For a while, I've been quietly preparing for the day when YT becomes unusable. I've been using Odysee and Peertube to see if they are viable options. To some limited extent they already are, but there are still lots of room for improvement. Just like Mastodon feels like the early days of Twitter, Lemmy feels like the early days of Reddit, Odysee is a bit like YT once was a very long time ago.

in recent years, YT has been working hard to kick out certain types of channels, so nowadays you can find that sort of content in some of the other platforms. It depends on what you're looking for, so the experience can be anything between awful and great.

It’s just history repeating itself. Israel keeps on pulling this same trick every now and then.

Here’s an example from 2009, and here’s another one from 2006.

Ok, that’s great. Seems like a fairly secure option, so I don’t see any major problems with it.

Yeah, well that’s the problem with writing short messages on a phone. It takes a lot of time to express your thoughts clearly. I’ve added an update.

Anyway, here’s a shorter version of it: I’m not telling you to block people just because they refuse to install Signal. Use this opportunity to find out more about your friends. If you find out that you’ve been hanging out with a jerk all these years, maybe it’s time to let that relationship go. That’s the idea I was chasing with my poorly worded message earlier.

In Terminator 1 the T-800 made a scam call to Sarah in order to find out where she is. He deepfaked the voice of Sarah’s mother, and she fell for it.

Ok, but can I generate a new passkey with the same fingerprint? I’m pretty sure that eventually someone will find an exploit that allows them to steal your keys, so you need to make the old keys invalid by generating new ones.

Producing quality text isn’t just a single skill. You need to come up with a good idea, write some text about it, delete half of it, turn the remaining part inside out, cut it to pieces, rearrange everything, delete everything, start over etc. it’s a lengthy process where the actual writing isn’t even the biggest part. Asking an LLM to write it for you will speed things up, but you still need to make all the big decisions yourself. You are still the captain of the ship while the LLM makes the propeller move.

Did the others give any reasons? Did you tell them why you prefer signal over WhatsApp?

Oh, I have this idea for a social media platform called Hate Furnace. The whole point is to disrupt the social media landscape by maximizing revenue, privacy violations, corrosive atmosphere and abrasive relationships. Instead of making friends, you make enemies in the Hate Furnace. Instead of following someone, you stalk them.

Hate Furnace - Watch the world burn!

Install Signal and tell your friends to do so as well unless they want to use SMS to contact you. If they refuse to use Signal in order to stay in touch, you should ask why. My guess is that those people are exactly the type you should have blocked years ago, so this is also a good opportunity to clean your address book and start from a clean slate.

Edit: That was badly worded, so here’s a clarification.

I’m not telling anyone to block anyone because of the app they use or don’t use. I’m talking about an underlying cause that affects many things such as the apps they use, flexibility and social interactions. Perhaps that person is actually a jerk, but you just haven’t realized yet. Here’s your opportunity to find out. Perhaps there’s a good reason for not installing a new app, but you just haven’t thought of it yet. That’s why you need to ask.

If someone doesn’t want to install a new communication app, that’s ok. Explain why WhatsApp sucks and how Meta is exploiting and abusing the users. Explain how Signal respects your privacy. If the answer is still no, then you have discovered something important. Maybe your friend is a bit more inflexible than you previously thought. Perhaps you value the friendship more than they do. Is it really worth it to be in contact with a person who doesn’t value you and the friendship that much? Maybe this is the type of person who you should have abandoned a long time ago. Not because of their app preferences, but because of their personality.

Of course there’s always a possibility that there is a valid reason and you’re not dealing with a jerk after all. If that’s the case, you can always use SMS and email to stay in touch.

“Don't order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.”

See also: lean manufacturing

The oil industry isn’t about to go anywhere, that’s for sure. It’s just that within the next 100 years, it will probably shrink to a tiny fraction of what it is today.

Now that plastic bags or straws have been banned in certain parts of the world, the future of plastic is beginning to look slightly more uncertain than it used to, but I wouldn’t be too worried just yet. Microplastics are also lookin pretty concerning, so maybe in the very long run we’ll start addressing that as well. All of this might reduce the demand for plastic in general, but I don’t think that’s going to have a major impact any time soon. As you pointed out, plastics are too versatile to ditch entirely.

Maybe we’ll start using more bioplastics, but petrochemical based plastics will be used in many places regardless. At the moment, plastics are used pretty much everywhere, even when it clearly isn’t the most optimal solution. I think that this situation will begin to gradually change as the production and use of alternatives become economically attractive.

For instance, a plastic wrapping around a salad doesn’t need to last thousands of years. As long as it protects the salad all the way from the farm to my kitchen, It’s good enough. This sort of optimization will probably reduce the demand for plastic, but it will probably never go down to zero. There are lots of applications such as chemical bottles where long term durability is far more important.