I’m really not; I was just genuinely curious.

What if the other party is recording the phone call? Which would you prefer in that scenario?

While it is absolutely possible to learn the skills required to pick up on these things, my personal experience is that it’s a very slow, very painful process. I first realized that there was information most everyone around me were getting that I wasn’t (i.e. social cues) at around 8 years old. I didn’t come up with anything resembling a solution until I was 12, when I read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It took me the better part of three decades to devise and implement my workaround. The essentials are that most people appear to have an intuitive grasp of social cues, including but not limited to the ability to recognize, identify, and interpret emotions in other people. I do not have this intuitive grasp, but I am now able to glean a largely overlapping set of information by consciously reading body language, micro-expressions, voice intonation, common patterns of phrasing, etc., and also by creating a mental model of common patterns of thinking, which I call “mental archetypes”. Note that these archetypes are neither intended as nor appropriate for comprehending or predicting any specific individual, but rather illustrate general patterns into which many people frequently fall, to aid in navigating social situations. For me, it was a lengthy, tedious, painstaking process, but it was effective.

I like Fossify Messages, personally, and because I also like handling texts from my desktop, I have a Matrix bot to forward them to my Element account.

Is it? I’m genuinely asking. I haven’t seen statistics on how much storage people looking for cloud backup solutions use, but to me, anything under 1TB seems too small to be worth it, these days.

I’ve been using rsync.net for a while now. It’s been stable, fast, and relatively inexpensive. There’s also the benefit that it’s easy to script automated backups directly to it. For more Dropbox-like functionality, I have a Nextcloud instance that uses rsync.net as external storage. It’s been great so far!