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1. Facebook owns WhatsApp and uses it to collect data about people, such as who they communicate with, how and when. They also know about many of the websites you visit and what you do there. They know everything you do on Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. They buy mountains of data about us from other sources. By analysing all of that data they can probably do a reasonable job at guessing the content of your WhatsApp messages.

2. WhatsApp tries to get every user to accept the option to backup messages and photos to Google Drive, where they sit unencrypted and accessible by Google. Even if you reject that option yourself, your correspondents are likely to have enabled it (if only just to stop WhatsApp from nagging about it) and so your messages are available for Google to read. Example of why this can be bad: https://www.vice.com/en/article/zm8q43/paul-manafort-icloud-...

3. Google Photos asks WhatsApp users if they'd like it to back up their WhatsApp photos. Even if you reject that option, your correspondents may have enabled it and so your photos are stored online unencrypted and accessible by Google.

4. Why should we limit what Google and Facebook know about us? Google and Facebook influence our behaviour for the benefit of their paying customers. Their computer systems are too powerful for our minds. They work against us, not for us. Companies like Facebook will come to be seen like tobacco companies, except that the harm is as from mind altering drugs. There is a documentary on Netflix called The Social Dilemma which explains this well. The polarisation of societies and the spread of conspiracy theories are some of the effects. The only defence is to disengage.

5. Read about Chinese-style social credit to understand why you want companies like Facebook and Google to know as little about you as possible. This is a good overview: https://nhglobalpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/chin...


> backup messages and photos to Google Drive, where they sit unencrypted and accessible by Google

WhatsApp provides an option (off by default) to encrypt the backup with a password so that it cannot be decrypted by Google.


There can be a temptation as a parent to practice our hobby in a way that makes us feel that we are engaging with our child when actually our child would be just fine with FlightRadar and more of daddy.

I'm not judging (really) because every family has different circumstances and every person is different, I just know that I jumped into this trap a few times and you are reminding me of myself back then.

Brain Rules for Baby is an excellent way to learn how your child works, or at least I found to be so.

Anyway, you're nearly at Brio and then Lego and it gets better and better...


Pricing? Can't see it on website



RSS is how I read websites. It's still RSS time


With the unwinding of twitter, RSS has become invaluable to me as a replacement.


I think you mean swipe. Swype was a brilliant third party keyboard app for Android which was better at text prediction and manual correction than Gboard is today. If however you really do still use Swype then please tell me how because I miss it.


Ha good point, and yes I agree Swype continues to be the best text input technology that I’ll never be able to use again. I guess I just committed genericide here but I meant the general “swiping” process at this point


My first question when I am considering a product like this is how can I get an email when there's an error in my application. Why isn't that in the top level feature list of everything like this, or am I unusual in thinking that this is an essential feature of any hosting system?


I've started tossing https://ntfy.sh/ alerts into my Deno apps to get push notifications for things I'm interested in


My wife has had good luck using Pushover [1], which seems similar. I wonder how these services compare?

[1] https://pushover.net/


I actually use Pushover for a project but it just does the notification part and requires me to catch all errors and send them to Pushover. I'm looking for the hosting service to catch unhanded errors automatically



Pushover looks very similar to Ntfy, but I haven't tried it yet.


I think the answer to that is the same as the answer to "how do I send an email in Deno?", since this lets you run arbitrary code.

System level cron needs that feature built in because you're just telling it a command to run, and you're limited in how you deal with error and output handling of that command. That's not a problem when you're in the language you're using to define the action. Just catch your errors, or grab all STDOUT/STDERR with some solution and do with it what you want on success or error.


The downside is that when it has to be done on a job-by-job basis, you can’t rely on the cron system handling failure modes you didn’t anticipate.


It's code. There is not necessarily a single solution that makes sense. The thing you're calling could throw an exception, or it could return a failure value. If it fails, you may want to set off some extra routine that retries, or perhaps you want to handle some specific errors and retry or notify, but other errors are critical and cause failure, not just notification. Having it handle those automatically is not a feature in some cases, it's a problem.

System cron is simple, by design, because as a DSL there's a benefit to not complicating it. If you're already in Javascript/Typescript, a lot of the benefits of that are mitigated by the benefits of having much more control over exactly how it functions in every care.

As an example of this, there's a bunch of cron "helpers" to deal with the shortcomings of cron's simplistic approach, such as those in moreutils[1].

P.S. Personally I wouldn't have even called this implementation cron and use the cron syntax for it, since that just makes people assume cron usage and the cron scheduling format is not an asset if you're already in a language where you could just pass in a structure with the specific fields you want set by name.

1: https://rentes.github.io/unix/utilities/2015/07/27/moreutils...


Some hosting systems may support that out of the box but I don't know what they are. Typically you would use metrics, monitors and alerts and create a notification alert based on certain conditions. No reason they couldn't provide some out of the box, but it's not common. At the very least it would need to stop after a short number of alerts or they'd end up spamming customers if it crashes on a loop


I like that it fits tasks around my calendar events to schedule my day. I wish there was an Obsidian plugin to do that.


I use Full Calendar Obsidian plugin that populates calendar from daily notes. But it doesn’t have an auto-sync option, so I add calendar entries manually at the start of the day.


I read that people often think this because cat intelligence is often measured by tests which better suit dogs


ADHD...


KeePassXC has Google Authenticator-compatible 2fa on Windows. I expect other programs do too, and for Mac and Linux. No need to keep a smartphone only for 2fa, unless you need something that Google Authenticator can't do


KeePassXC even has Steam-compatible 2FA. But Steam currently still requires some sort of stupid unbypassable mobile prompt in certain circumstances, so you can't ever truly rid yourself of the app.


Yep xc works on Linux too and comes with the 2fa feature too. On mobile you can look at keepassdx which uses the same field as xc for its 2fa.


This.

Problem still persists with mandatory phone number verifications every couple months. It's likely most services have a cronjob running for that.


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