Honestly, as much as I would like that as the next guy.. I doubt they would've gotten anywhere close to engagement in the range of 400 comments sadly.
When it comes to reach this is still not the place to be. Now, how meaningful the comments are? That's a different question.
I think we can be pretty damn sure that the encryption is not backdoored since the Signal Protocol is the gold standard in encryption nowadays and thousands if not more highly skilled cryptographers without tied to the US govt looked at it thoroughly. Also Snowden calls Signal the best messenger on the grounds on him using it daily and still being alive so that's also a pretty good sign.
Also, do you have a source about them being mainly funded by the US govt? In their blog they talked about mainly being funded by small donors and a few initial loans from people who care about privacy.
I mean they did also inject affiliate links without the users noticing which is really shady behaviour from a browser because it has one job, open the link I click and nothing else. But that's just IMHO if that is acceptable for you personally then there is no issue with that.
Just leaving this here for everyone! This browser extension saved me a lot of hassle so many times. We need to stop paying where possible and this is the convenient legal way for a lot of papers out there: https://unpaywall.org/
Matrix does definitely not have the same reliability as WhatsApp or Signal. I've used it for around 3 years now with a group of tech savvy friends.
It's still a regular occurrence that we get cannot decrypt errors, sometimes the app doesn't show new messages in the chat but they are visible in the preview, also the app can be soooo slow.
Also, I know it's not user error. If you check the Matrix development and follow their blog posts they already acknowledged the issues and are working on fixes. But for now it's just wishful thinking when one calls them reliable alternatives for mainstream use. I'm not hating and will keep using the project because I truly think they are doing amazing work.
10 Gbps symmetrical for 40 bucks a month TV included. It's absolutely mind boggling for me how expensive internet is in North America.
Well yes, however without acceleration JPEG XL is many times faster. Also if you only have a CPU for example.
It's also highly parallelizable compared to AVIF which also matters a lot considering the amount of cores is growing with the likes of ARM and hybrid architecture CPU.
AVIF also fairs badly with high fidelity and lossless encoding, has 1/3 the bit depth and pretty small dimension limits for something like photography.
I don't think AVIF is per se a bad format. I just think if I want to replace a photo oriented format I'd like to do that with one that's focused on „good“ photos and not just an afterthought with up- and downsides.
I still won't get over it and will keep fighting for JPEG XL. It would fix so many issues and greatly reduce the bandwidth need of the internet while not either having weird licensing or royalties and / or being a „what if we just took one frame from a video“ picture format. Also it can encode back to JPEG lossless for legacy uses. What more could one want?
What a shame… this was the chance to finally get rid of this cancerous herbicide and now we're stuck with it for another ten years it seems. If you want more information and / or voice your disagreement there is this petition with more than 2.5 million signatures.
That's why Tenacity is here to save the day!