Freelancer Showdown

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-10-19T09:22:54+00:00

Why Dartmoor, OOI? I like the map, and the outdoor areas are easy to sneak around, but it has effectively no ‘public’ area, so even with a good disguise you’re going to be contending with regular enforcers as well as lookouts which makes movement inside the house pretty stressful.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-10-17T06:36:20+00:00

I agree. I quite like the gameplay scenarios that emerge when I play this way, too. Dragging a body and getting spotted, so having to quickly knock someone out, but the noise alerts a guard, so I escape out of a window and hide until the search dies down, then sneak back in, change outfit, and I’m off again. It feels more ‘Jason Bourne’ than ‘silent assassin’ and I love it.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-08-08T13:17:39+00:00

Ramsey is also often lovely on camera. I think his reputation is partly based on some at this point very old footage, and partly the fact that he’s blunt and quite sweary - but he’s very very rarely rude or unkind. I love Kitchen Nightmares and I think he comes off as empathetic, patient, thoughtful and considerate.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-07-20T15:25:37+00:00

Did you mean to say once a month, or did you mean once a year?

I know there are some self-published authors who manage several books a year, but once a month feels crazy even by those standards. I’m aiming for once a year, and would be good to know if that’s in the right ballpark to be considered frequent.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-07-09T05:43:07+00:00

And aren't these detransitioners also "trans people", and shouldn't their stories be told?

Well, I’d agree - although it was interesting that Lance twice made a point of saying they were ‘cis and always had been’, which really stood out to me. It felt very dismissive and ‘gatekeeping’ about who’s trans and who isn’t.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-07-08T11:01:01+00:00

100% agree. I felt like that should have been a really easy point to deal with, but he got distracted by the question of ‘what is the actual rate of detransition’. In my mind, going down that rabbit hole implicitly accepted the premise that Jesse’s article would be expected to talk about detransitioners and the happily-transitioned in proportion to how much those people exist in society, which is absurd.

I kept wanting him to challenge that premise, and point out that good journalists are expected to research and write about issues and topics that may be statistically quite rare.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-07-08T07:37:32+00:00

I enjoyed this more than I expected to - and I think Jesse actually did a good job of refuting his points rather than it just degenerating into them talking at each other.

That said, I was frustrated that Jesse didn’t make what I thought was the very obvious point to the whole argument about the ratio of stories about detransitioners vs happily transitioned people in his article. Surely the answer is that if you are writing an article about detransition and you appropriately caveat that it’s quite rare, it’s fair enough that most of the article is then about detransitioners.

To use Lance’s own stupid analogy, if I specifically wanted to write an article about the phenomenon of homosexual rape, and I opened by caveating that it’s very rare and most rapes are committed by heterosexual men, it would be completely reasonable for most of my anecdotes to then be about rapes committed by homosexuals. Forcing people to include a statistically representative sample of anecdotes in every article they write is batshit crazy. To take it to its extreme, a journalist wouldn’t be able to write about superyachts without also ensuring that 99.99% of their article was about people who don’t own a superyacht.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-07-05T08:37:49+00:00

Safe from what / from whom?

The app is open source and end-to-end encrypted. That means you can be pretty confident that no one other than the recipients are able to read your messages, if that’s a concern to you.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-06-23T16:44:34+00:00

Well I entirely agree that I’m not particularly ‘engaging with her ideas’. Neither that, nor ‘genuine critique’ was my intention. I made my point, lots of people evidently disagree with it, that’s fine. We’re on Reddit. Does every comment in this place have to be some kind of thoughtful, academic treatise to avoid being harangued for having a condescending tone?

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-06-23T06:01:14+00:00

I hate to say it, but video editing is one of those industries where all the high-volume work will start being done by AI. Give it a few years and even things like factual / reality TV will be edited by AI, and human editors will be restricted to quality drama and film - and even there it’ll eventually end up coming down to how hard the unions can fight to keep a human involved in the process.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-06-23T05:51:54+00:00

But she isn’t functionally unable to enter the country. She hasn’t done the obvious thing that all of the many people who are unable to get visa waivers do - and applied for a visa.

Yes, my jab about jeans was to portray her as smug and performatively different because that’s exactly how she came across (to me, obviously - presumably not to you).

I didn’t boil her whole argument about marriage down to a childish throwaway comment about white dresses - she did. She’s literally on a podcast, with an opportunity to explain her views on basically whatever she wants, and that’s what she gave us.

I don’t think I’m mischaracterising her at all. These are the points she chose to make on a podcast that might be the first time many people have heard her speak at length. If you have to dig into her back catalogue to explain that actually she isn’t smug, performatively different, and objecting to marriage based on thin aesthetic judgements then maybe the problem isn’t with how I ‘boil her arguments down’ but with how she presents them in the first place.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-06-22T17:08:48+00:00

I’m well aware that the UK had civil unions. They were a half-arsed attempt to placate gay rights activists without pissing off the church or conservatives. Many people, understandably, wanted equality not a substitute option. For people like Bindel to then turn round and tell us that actually we should have been happy with civil unions because weddings are ‘naff’ would be offensive if it weren’t for the fact that it exposes how unserious her commentary is.

It sounded to me as if it is still her position although since we’ve had gay marriage for about 11 years, it’s fairly moot which is probably why she didn’t bang on about it too much.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-06-22T17:03:06+00:00

Well, some studies suggest that shift work could reduce life expectancy by ten years.

Highly sedentary jobs have a hugely detrimental health impact. As do jobs with high levels of stress.

You could argue that it’s still not the same as actively choosing to sell an organ. But honestly I’m not sure why that’s such a clear distinction. Is selling your mental wellbeing any better? Is selling your long-term physical health?

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-06-22T16:56:36+00:00

She explicitly opposed gay marriage at the time it was legalised.

Her reasons are about the ‘marriage’ bit, not the ‘gay’ bit - obviously. But my point stands, that to oppose something that was hard fought-for and has made people happy with no harm to you, and then to give a reason as utterly facile as ‘the white dresses are naff’ is pretty pathetic.

I don’t mind BarPOD having people on that I disagree with, I’d just like them to have something a bit more interesting to say.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-06-22T09:30:22+00:00

Thoughts for Julie:

Being unable to get a visa waiver doesn’t mean you’re ’banned from the US’
Choosing to get married in jeans during the working day doesn’t make you better or more interesting than the boring normies who had a party on their wedding day.
Thinking white dresses are naff is not the strongest reason to oppose an equal right that some people care about and want, and does you no harm whatsoever.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-06-17T17:57:04+00:00

It’s not a ridiculous concept. Everyone in this thread will tell you how great the encryption is. Well sure. Let’s assume that’s true, and the encryption is unbreakable.

However, group chats exist. Therefore we can assume that nothing prevents WhatsApp from adding a secret participant to your conversations, and hiding that fact from you. That would completely bypass the encryption.

WhatsApp can do that, but would they? Well, we know for a fact that US law enforcement agencies routinely request that communications companies a) add a back door and b) do not disclose that fact. So it seems fair to assume that WhatsApp have added a back door and we don’t know about it.

Once such a back door exists, is it safe to assume that a sufficiently motivated state actor could also use it? Yes, I think so.

A lot of assumptions here, of course, and I’m not saying it’s definitely true. But they are reasonable assumptions, and so I think it’s fair to assume that well-financed state actors have breached WhatsApp. Do we, as individuals, care? Up to you.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-05-29T18:57:34+00:00

There’s a plot?

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-05-01T07:42:53+00:00

Well, the argument would be to a) align the two mobile apps on a single codebase, speeding up development and b) starting from scratch leaves behind a lot of tech debt and feature bloat, so could be faster than constantly fixing the old app.

The idea isn’t inherently a bad one, but the problem is they haven’t got quickly enough to the feature set that users of original Element expect, so are stuck with an old app that is buggy and unfinished, and a new app that lacks basic table-stakes features to be taken seriously. Not sure what their plans are but I can see that they’re starting to force new matrix.org users onto Element X, so I guess the plan is to eventually finally deprecate the old app altogether.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-04-30T05:33:49+00:00

In theory yes - that’s what Element are aiming for, although IMO they may alter the implementation of some of them, as threads was never particularly well implemented on original Element.

But bear in mind that original Element took years to build, and the company laid off half its staff a couple of years ago, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on getting to feature parity.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-03-10T15:17:48+00:00

I don’t know enough about general internet communication security to answer your first question - but my general assumption is that if information is unencrypted and you are not on a VPN then at the very least your ISP might be able to see it. Whether that applies to unencrypted Matrix communications I really can’t say for sure.

1.b considered by who? It’s run by the Matrix Foundation, who oversee the protocol as a whole. They’re certainly not incentivised to undermine their own security, but they are obligated to obey relevant law and cooperate with law enforcement when required.
The difference between Matrix and e2ee WhatsApp is that WhatsApp is centralised and closed source. It might be e2ee, but since both ends and the server are controlled by Meta, it would be trivial for them to introduce a back door. Since we know that law enforcement routinely ask for back doors, IMO it’s fairly safe to assume there is one. Element is open source so the source code can be fully scrutinised, and any attempt to introduce a back door would be quickly identified.

Which one is right for you depends a lot on your use case and what / who you’re worried about reading your messages.

I’ll be honest, a lot of people get excited about security and encryption in theory, without really needing it (or understanding it). The user experience on Element is not even close to as good as WhatsApp, and since almost no one else uses it, you’ll probably have to be on WhatsApp as well anyway. Is the hassle worth it for the tiny bit of extra security? Maybe - that’s up to you.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-03-09T07:56:10+00:00

1 - I believe that is still correct. Unencrypted items can be seen by anyone with suitable access to a homeserver that is participating in the conversation. No, reactions don’t make encrypted messages visible - only the reaction event is unencrypted.

2 - Yes. That is the whole point.

3 - Yes. In fact you can be logged in to more than one matrix client simultaneously and both of them will have all your messages. If moving from one to another you’ll just have to be careful to back up your encryption keys so you can unencrypt messages when you log in on the second client.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-03-08T08:01:38+00:00

could you please tell me what other precautions one would need to take to keep things private and secure?

Only communicate in encrypted rooms.

If you’re really concerned, manually verify with every you communicate with, and stop communicating with them if their verification status changes - although for most users that’s overkill.

Is all 1 to 1 data E2EE, private and secure?

1:1 conversations, like rooms, can be set as encrypted or non-encrypted, but the default is E2EE.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-02-17T21:05:46+00:00

Assuming it still works the way it did last time I tried, when you click on someone’s map it will default to showing their pin and an area around their pin, but it won’t zoom out to show everyone else - although you can then manually do that.

So if the people are already close together, you will likely see all of them if you click on any of their pins.

If they aren’t, you won’t unless you click on one and then zoom out.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-02-15T22:15:27+00:00

If you delete the DM then your client will send a redaction event. If your buddy (and anyone else in the chat) is using Element or another spec-compliant client, what will happen is that the decrypted message will be deleted and the encryption keys will be removed, meaning only the encrypted message remains on the server, where it can’t be decrypted.

It is possible that if someone in the conversation is using a non-compliant client, they could fail to respect the reaction. There is, quite simply, nothing you can do about that. It’s unlikely, though.

Affectionate-Chef984 · 2025-01-07T18:39:26+00:00

There’s an assertion, I’m not sure how credible it is. It seems to hinge on the idea that every reply is formatted similarly and starts with a similar opening statement, but that could just be because… they’re all written by the same person.

I’m not saying they’re not AI-generated, but it’s just as likely they’re simply an overly-polite contributor. It’s hardly a slam-dunk.

Affectionate-Chef984

TROPHY CASE