Either the projects he's working on are side projects, and in that case I don't see why he would need to use the complex pipelines, just Vanilla JS and PHP still work super fine, even better nowadays actually, or the projects are professional ones and then to ship code written by AI is extremely dangerous and he should have resources (time and people) to do things properly without AI. So, I'm clearly not convinced.
Maybe it is „very” professional, so he is part of one of hundreds of teams and he is creating micro parts of big system and with such setup he is easily hiding in ocean of very low performing people.
In many big setups there are so-called microservices that in reality are picoservices doing function of 1-2 method and 1-2 tables in db.
Either way - the setup looks nice and is one of very few that really shows how to make things work. A lot of people say about 5-10x improvements not showing even the prompts, because probably they made some 2 model CRUD that probably can be already made with 20 lines of code in Django.
I use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame, then with a Z3C.
For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when it was becoming stable enough.
It's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and attempting to be a major actor.
A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.
I'm sorry but I don't think this guy did his homework correctly. You don't need a phone number anymore to use Signal. You still need one to register, but not to communicate with anyone. You can simply share your username for that. So you can just buy a prepaid card with cash, register, and then throw it away, and it will never be linked to your real identity.
Signal is not perfect, but it's still the best we have.
Case in point: recently, some Russian mobile service providers started blocking registration SMS for popular messengers, Signal included.
In earlier years there were also cases of mobile number spoofing in the country, where the control over the number was given to law enforcement who then use it as second factor authentication to break into different accounts.
That's how easy it is. The word "secure" and "mobile phone number" are the opposites of each other.
What about the possibility of the number being re-registered with someone else and them using it with Signal? They won't obtain your chats of course, but this workflow with a throwaway number doesn't really work for more than short term use?
You would need to throw the phone away too, and use it only for the prepaid SIM, otherwise its IMEI will be linked to anyone who can observe which are associated with which SIM registrations.
I guess if a serious audit is done then it could be a nice solution. I would love to read more technical details about it, especially how it can be sure the messages are transmitted to the good person.
I am working on https://disco2very.org a NextJS AGPL game to discover the CO2 footprint of... many things. It is using the open data from the French environmental agency ADEME. Tell me what you think!
The scenario you are describing (discovering a problem to fix, being able to fix it, but then not sharing the fix with other people) is the exact reason why GPL has been invented: to force people to share their work, so that we can all have better software, together. Maybe the software you are using wouldn't have been that good if other people weren't forced to share their improvements. Your small effort is going to help others, and their small efforts are going to help you even more. This mindset of sharing should be natural but, as you just proved, people are lazy and so the license has to force them.
Signal is not a company but a non profit, and their service is not proprietary but fully open source including the server side.
That being said, it is centralized and so less resilient, it can be taken down more easily. So you have to pick between more secure (Signal) or more resilient because decentralized (DeltaChat).
Theoretically Matrix has both, but at the moment it is not as secure as Signal, and its UX is clearly worst. And to that you have to add the complexity of decentralization for normal people: which server to pick, how can I know if someone I know has an account... Here the comparison with email should help but still it is not as easy as entering a phone number and immediately you have all your contacts available.
But, and maybe I'm stating the obvious but it is a critical difference, open source is nice but much inferior to open interoperable standards.
Signal-the-company does not allow any clients other than their proprietary compiled client (I believe they sort of tolerate some, but not supported). So while in theory I could use the open source software to run my parallel signal-protocol network, it won't interoperate with the one run by Signal-the-company which is where most people are. So, not actually useful.
Contrast this with email which is an open standard. I can run any SMTP server I like and any MUA I like (or even write my own for one or both), and interoperate with the whole universe of people who use email.
