2026-01-22 01:16:53 Environment for cleobuline inactive, freeing... 2026-01-22 06:59:58 I would suggest using just bang as a prefix to invoke.  ! instead of forthBot: 2026-01-22 16:06:30 Ugh. SIM card in my phone has died. New one's on the way, but in the meantime I can't 2FA anything, and it's a royal pain. 2026-01-22 16:07:02 Particularly annoying that Amazon decided I needed to re-authenticate, in spite of the fact I didn't restart my browser or anything. It normally will keep me logged in. 2026-01-22 16:07:49 It seems overzealous - it's the same computer, I've got the password, etc. 2026-01-22 16:14:47 Did you change your number early on Amazon? 2026-01-22 16:14:56 Or something else that might have triggered it? 2026-01-22 16:19:25 No. No changes of any kind. I assume a cookie just timed out. 2026-01-22 16:20:44 With Amazon it's just frustrating that they don't offer other options that don't require your phone. But the three options they offered were a) text to my phone, b) call to my phone, and c) WhatsApp to my phone. 2026-01-22 16:22:14 I don't have WhatsApp, and I have no idea whether it work would over WiFi without my phone's SIM working. I can't make calls or send of receive texts even over WiFi. Normally I can, even with my cell service turned off (we have poor service out here, so I normally rely on WiFi when I'm at home). But apparently that all stops working if it can't get at the SIM. 2026-01-22 16:22:53 It seems to need it for text / call operations even if it's not going to be used for the actual communication. 2026-01-22 16:23:43 Poor design if you ask me - all of it should be set up to work over any communication channel, and then cell vs. WiFi should just options at that physical layer. 2026-01-22 16:24:30 I understand that cell service appeared before WiFi was common, but my God, they've had decades to modernize. 2026-01-22 16:25:50 I'm hoping the SIM card will come today, but I really think tomorrow or Saturday is a lot more likely, and it might even spill into next week. 2026-01-22 16:27:02 i think it needs the sim even over wifi for encryption stuff 2026-01-22 16:27:26 Might be. But it still feels like an antiquated way of doing things to me. 2026-01-22 16:28:57 For that matter, the hard division we have between phone numbers and other things like email addresses doesn't really make any sense anymore anyway. Why can't I just use my phone to call someone using their email address or something like that? It really should just be one seamless thing, and whether you choose to send short messages, long messages with attached documents, voice, video, or 2026-01-22 16:29:00 whatever shouldn't really matter - just ways of using the channel. 2026-01-22 16:29:53 It's a "technology silo" that really has no need to even exist anymore. 2026-01-22 16:37:16 It's certainly possible to record an audiofile and send it over email - MIME can do it. My personal preference is to reserve email for (relatively) small text messages, so my MXes reject anything larger than about 150 KiB, which kind of rules out .mp3 or Opus. 2026-01-22 16:37:17 FWIW, there's (or at least was) Delta Chat messenger that uses email under the hood, so at least you can "text" someone using their email address. Not sure how convenient it is to send voice / video with it, though. 2026-01-22 16:40:49 But regardless, email is a technology that has its protocols, its strong and weak points, its conventions, and I daresay, its traditions. That /your/ mail user agent can attach and send, say, a .docx file, doesn't quite guarantee that your recipient will be glad to receive one. 2026-01-22 16:42:13 Sure - but I mean we ought to be able to have it all work in a much more seamless way. Like, use your "phone" (or whatever we chose to call the pocket gadget) to place a real-time voice call to an email address. And if that person had their end setup at that moment to receive such a call, we'd connect and could talk just like we do on the phone. If not, we'd get a "voicemail" instead. Surely 2026-01-22 16:42:16 you see what I mean - I just mean this wall between "phone calls" and "everything else" could very easily just be torn down. 2026-01-22 16:52:57 GitHub seems to spam me with 2FA BS a lot 2026-01-22 17:12:39 I suppose it's possible (say, a DNS RR declaring that this email domain corresponds to that SIP one), but a. that would require explicit support from the mail user agents involved; and b. there're quite literally /hundreds/ of MUAs currently in use, getting even a fraction of them to agree to support that new feature would be quite an undertaking. 2026-01-22 17:12:39 Did you know, for example, that there's a command line-based communication suite that includes a web browser and a mail user agent, that's aimed to be easy to use with Braille displays? (I can imagine it adding support for voice calls, but probably not video calls.) See #edbrowse / http://edbrowse.org/ . 2026-01-22 17:17:45 Though I think the thing with the original problem is that, see, I've been maintaining MXes since about 2001 (first for my employer, then for myself; never anything big: dozens users tops), and I can easily create hundreds of valid email addresses, or even send emails From: addresses that never were valid. 2026-01-22 17:17:45 The thing about SIM cards is that one's unlikely to have hundreds, or even dozens, of them, so unlike "owning" an email address, owning a given SIM card serves as a proof of traceable identity. Which is why WhatsApp and 2FA providers and whatnot want users to have a SIM card rather than an email address. 2026-01-22 21:51:20 hi all, I had a germinal project idea to build a parallel DDA using a dozen or so super cheap microcontrollers. Was thinking something like an RPI pico but wondering if there is something out there that is significantly cheaper, if I don't need nearly so much memory or other fancy features. I see one can do a ten pack of Picos on Amazon for $4.50 USD/unit. My modules would be doing basic arithmetic and GPIO stuff ma 2026-01-22 21:51:20 inly, so rp2040 seems overfancy, but I'm not seeing other little boards cheaper than that