I wholeheartedly agree tbh

lich king was decent but it felt like the start of the downward spiral

as disabled people, we couldn't possibly figure out voting, let alone have questions around policy. eyeroll

oof yeah :| Twilio has pretty much made half a business model out of promising that you can refuse VoIP numbers using their APIs soo it's a real thing

honestly, this responses just pisses me off.

not everyone who needs to be careful with their privacy is fortunate to have a stockpile of money to spend on carriers that are WAY more expensive than they need to be. or reliable internet access.

i understand that you may not have an answer to the original question of "how do I ?", and you have the opportunity to avoid the situation in the whole and not have to think about it -- that's pretty awesome! but it completely ignores the fact that everyone is in a different situation, with specific and unique needs and context. it reeks of being patronizing tbh.

we don't know what this person's situation is, so the thing to do here is to take them at their word and help them with the problem in front of us. suggestions towards alternative solutions are of course welcome, but things like "not sure why youd want to do that" only serves to show that you don't understand the situation.

not everyone has the same choices available to them in their situations, everyone's threat model is different.

and when you need a real, non-VoIP, number for something, wifi helps out how..?

never forget that even the tor project had a relationship with Team Cymru that everyone likes to pretend was just a normal thing for them to do.. Team Cymru is kiinda creepy

partly it's not about what it can do that a smartphone can't, but exactly the opposite. there are lots, and lots, and lots of things smartphones can do that PDAs can't. and i neither want to do any of them, nor have constant notifications and advertisements trying to get me to do them.

but the big thing for me is that they were designed local-first. my data lives on the device. i sync it to my other devices. i can't accidentally lose access, get suspended, have my account closed due to a change in ToS, get my account locked out because i accidentally visited from a VPN or used a VoIP number -- all of which, now, are at best massive inconveniences and at worst result in major data loss for no reason. it didn't need connectivity to do it's job.

when i can refuse to connect my smartphone to an IP network and still have it do everything i need it to do, i will back off :p

i have an android phone here that i've slowly been trying to make behave more and more that way, looking to tools like SyncThing and DECSync and anything that's designed similar. it's close, but it still causes enough annoyances that i'd rather just have a PDA.

yeah i'll admit I still hear in Todd's voice most of the time... or occasionally McKay's

ba'al vs ball ofc

it's not exactly a new thing, but yes. they've been trying to bus people as far as they can get away with.

i'll admit to almost spitting out my energy drink snorting

weed, cigarettes, caffeine. lots of it 😅