This is a core problem of distributed systems though. Signal even cites this as their reason to not federate with anyone.

Once you get decentralization going you need everyone to stay kind of up to date or stuff will just not work.

It is not. Discord’s protocol has been tailormade to suit Discord and the developers will not give a single thought about keeping it stable because only the Discord server&client are meant to use it.

An XMPP developer would likely have been delusional about the protocol he himself developed. But at the time I can assure you XMPP was completely irrelevant. AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo! and maybe IRC were the tools of the day back then.

Because of actual competition (which XMPP had absolutely no part in) multi protocol messengers had their golden age then.

No.

• I want to send messages to people who are not currently online (having a server stay online for you is a desparate hack and not a solution)
• I want to send media other than text
• I want my messages to be e2ee
• I want presence - e.g. know if someone is available, busy, away
• I want voice/video calls

and many more…

None of these were solved by IRC but by the others you mentioned.

Also Matrix can bridge to XMPP, of course you wouldn’t because nobody uses XMPP.

No. There was nothing to extend and extinguish with XMPP. It was a dead on arrival protocol that nobody ever used seriously. I’ve been to the internet at that time and what people actually used was: AIM, ICQ, MSN and possibly even Yahoo!. (IRC for the nerds and Counter-Strike)

It was exactly the other way around. Nobody ever used XMPP, then Google opened federation on their first chat and suddenly someone was actually reachable via XMPP which was a cool thing for some nerds that were into XML then, but when Google noticed that it only imports problems with nothing to gain from the XMPP network they just shut it off.

At the time nobody cared because the people accidentally using XMPP didn’t give a shit about it because they used Google not XMPP in the first place.

The analogy is that you buy a car (because if it breaks, the car and your entertainment stuff, you will buy a new one to replace it, you will also carry all maintenance) but suddenly you can’t drive backwards anymore because the manufacturer decided retroactively that you should pay extra for that (possibly in a subscription).

I would say it is your good right then to make your car drive backwards regardless of what it may take.

TechnologyConnections is pretty dope

You really don’t know the history of Microsoft, do you?

The interface gets a little better and that’s it basically? (Alternatively: They try to spin a social medium around it and fail somewhat and succeed somewhat?)

It’s basically the same thing that happened to Homer Simpson. The original did dumb things but never intended for things to fail or to be evil. Of course it is easier to write cheap gags if you throw all of that out of the window.

I see you are a man of tights

If you are able to open your password vault from the device you use as a second factor (which you probably do) the whole point is defeated anyways. Multiple apps on the same device won’t save you.

I see you are correct.

If you use something like C# at least source management and packaging are being done for you by the development tools.

But yeah it needs to do something useful and one needs to know how to operate it. That doesn’t go away.

I mean I can compress any story you like into 3 sentences making it sound completely silly. Is there a point to make?

It doesn’t or do you have serious applications for self-modifying code?

Being close (and “sometimes” precise) to the intended meaning is an equally useless metric to measure performance.

Depending on what you allow for “well close enough I think” asking ChatGPT to tell a story without any reading of fMRI would get you to these results. Especially if you know beforehand it’s gonna be a story told.

It’s the other way round. Code is being written to fit how a specific machine works. This is what makes Assembly so hard.

Also there is by design no understanding required, a machine doesn’t “get” what you are trying to do it just does what is there.

If you want a machine to understand what specific code does and modify that for another machine that is extremely hard because the machine would need to understand the semantics of the operation. It would need to “get” what you were doing which isn’t happening.

That game would still not work because there is a ton of hidden state in all but the simplest computer games that you cannot tell from just playing through the game normally.

An AI could probably reinvent flappy birds because there is no more depth than what is currently on screen but that’s about it.