Spoilers:

Worst 10: Spain, Finland, Sweden, Greece, France, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Canada, Portugal.

Best 10: Netherlands, Iceland, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, South Korea, Japan, Malta, Czech Republic, Singapore.

Order in both lists is from higher to lower rate of unemployment, i.e. worst to best.

I don’t think much of these lists I guess. I keep hearing that Germany is hosed because of inflation outstripping earnings, and lots of Germans are moving to Austria because of that.

The lists generally don’t reflect anecdotal economic conditions in those places. So I’d like to see more direct numbers about median purchasing power and stuff like that. Also for work-seekers with some mobility, exactly what kinds of openings are there in a given country and what occupations are already glutted.

Music that takes focused listening, or else the kind that zones you out.

1 centaur = 1/2 human + 1/2 horse

1/2 human + 1/2 centaur = 3/4 human + 1/4 horse.

Yay math.

Only living people can win the prize. If they die between the announcement and the ceremony they still get it posthumously. I’m pretty sure that has happened now and then.

Interesting though article is from 2016 which is when the scandal happened.

Meh. I’m holding out for wretched hive of scum and villainy.

We had that, it was called dmoz.org, looks dead/squatted now.

Cosmological restaurant. It’s at the end of the universe.

If they own houses that is public info.

Expert calls Musk’s ‘Doge’ involvement ‘one of the greatest brand destructions’

WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.

What the heck is this thing? Should many of us care?

Those are nice generalities but I think they ignore reality. Jami seems like sort of a side project to its developers. Bug reports often are answered with a suggestion to make sure everyone is running the latest version of Jami, which is often useless advice. Like if you try to call your friend with your new phone and the call doesn’t complete, it’s unhelpful for your phone manufacturer to say your friend should get a new phone. You might be interested in helping fix the problem but your friend just wanted to have a phone conversation and doesn’t want to get dragged into a debugging project. It’s even worse if the other person is not your friend but rather is someone you just met and exchanged numbers with. If you try to follow up with a phone call and there is a problem, GAME OVER. You permanently lose contact with that person. You can’t possibly suggest Jami as a Skype replacement after that happens to you once or twice.

Another thing with comms programs in general is you really can’t debug them with just one computer. Their whole function is to let two computers talk to each other, so you need two computers where you control both ends and ideally control the network as well, so you can insert delays, network faults, etc. If the Android version has trouble talking to the Iphone version, you need both kinds of phones. I’m not sure if Jami’s devs really understand that. I’ve worked on telecom stuff in the past and it’s just the reality of that field.

Yet another (I’m not sure of this) is that Jami is a peer to peer program so I suspect some of the problems revolve around firewall traversal gotchas of various types. I don’t know if there is a cure for this while keeping the basic architectecture intact. I do like it in principle and I know that people get BitTorrent working reliably without too much trouble, so maybe Jami is just missing some trick.

Finally, Jami is pretty old and back in those days, people hadn’t really thought about the subtleties of encrypted group chats. Signal does a better job, and these days there is a standard (RFC 9420) for how to do it (I don’t know if Signal follows this standard). It would be good if Jami were revamped for that, but 1) that would break interoperability again, and 2) I don’t know if it’s workable at all with Jami’s architecture (serverless, using a distributed hash table for peer discovery).

For now I’ve sort of given up on Jami and am trying to figure out what to use instead. It’s unfortunate that the main devs don’t seem to have that much interest in making Jami reliable. Randos like me capable of making small contributions can’t really help much with more involvement from the experts.

I found the wikipedia article mostly incomprehensible but it says a few things. You are probably better off asking on MSE or Reddit, sorry to say. Wikipedia’s math reference desk has slowed down a lot in recent years though that’s possibly another place to try.

At least here in the US, lots of mobile phone plans have free or cheap international calls, depending on the countries involved. Example. Some home landline plans also have that. So far that has been enough for me on the few occasions when I’ve wanted to make an international call. If more frequent, I’d use a VOIP provider, maybe Twilio (I’m sure there are others too, but I know Twilio supports this and has a decent API).

VOIP providers will often also sell you inbound phone numbers in the destination country, if you want the other person to be able to call you from their landline without it getting rung up as an international call for them. Those aren’t always so cheap, but there are obvious use cases.

Oh I see. Yeah DVD drives generally use the same SATA interface as hard drives.

Because your status updates and messages are encrypted and stored (until retrieved, of course) once for every recipient, and that includes your other devices and their other devices.

I’d like to see a numerical estimate of how much data this is. But, it sounds to me like more reason to want to self-host.

I don’t see any point to rehashing the other stuff. Non-TLS websites mostly went away once DNS spoofing at wifi hotspots became widespread.

If you mean a 2.5" drive (laptop sized) then yes you can generally do that. 3.5" drives are usually 1" thick and won’t fit in a slim DVD drive slot.

Thanks. The more I think about it, the more this seems like outright evil behaviour on Signal’s part to pursue user growth, similar to Facebook etc. Imagine that you and your boss are in each other’s contacts for obvious work-related reasons. Do you really want Signal notifying your boss that you registered for Signal? For some of us it’s fine, but in general it seems like a terrible idea.

Yeah I’m on their Discourse forum, but the situation isn’t that great, and it’s unclear to me if the problems are fixable. Particularly when there are incompatibilities between version X and version Y, where both versions are already in the wild. You can’t travel backwards in time to fix those versions, and this (like email clients or telephones) is an application area where you can’t tell people to update their clients all the time. You have to keep things interoperable.

It’s also often inconvenient to reproduce bugs like that in order to diagnose them. If you try to talk to someone over Jami and it doesn’t work, you generally can’t borrow their phone to analyze the issue. If you’re one of the core developers, maybe you have access to a room full of different kinds of phones and OS versions to test with, but a typical user/contributor won’t have anything like that.