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I once decided to deny new customers in order to be able to service current demand at the quality we wanted. It backfired and made people want our product even more. Our phones were blowing up. That approach can have unintended consequences!

You unintentionally used a common sales tactic; by decreasing supply you increase demand.

Another knob you could have turned is: raise prices. Did you try this?

Anthropic is already doing this.

Signup prices seem higher now than three months ago.

This is actually the least frustrating method because people who can't afford to pay are not as angry as people who paid and aren't getting served (like when sign-in emails don't arrive for hours or days), or people who have paid for a long time to suddenly see quality decrease.

But it might not be best for business: Having more users than you can handle might suck, but if you're popular enough, people are still gonna put up with it.


AIUI, Signal decrypts the E2EE message locally, but then sends the decrypted message to iOS in order to display the notification to the user. iOS then stores this data and it persists after the user dismisses the notification.

This makes sense and there's really no way around it without a change from Apple. If iOS is going to show the user a Signal notification with the decrypted message in the notification body, then iOS must be given the decrypted message. iOS could (and probably should) delete that data off the device as soon as the user dismisses/engages with the notification. But it sounds like they do not.


I agree. My point is that this isn't an "obvious hole in the whole E2E encryption setup", because no network actor (e.g. Google, Apple, Signal servers) can read the data.

This "hole" in E2E is the same as any malware on the device. If the device cannot be trusted, no form of E2E will work. The E2E encryption is functioning properly. The problem here is completely unrelated to E2E encryption. E.g. you could have a personal notes app that makes no network traffic, but generates notifications occasionally regarding your notes, and it could have this same problem, even though no messages are sent over the network, and in fact the phone could have all networking capabilities disabled and still have this problem.

>This makes sense and there's really no way around it without a change from Apple.

There is a bit of a workaround: Signal has a setting to not put message content in the notification. That fixes this AIUI.


So Maria machado, the recipient of the Nobel peace prize in 2025 is a would be dictator ?


We have some interesting precedents to compare notes with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi

That did not quite go according to plan either. Definitely not a dictatorship but not exactly clean and the end result is not so far off from where they started. Venezuela could easily end up worse than it is today.


Why do you believe some civil opposition leader will end up im power after foreign military intervention?

Usually people who end up in power are ones best at shooting others invluding shooting civil politicians.


So you know better than the poor brown people?


You’d be surprised. Last month on a visit to the U.S., 8/10 Uber drivers I had were Venezuelan. I’m a fluent Spanish speaker so I engaged in this very topic. The vast majority of them wanted Maduro out, and the fastest way to that is through U.S. intervention. They were not opposed to this.


1. This is a bit of a selection bias, since they are in the US, they aren't going to be the ones in the line of fire. It's all upshot for them.

2. Turn back the clock two decades ago, I'm sure plenty of ex-pat Iraqis wanted Saddam out, but half a million dead and a ten-year civil war and also fucking ISIS may have been a bit above what they were willing to pay. If I were living in a country ruled by a deranged autocrat (...), I too would like to see him removed, but that doesn't mean I'd invite war over it. (And the knives-out-nightly-disappearance repression that will inevitably follow.)

3. Given who Trump sucks up to and appoints, I'm sure he'll find his own monster to replace Maduro with. (The US track record with this in the Americas has been incredibly awful, but I've no doubt that he can set a new lowest bar.) He sure as shit won't be putting some lady who won a peace prize in charge.

Yes, I suppose you have successfully provided a counter-argument to my point, and I have to concede it - there are people with more skin in the game than the average MAGA who want to stick their former neighbours' hands in the fire, to check if it is hot.

Political expats and exiles do tend to favor invasions of their countries more than the people who live in them do, and I've not considered their viewpoints in this.


Like distributing an iOS app in France that uses encryption? What a pain in the ass that is.

The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.

Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?


You can't sell encryption in France if you haven't proved it actually is strong encryption and not a rot13 or something, which is actually a _very_ good idea.

Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.


Some apps have refused to distribute in French store for this reason, such as Syncthing apps Mobius and Synctrain.


It’s a very, very hard read. His vocabulary is insane. I had to look up so many words. Very rewarding to make it to the end though.


What kind of a book is it, genre-wise? Was it interesting? I'm deciding if I should read it someday or not


My understanding is that it’s a loose autobiography.

I read through two thirds of it during Covid. I think it’s has an unfair reputation of being a challenging read; yes you’ll encounter new vocabulary, but the narrative itself is really interesting and clear.


Thanks. I'll check it out


I had the pleasure of recently meeting Leonard and spending a couple weeks together. What a unique and interesting person. I think he’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. His stories are captivating. Could spend a very long time chatting with him.


Has he been doing well?

I'd read he met Ross Ulbricht in USP Tucson when they were both serving life without the possibility of parole. I hope they can reconnect now that they're both free.


Yes, he’s living life to the fullest!

The most active 80 year old I’ve seen. Lots of travel, speaking at conferencing, networking in his professional circles.

Believe it or not, he’s a fairly conservative person. He’d never done yoga, breath work, sauna, cold plunge, saline IVs. I had the honor of pushing him out of his comfort zone a bit with the hippy health stuff.

He’s speed run learning how to use a smartphone and loves using it to connect all the people he meets together.

I think that was the most intriguing part of Leonard- his ability to pick up a new concept in minutes and apply it expertly. We were discussing modern cryptography and he was able to grok it in < 5 minutes.

Yes, he and Ross are still friends today. If I understand correctly they recently met up for the first time outside of prison.


>He’d never done yoga

Huh, the article says he did Yoga.


That's so cool to hear! Thanks for sharing


I’m kind of perplexed by the way Ross Ulbricht is held up as a hero after he was caught spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire hitmen to murder multiple people. Usually when I bring this up people try to change the subject to the FBI agent who tried to steal crypto or they suggest that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the claims (the court found that by a preponderance of the evidence he sent the messages). There are also claims that because they didn’t pursue those charges they do t “count” despite the preponderance of evidence. Some people just aren’t aware at all.

It’s a strange internet phenomenon where people seem to want him to be a folk hero and they’re willing to ignore or use mental gymnastics to wash away the fact that he was spending a lot of money to murder several people.


The jury is out on whether the accounts linked to the hiring of the 'hitmen' was exclusively under the control of Ross Ulbricht.

The 'preponderance' was found by a judge, not a jury, so it's a different threshold than say demanding a jury in a civil suit where the jury would make a finding on preponderance. You effectively have a jury of one, where that jury member is highly intertwined with the same federal government that is prosecuting the crime, in a way that would surely eliminate them in voire dire for an impartial jury.


This is what I’m talking about: There was apparently a preponderance of evidence that messages were sent and money was transferred to have people killed. There was motive. There was evidence. A court reviewed it. It was introduced in a trial.

Yet there’s this desire to downplay it or wish it all away as a conspiracy against him. You have to suspend belief and assume that someone else sent the messages or that they were fabricated. It’s all really hard to believe unless you’re in the mindset that he’s a hero and you need to explain away the inconvenient parts of his history that detract from the person people wish he was.


Ulbricht tried to put out hits on people, this man made a drug banned by governments. Both illegal but only one highly immoral.


My app’s organization is outside the “west”. So in order to complete verification with Google I had to pay some subcontractor of Dunn&Bradstreet almost $500 to get the DUNS. Then I had to get an original certified copy of the organization’s registration from the national registry. Then have an official notarized translation to English and get all that apostilled (another $500 through a service).

Also, Google support refused to tell me what set of documents they would accept. I had to figure it out myself.


Sounds like you just found a business - offer this to others, you could be the fourth party in the transaction!


Do it via an app listed on... Play Store.


Primal.net and yakihonne.com speak nostr protocol and are both pretty slick implementations.

Primal recently launched “build your own algorithm” along with a feed marketplace.

P2P doesn’t work for social, see SecureScuttleButt. Rabble has moved pretty firmly into the Nostr camp. He’s one of the top minds thinking about decentralized social media. Study nostr and don’t dismiss the relay model lightly.


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