I just finished Where the Water Goes, by David Owen. He gets a little rambly at times, but overall it’s a great look at the history of water use and development in the western US as seen through the lens of the Colorado River. The author chronicles several road trips he takes to follow the entire length of the river and several tributaries, and he weaves in a great amount of history along the way.

I particularly enjoyed the part about Arizona’s governor sending out the National Guard to prevent construction workers from accessing the East bank while trying to start building Hoover Dam. He also appointed someone to be the admiral of the Arizona Navy so that she could harass them in boats.

Ultimately it’s a story about just how fucked we all are, but I really enjoyed it and the specificity of why.

A free app with no advertising doesn’t make that kind of money, it gets progressively deeper into debt to a good Silicon Valley rich guy who got it off the ground, Brian Acton.

His biography on the Signal Foundation website:

Brian Acton is an entrepreneur and computer programmer who co-founded the messaging app WhatsApp in 2009. After the app was sold to Facebook in 2014, Acton decided to leave the company due to differences surrounding the use of customer data and targeted advertising to focus his efforts on non-profit ventures. In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike. Signal Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous.

Prior to founding WhatsApp and Signal Foundation, Acton worked as a software builder for more than 25 years at companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Adobe.

The Wikipedia article on the Foundation says the loan balance was up to $105M later in 2018. Meanwhile, Acton is still worth $2.5B according to Wikipedia, so things are probably fine for now, even 6 years later.

But you’re right that Signal eventually needs revenue to keep even a small team of high caliber software engineers and devsecops folks around. You very much want excellent engineers to continue to be involved with critical encrypted communications software on an ongoing basis, so it will cost money indefinitely. Presumably Acton does not wish to bankroll it indefinitely.

Again back to the interview:

I wouldn’t imagine that most nonprofits pay engineers as much as you do.

Yeah, but most tech is not a nonprofit. Name another nonprofit tech organization shipping critical infrastructure that provides real-time communications across the globe reliably. There isn’t one.

This is not a hypothesis project. We’re not in a room dreaming of a perfect future. We have to do it now. It has to work. If the servers go down, I need a guy with a pager to get up in the middle of the fucking night and be on that screen, diagnosing whatever the problem is, until that is fixed.

So we have to look like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.

I’m really glad they pay those engineers that much, so that Zuckerberg and his ilk can’t entice them away with oodles of money. One presumes they also believe in the cause, but I think this currently looks like Acton fighting surveillance capitalism with what capitalism got for him earlier in his career.

Cofounder Moxie Marlinspike is clearly a brilliant hacker and coder who was crucial to Signal’s creation, but I think it makes sense that he hasn’t stuck around to try to solve the long term business problem of keeping it aloft infinitely.

So what to do about it? The OP interview is with Meredith Whittaker, who’s entire job is figuring that out:

Since she took on the presidency at the Signal Foundation, she has come to see her central task as working to find a long-term taproot of funding to keep Signal alive for decades to come—with zero compromises or corporate entanglements—so it can serve as a model for an entirely new kind of tech ecosystem.

I’m a recurring donor because I want Signal to succeed and I want to vote now with my wallet, but fundamentally it’s on Whittaker to figure out how to make the long term work. Here’s what she says:

I see Signal in 10 years being nearly ubiquitous. I see it being supported by a novel sustainability infrastructure—and I’m being vague about that just because I think we actually need to create the kinds of endowments and support mechanisms that can sustain capital-intensive tech without the surveillance business model. And that’s what I’m actually engaged in thinking through.

but translation certainly isn’t [done on device]

Google Translate has downloadable language packs and runs on device, including offline in foreign countries without roaming data. Including the live video OCR and replacement.

That’s not to say that what you experienced isn’t creepy, but it’s not necessarily cloud-driven.

That is certainly one of the conclusions in The Man Who Killed Google Search.

But you can no longer be sure you’re getting unsponsored human opinions there. It’s already been ruined by bots and management decisions. Seems totally fair for the original content generators to salt the earth on their way out.

There’s also the possibility of adding to the wonderful irony of making the AI more useful than the original by having content that’s no longer accessible through through the original. It doesn’t get more enshittified than that, even if Prashanth Chandrasekar is too out of touch to ever regret his decision.

It’s true that it’s mostly a symbolic act, but the rebellion matters, especially from old accounts. It’s also a nice way to mark the time after which I never participated in SO again. After my ban expires, I’ll deface my questions again. And again. Until they permaban me.

They seem to only be watching the questions right now. You’re automatically prevented from deleting an accepted answer, but if you answered your own question (maybe because SO was useless for certain niche questions a decade ago so you kept digging and found your own solution), you can unaccept your answer first and then delete it.

I got a 30 day ban for “defacing” a few of my 10+ year old questions after moderators promptly reverted the edits. But they seem to have missed where I unaccepted and deleted my answers, even as they hang out in an undeletable state (showing up red for me and hidden for others).

And comments, which are a key part to properly understanding a lot of almost-correct answers, don’t seem to be afforded revision history or to have deletes noticed by moderators.

So it seems like you can still delete a bunch of your content, just not the questions. Do with that what you will.

I recently showed up here from Reddit and it’s pretty disappointing. I found a few interesting-to-me niche communities, but most of them seem to have a dozen or so posts from 8 months ago and then nothing. That timing coincides with Reddit’s API changes, so I’m left to assume there was a burst of activity driven here at that point but that it fizzled out quickly.

The infrastructure and UX here seem ready, but the network effect is very slow for a long time. Without a lot more real users (and diverse niches), it will be difficult to attract and retain a lot more real users. The initial confusion about federation and technical concepts also needs help to get them started, but the niches are needed for retention.

Tldr, I don’t want to read about technology and Star Trek, I need cast iron and Costco, 3D printing and landscaping, cycling and idiots in cars.