Tried this; continued to see no ads for anything at all. Am I doing it wrong?

I use Matrix, and I’ve moved some conversations with people I met in public rooms there to Signal because it kept failing to transfer keys rendering it unable to decrypt messages. I haven’t seen that in a while so maybe it’s fixed, but I haven’t been using it for one-to-one conversations lately.

Unfortunately, I’ve found most people have a lot of resistance to adding another messaging app. I don’t really understand why that is, but it’s true. Asking someone to install a messaging app when I’m their only contact who uses it and they have another way to contact me has a success rate near zero.

Maybe. The bad actor here seems to be the government of China, and the linked page says:

The individuals most at risk include anyone connected to: Taiwanese independence; Tibetan rights; Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in or from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; democracy advocacy, including Hong Kong, and the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

I can imagine them casting a wide net.

What is this? A Twitter post?

Just about. JWZ is known for his cynical hot takes on tech in general.

I don’t think any of his complaints are invalid, though his conclusions are uncharitable at best. Making a communication tool that’s both reasonably secure and sufficiently palatable to people who don’t know how to use computers to achieve broad adoption is a hard problem with no perfect solutions. If he has a better idea, well… he’s a skilled and somewhat famous programmer; he’s better equipped than most to implement it.

Each participant is sent a separate copy of each message encrypted with their own key.

A problem is that some sites that don’t need cookie banners use them anyway due to a poor understanding of the law and excess of caution.

Well… sort of.

Batteries perform differently under load. A battery that delivers 10Wh under a 1W load will probably deliver less (and get warmer) under a 10W load. Power supplies also perform differently under load, and DC-DC switching power supplies perform differently based on the output voltage. Generally, a larger voltage conversion and/or a higher load is less efficient. There’s also going to be some base power consumption in the circuit, so the most output power is probably achieved at some sort of medium load.

To make things more fun, batteries are usually tested under constant current, not constant power. The increasing current as the battery drains of a constant power load will result in less total power, and constant output power often means increasing input power as the battery drains.

In short, the real world is complicated. Giving best and worst case Watt-hours could be a reasonable approach.

I’d be a little concerned about safety. A manufacturer or distributor that’s willing to lie so blatantly about capacity might also be willing to sell cells that failed QC.

Powerbanks are where it’s most problematic. They’re usually reporting the capacity of the battery cells in mAh. Those cells will be at 2.8-4.2V during operation, but the powerbank outputs 5V, or in modern powerbanks some higher number. 5000 mAh at the 3.6V average of the cells during discharge is certainly not 5000 mAh at the 9V it’s giving to my phone.

It’s not going to give my phone 2000 mAh @ 9V or 18 Wh as the math would suggest either because it’s well below 100% efficient. I’m not sure what’s reasonable to demand in terms of advertising here since efficiency will vary with output voltage and output wattage.

I guess they could still lie about watt-hours

Your battery illustrates that; 9.9Ah * 3.7V is, indeed 36.63Wh. Buying anything without trust in the seller or verification by a third party is a crapshoot.

And I think we’d all agree a sophomore dating a college student would be pretty imbalanced.

I was a college student at 17, but I think you had a larger age difference in mind. I do think we can all agree there should be laws against adults sexually exploiting teenagers.

Yes, though legally that’s a bit of a grey area. It’s only really entrapment if law enforcement or informants entice the offender to commit a crime they weren’t predisposed to commit. I imagine it would be an uphill battle to convince a judge or jury of that when it comes to meeting minors for sex.

The decoys were careful so that it would never even be a question.

I remember looking up the people To Catch A Predator worked with and reading some of their chat logs. The decoy was always very upfront in giving an age unambiguously below the age of consent in their jurisdiction, and never initiated conversation about sex or suggested meeting in person.

Of course, the decoy would always agree to do so if the offender asked, but the criminal conduct was unambiguously criminal, and unambiguously the offender’s idea. What we see in this article appears to abandon that sort of rigor to manufacture more opportunities to confront someone.

We’ve decided, as a society, that humans cannot consent until 18.

Older criminal laws were based on that idea, usually called “statutory rape”. Modern laws about sexual abuse of children usually ignore the concept of consent entirely to allow for more nuance.

One example of nuance is exceptions for people close in age so that non-abusive relationships between teenagers don’t suddenly become crimes when someone has a birthday. Another is that consent is often a factor in the severity of the penalty.

Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.

Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.

I’d put it farther removed from the technical side than that; dreadbeef is thinking like a manager. OP might be better off paying a third party $3/month to handle the details and host a heavyweight, full-featured blog for them, but that’s not what they asked for.

This is selfhosted, which I think implies a desire to self-host things even if it might seem a wiser use of resources to do something else.

I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.

This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.

I’m sure there’s a way around it for institutional customers.

It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I’d probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.

Yet they still think it’s a good idea to limit text posts to 300 characters for reasons I cannot fathom.