2025

Many people were surprised to learn on the 20th that Signal uses Amazon/AWS infrastructure. Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, had to explain why:

Instant messaging demands near-zero latency. Voice and video in particular require complex global signaling & regional relays to manage jitter and packet loss. These are things that AWS, Azure, and GCP provide at global scale that, practically speaking, others (in the western context) don’t.

It’s important to note that Signal uses end‑to‑end encryption, which means nobody at AWS can access the content.

(By the way: the “reply guys” issue on Mastodon shows up in almost every technical post Meredith makes.)

I find it fascinating that so many people fall for the fallacy that artificial intelligence is reliable enough to guide decision‑making. And sometimes I find it funny, too.

Brazilian startup Jumpad is intriguing from the pitch itself: a “self‑hosted platform, deployed on the company’s cloud” that lets you enable APIs from external services like OpenAI and Google. Hm, okay. The service “involves engagement dashboards and gamified trainings, contributing to cultural transformation.” As an example of “cultural transformation,” we’re treated to this gem:

At one client, it was found that 25% of employees’ time was spent on calls and meetings, but about 80% of them were not actively participating. In other words, it was a huge waste of time.

Imagine having to burn the planet to “discover” that most meetings could have been an e‑mail.

(The information comes from Brazil Journal [pt_BR].)

On macOS 26 Tahoe, run this command to disable Liquid Glass:

defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES

Kinda shocked this is possible. Is Liquid Glass just a skin layered on top of macOS’s now‑classic UI? That would explain a lot… (Tip from Capi Etheriel, via r/MacOS.)

Tech companies are finding out everything is political

Framework, which makes and sells modular, repairable computers, is facing a small uprising on its official forum after announcing sponsorships of the Hyprland and Omarchy projects — a Linux window manager and a pseudo‑distro based on Arch, respectively.

(more…)

It’s impossible to evaluate your sleep with only one number

iOS 26 brought a new score to the Health app: sleep quality. (It’s not exclusive to the Apple Watch; any band or watch compatible with iOS can contribute to that number.)

I’m skeptical of scores like this. It’s reductive and can be misleading to assign a single score to something as complex as sleep. And, in a great irony, my numbers (!) kind of prove that.

(more…)

Sideloading is fundamental to Android and it is not going away. Our new developer identity requirements are designed to protect users and developers from bad actors, not to limit choice. We want to make sure that if you download an app, it’s truly from the developer it claims to be published from, regardless of where you get the app. Verified developers will have the same freedom to distribute their apps directly to users through sideloading or through any app store they prefer.

Google's logo, capital “G” colored.Google
via Android Developers Blog

Liquid Glass

Major redesigns of graphical user interfaces (GUI) always provoke surprise and complaints. With Liquid Glass, Apple’s new visual language, it’s no different.

The good news is that beneath the new buttons, unreadable text blocks and modernized effects, the way you use systems like iOS and macOS hasn’t changed. People familiar with the previous versions will be able to find their way around the new ones.

That doesn’t mean Liquid Glass is a success. At the risk of contradicting myself later, I think Apple missed the mark.

(more…)

Three options to increase privacy on LinkedIn

1

LinkedIn changed its terms to share more data with Microsoft for advertising purposes. It’s routine — nothing dramatically new or alarming — but I liked that, in the explanatory document, LinkedIn included direct links to the three settings that, when turned off, stop that data sharing. Thanks…?

Just click the links while logged in and disable all of them:

While you’re at it, also disable sharing content to train generative AIs.

Apple forgot the “Compact” tab layout in macOS Safari

I’m not in a hurry to update my Apple devices to the 26 “crop” of OSs, but Safari on macOS… why not?

Every year Apple ships the big update to its browser for older macOS releases. It’s an exception to the rule of updating native apps only with the OS. The list of changes is always long and this year’s is no different.

Unfortunately, Safari 26 is broken for the five people who use the “compact” tab layout. And yes, I am (or was) one of them.

(more…)

Farewell to the fediverse

2

In December 2023, this blog joined the fediverse (pt_BR). Thanks to a WordPress plugin — the publishing platform used by Manual do Usuário — it became possible to follow updates here without leaving Mastodon, Pleroma, GoToSocial, or any other application compatible with the ActivityPub protocol.

Over nearly two years the plugin has improved a lot. And it’s set to improve further, judging by the developers’ roadmap, to the point that — if all goes well — it may one day be possible to turn blogs into full actors in the fediverse.

Despite that, I plan to remove ActivityPub support soon. Here’s why.

(more…)

Wireless earphones: a belated review

2

Since the early days of this Manual, my goal has been the “slow web,” which here translates to being the last to cover a topic. Even so, I didn’t expect I’d ever write about something eight years late.

Anyway — here we are. Let’s talk wireless earphones.

(more…)

What’s on your phone, Leonardo?

What’s your name and what do you do?

Leonardo, 40, southern Brazil, makes educational videos on the internet and has been a regular reader of the Manual do Usuário for years.

(more…)

The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline.

Google's logo, capital “G” colored.Google
via Search Engine Roundtable

1

I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now.

White man, with dark and short hair, with dark circles.Sam Altman
Co-fundador e CEO da OpenAI

If only we knew who was the “genius” who started all this mess…

The family computer

For roughly 20 years, from the 1990s to the 2010s, the family computer (always a desktop) was the household symbol of modernity in Brazil, a prerequisite for promising futures and the only gateway to the internet. It competed for space with the TV or, in larger homes, earned its own room where residents did schoolwork, casual research, played games, and spent time on primitive sites from a web dominated by written text.

It was the “family computer.”

(more…)