS app besides the stock Apple Messages app and thinks that Molly not being able to use SMS is a bug when this fact is literally posted on the Molly homepage and on the project's README on GitHub. This is such a low bar of (contextual) intelligence to clear that I will indigently refuse to link the respective answers to both the Molly homepage or Molly's GitHub repo, because help vampires that have somehow passed my hyperbolic boundary of patience and running amok on the other side of infinity need to be Thanos snapped out of existence.

(Yes, I'm like Elliot Alderson — I think most Marvel movies are stupid, but also the Thanos snapping reference is one of the objectively good phenomena to come out of the MCU. But the neglected Marvel TV shows, like Legion or Cloak and Dagger? C'mon, you're ripping us off here.)

Google passive aggressively ignoring Mullvad's filed Android issue reports

Mullvad made a blog post about Android leaking traffic connectivity checks. As part of another Twitter thread, likely in response to increased public coverage of GrapheneOS, Micay posts where these connection checking services can be altered on the GrapheneOS website.

I wish there were actionable directions that an “idiot” like Louis Rossmann can read and understand (and warnings about the consequences of all possible choices), rather than vague directions that take only up to 1 minute to follow thinly spread out in prose more dense than in most academic physics articles. My “Michael Bazzel” type of advice is to avoid tinkering with the options for DNS or the time checking services. A development team, such as for GrapheneOS, should actively make decisions on those low level details — not some rando who thinks they know a lot about internet privacy after spending too much time with the adult children of the GrapheneOS Matrix room.

A project like GrapheneOS potentially endorsing an app is like a humanities organization endorsing a political candidate — this is why organizations like the ACLU and EFF do not endorse political candidates currently running for office.

Random crap close enough to Jeremy Soller's Twitter feed

I have no idea why Jeremy Soller, of System76, even tweets. Is he literally playing 4D chess to market himself, System76, and his Redox project all at once? At least he's not a stuffy boomer, like: Linus Torvalds of the Linux kernel (which is technically a lie, since basically legions of programmers code most of the Linux kernel, yet Torvalds takes all of the credit in the public's eye); Richard Stallman of the GNU Foundation; whoever the BDFLs are in Vim and Slackware, respectively; and Leah Rowe of Libreboot.

The best tools right now are made in teams. Signal (for better or worse) no longer relies on Moxie Marlinspike to code or maintain the servers anymore in 2022. System76 is a small company making better changes to what should be Ubuntu than Canonical itself. (Also, screw Red Hat Enterprise Linux — you know that the NSA acts as Janus with RHEL: the agency both hardens RHEL servers, yet also sits on various CVEs for RHEL to attack the rest of the world that made the first good step of not running Windows Server.) Nobody at Linux Mint actually tries to push his/her/their own public image as “leader of Linux Mint”. Nirav Patel at Framework does not seem to be the type of person to claim that the entirely of Framework stands upon only his shoulders. Arch Linux and Alpine Linux are both run by their respective teams. Even Gentoo has to maintain its fiances.

You either adapt and become the modern stoic chad who everyone is generally fine with, such as Soller; or you die like a stuffy weirdo in projects that decide to continuously dysfunction under BDFLs. Daniel Micay will not be able to change as a person, before GrapheneOS becomes this quaint project that Snowden praised some time ago in the distant past... when someone of Andrew Huang's caliber comes around, functionally performs everything Micay and the GOS team currently does (not the CS definition of “function”), and does not have to become a SJW to actually be objectively progressive — yet does not needlessly piss everyone off due to a pathetic ego fueled by Twitter's black boxed adtech algorithm. Physicists or statistical mechanics who change the time scale to centuries say that glass is a fluid, yet that is exactly how Micay's personality is: basically a solid on the time scale/order of 1-5 years.

Not to be arrogant, but... at least I will not be making the same mistakes as Micay.

Anyways, here are the random bits.

Amazing art mirror

I wish I knew where this mirror was located.

Why does tech in the greater Boston area suck?

This tweet confirms that New England thinks financial tech (or “fintech”, as “journalism” is calling it these days).

Zachary (@a1p1n3) and iOS jailbreaking

Was this man responsible for one of the 2-3 main jailbreaking methods, back during the iPhone 4/4s or iPhone 5 era?

Regardless, I am glad that this hacker is most certainly not in jail... since most unstructured hackers end up in jail.

Not a great trend for us fellow “hackers”. I am using MacKenzie Wark's definition of a hacker, so more than just the computer hackers.