Just a stranger trying things.

  • 7 Posts
  • 235 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • If you open the latest instance, from August 2024, you will find a California government request, for a number of phone numbers.

    The second paragraph of that very page says:

    Once again, Signal doesn’t have access to your messages; your calls; your chat list; your files and attachments; your stories; your groups; your contacts; your stickers; your profile name or avatar; your reactions; or even the animated GIFs you search for – and it’s impossible to turn over any data that we never had access to in the first place.

    They respond to the request with the following information:

    1. The responsive information that Signal possessed was:

    a. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration: 2023-01-31 T19:42:10 UTC; Most Recent Login: 2023-01-31 T00:00:00 UTC.

    b. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration: 2022-06-01 T16:30:01UTC; Most Recent Login: 2022-12-12 T00:00:00 UTC.

    c. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration 2021-12-02T03:42:09 UTC; Most Recent Login: 2022-12-28 T00:00:00 UTC.

    The redacted values are the phone numbers.

    That is the full extent of their reply. No other information is provided, to the government request.



  • and requires phone numbers (meaning your real identity in the US).

    This gets shared a lot as a major concern for all services requiring a phone number. It is definitely true that by definition, a phone number is linked to a person’s identity, but in the case of signal, no other information can be derived from it. When the US government requests data for that phone number from Signal, like they occasionally do, the only information Signal provides them with is whether they do have a signal account and when they registered it last and when they last signed in. How is that truly problematic? For all other services which require a phone number, you would have much more information which is where it is truly problematic, say social graph, text messages, media, locations, devices etc. But none of that is accessible by Signal. So literally the only thing signal can say is whether the person has an account, that’s about it. What’s the big deal about it? Clearly the US government already has your phone number because they need it to make the request for Signal, but they gain absolutely no other information.


  • Get what you are trying to say but both are still encrypted. They simply aren’t end to end encrypted. So the messages are private.

    You explain exactly why messages are not private: if they are not end-to-end encrypted, by definition Telegram can read all the messages. That’s exactly what end-to-end is meant to protect against. So in that aspect, Signal truly is private and Telegram maybe, if you activate their private chats but I’ve not seen security experts praise their algorithm, compared to their regular endorsement for Signal.




  • To run the full 671B sized model (404GB in size), you would need more than 404GB of combined GPU memory and standard memory (and that’s only to run it, you would most probably want it all to be GPU memory to make it run fast).

    With 24GB of GPU memory, the largest model which would fit from the R1 series would be the 32b-qwen-distill-q4_K_M (20GB in size) available at ollama (and possibly elsewhere).


  • I’m personally satisfied with the statement, position and reflection on the issue.

    It was a fuck-up to publicly respond to donaldtrump in what could be seen as an endorsement. This was acknowledged and remedied.

    The no politics stance is probably unavoidable, as mentioned but they should never focus on political parties, but on defending the values, this is what is clarified and that’s best. We should accept to support a bill strengthening privacy even if it may come from a political party we generally do not support. Denying our support to such a bill would not strengthen the core value we defend. And as individuals we may still criticize all other activities of such a political party if we disagree with others of their activities.

    As a community, I hope we can come together, and resist the temptation of purity tests, and acknowledge that we are all fighting for the same cause, no matter our perspective on other issues. We need the support of everyone.



  • Memento is a movie about a guy who tries to find the murderer of his wife but has a condition where he only remembers the last few minutes, so works with post-its, photos and tatoos to piece things together. Great movie!

    Predestination is a time traveling cop trying to prevent a terrorist attack.

    I’m leaving the best part out which is thought provoking, but you will find it and appreciate it when you watch both movies I think.



  • My number one gripe with organic maps is how fragile the search is. If you don’t write it exactly right, you get no or irrelevant results. Also, it seems to have no clue of what is popular and what people expect when they search for something. I’m not talking about personalized results but for example the following: searching for “Eiffel”, leads me to minor roads, restaurants and all kinds of results unrelated to the Eiffel tower. This is what is troubling me the most.



  • Exactly, this is about compression. Just imagine a full HD image, 1920x1080, with 8 bits of colors for each of the 3 RGB channels. That would lead to 1920x1080x8x3 = 49 766 400 bits, or roughly 50Mb (or roughly 6MB). This is uncompressed. Now imagine a video, at 24 frames per second (typical for movies), that’s almost 1200 Mb/second. For a 1h30 movie, that would be an immense amount of storage, just compute it :)

    To solve this, movies are compressed (encoded). There are two types, lossless (where the information is exact and no quality loss is resulted) and lossy (where quality is degraded). It is common to use lossy compression because it is what leads to the most storage savings. For a given compression algorithms, the less bandwidth you allow the algorithm, the more it has to sacrifice video quality to meet your requirements. And this is what bitrate is referring to.

    Of note: different compression algorithms are more or less effective at storing data within the same file size. AV1 for instance, will allow for significantly higher video quality than h264, at the same file size (or bitrate).