I’m no expert, but I don’t know if I agree with the premise that Linux desktop is secure via obscurity. Linux is probably the largest effort to create a secure OS, and the Linux desktop benefits greatly from that effort.

OpenBSD has an excellent security track record and is regularly updated, I’m not sure if I believe that its security is “outdated.”

Happy anniversary!

Cake Wallet has made Monero accessible to so many more people and is my mobile wallet of choice. Your passion for Monero shows, hopefully Cake Wallet and Monero will keep improving and bring cheap, trust-less, private payments to even more people.

Spotify is horrible quality for 2023

To my surprise, even Spotify’s standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify’s standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar’s ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that’s apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn’t grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would’ve added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).

Our conclusion is that the quality “difference” is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.

Not sure why you would trust this site. According to the wayback machine their 2020 population forecast just kept lowering and lowering despite the U.S. population only increasing. And since 2020 has passed, we know they were very wrong.

I don’t think anything is “needed.” Monero is a currency, ideally it will be used for everything a currency is used for.

they are silenced and shut down

Silenced and shut down is quite an extreme claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_truth_movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_conspiracy_theories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-knowledge_conspiracy_theories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

I knew 2 people that died from car accidents during covid but zero that died from covid

30 years of road deaths roughly equates to the total deaths of covid, pretty likely for that to occur

So we should be much more concerned with road safety than covid

road precautions are pretty mature after decades of developments (road deaths are on the decline), covid deaths at their peak were way higher than road deaths and we didn’t have precautions like vaccines and social distancing figured out.

how could I have known it was not dangerous but all the world’s media did not know?

I mean its possible that you’re wrong

the consensus said it was a deadly new virus, this was 100% wrong

Anecdotally, I personally knew two people that have died while having covid, and got pretty sick from it twice myself. Falls pretty well in line with what everyone else is saying about covid.

they would be instantly ridiculed by the media and most likely lose their jobs

The majority of the planet does not live under the media and institutions of the united states. Differing theories are pretty much the backbone of science, I find it hard to believe that a theory would get someone fired.

I don’t think either of us are qualified to argue about the engineering, physics, etc. but I propose a different argument that is the broader issue of almost all conspiracies.

I haven’t seen this (or other conspiracies) gain any traction amongst accredited individuals or institutions. If practically every engineer, physicist, or whatever on the planet has been exposed to this event, and there is almost no resistance to the mainstream narrative of how things went down, then I am extremely doubtful that you, me, or whoever made the video are able to understand why the mainstream narrative might be wrong.

The US government can commit war crimes without having to make a hoax that probably didn’t justify what they did in “retaliation” anyways.

Admittedly I didn’t watch the entire video, but I think this is pretty stupid. There’s loads of independently recorded angles of this happening (here’s 50 of them), and one of the largest cities on the planet full of witnesses.

Even if the videos shown we’re “forged,” how do you know that an “actual” plane wouldn’t do exactly as it did in the video? Lots of other planes have flown into other buildings, and the planes enter the building without crumpling. I’m sure you can do your own physics simulation rather than trying to abuse intuition but many other people have done it already (here, here, here).

When I think of Bitcoin, I think of corporations. Bitcoin has chosen not to evolve in favor of companies that profit off of its weaknesses, and using the currency is almost completely surrounded by companies that have to listen to the government (ATM’s, exchanges, etc.). I would bet that the large majority of people who “hold” Bitcoin do it for the money and don’t care about everything I’ve mentioned.

As long as you restrict RPC on 18081 its fine to externally bind, 18089 is just an indicator that its intended for public use.

Edit: Looks like my monerod isnt letting me externally bind to 18081 like it is 18089, maybe you’re right or I’m missing a command.

I agree with @shortwavesurfer@monero.town, what I need in a Monero wallet is good send/receive and maybe an optional fiat api. I feel like all the other online services might as well stay in Cake wallet with the “bloat” coins. I feel like most users that would rather use a Monero-only wallet over multi coin would agree with the sentiment.

Appreciate the work you do.

Then everyone needs to download and make an account on said app, they already exist and none are unanimous.

Everyone has a phone number that gets used for auth and other things. If that system doesn’t change then RCS is way better.

Never looked into it, what’s so bad about RCS besides it being proprietary? Way better than SMS in my experience.

RCS seems to be pretty openly licensed out to other OEMs, definitely a lot better than iMessage.

It’s still proprietary though, a far cry from something like Matrix.

Yes, but nobody uses the alternate chains and the coins become effectively worthless.

Nice. In the rare chance that you haven’t heard of GrapheneOS, now you have.

Did you get your phone from your carrier? In addition, some brands do that with cheaper phones. Can buy unlocked phones.

Maybe try Google Pixel or iPhones that have terms against pre-installing shit.

You’re right about most things, and Linux/VR support is often a deal breaker for me so I rarely use Epic. But you really think its that unusable? I’ve heard mostly positive things from my friends. I don’t care how or why they’re giving out free games but its a huge plus. I just really don’t understand all the hate.

What’s so wrong with Epic? I prefer Steam but Epics client has a better UI, I haven’t found any problems, and deals seem better than Steam, especially with free games.