I think the hate for Andromeda was a little overblown. I enjoyed the heck out of the game, regardless of any weird facial expressions! It of course was never going to live up to the original trilogy but it stood out on its own in a lot of positive ways

How long have you been running it so far? Any issues?

Everyone outside of the U.S. almost assuredly still has SMS capabilities, it’s just not common utilized because everyone is already on WhatsApp or Telegram. It’s where their friends are, locking them into the ecosystem, which is exactly what I just said. And I would be willing to wager the only reason WhatsApp really got huge was because SMS hasn’t always been free to use and may still not be free in some countries and with some plans.

Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp are fine, as for privacy how exactly are SMS better?

I wasn’t speaking to privacy specifically, but where all your friends are.

If you want privacy, then you shouldn’t be using Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp anyway, considering both are owned by Meta and their privacy track record is shaky at best.

Signal is a great choice, but we get back to the main point where not everyone is on Signal, and once you are on Signal you’re locked in to using Signal and must have their app to participate in the conversation.

My point wasn’t that SMS is better, but it’s simpler and more widely available and doesn’t require a standalone application to use.

Ideally we would use an open standard like the Matrix standard to communicate, that way you can download whatever application you want and have all the privacy you could ever desire, but not have to download some random messaging application just to catch up from Gary from primary school

If you’re technically savvy, it looks like you could self-host the application. https://github.com/beeper/self-host

It sounds like a too good to be true situation. Definitely an interesting concept though. Sounds like they use remote servers to connect to the third-party apps using your credentials and then transcribe the messages using the Matrix protocol to the app. Source here and snippet below

Beeper consists of two main components:

• A client app that runs on your devices.
• A web service run by Beeper.

… Beeper’s web service consists of a Matrix homeserver and infrastructure to run open source bridges that connect to 15 different chat networks.

Currently free but also will be a Plus version eventually rolling out, according to the FAQ

For now, everyone has access to all the features of Beeper Plus for free. At some point in 2023, we will begin charging $5-10 per month for Beeper Plus.

Also, no humor is lost on the fact that it is dangerously close to Wuph from The Office…

It’s exactly what social media platforms, particularly Facebook, want. They want you to feel locked in because your friends are there

I don’t know why people don’t just use more SMS. You don’t need all the fancy bells and whistles, it shouldn’t change the conversation you’re having, especially with the gradual rollout of rich messages, and it has a wider audience than Facebook will ever have. More people have SMS than have Facebook

Python calculations run in the Microsoft Cloud, with the results returned into an Excel worksheet.

Weird choice, so it has to be due to wanting to Paywall it (they mention that at the bottom of the article). Otherwise I’d rather have the option to install python locally and speed up my queries when working on large data sets

Probably the hardest part of React, for me, was getting used to the callbacks. Passing data up to the parent component using a function. It’s a little difficult to get used to if you haven’t encountered it already

Pragmatic Programmer is OK, there’s not any code that I can remember and it’s just general purpose, helpful ideas for programmers to follow