FriedrichN

That's pretty much what I mean. Implementing the authenticity measures is very easy, making sure the e-mails get delivered to peoples inboxes without getting marked as spam is hard.

I just wish these big parties would give you a more formal way to make clear you're not a spammer.

Self hosting is not that hard actually.

The problem lies with the big e-mail providers marking your e-mail as spam, even if you have everything configured right (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) and you're not on any blacklists. They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.

Very cool! I will be playing with this.

The only thing that jumped out to me is a lack of a panic button that stops all sound.

You are right. However, it is my work and I do have an emotional connection to my work and my frustrations with certain technologies are very real.

They absolutely do. But I usually don't have to explain the config language and it's widely supported, that is an absolute upside of .ini files.

I'll use what I'll have to use, it's a tool like you said. But I don't have to love it. Configuration is a necessary evil and whatever I end up using, I'm never fully satisfied with the end result.

I'll just come out and say that I hate every single configuration language. All of them suck in their own unique way and every time a new one comes out it fixes some issues of the language it's supposed to supersede but never without introducing new problems. And eventually you're left thinking that you should've just used a .ini file.

I actually really like the fact that my Garmin Instinct is not really a smart watch, it makes connecting it to your phone optional. Mine has never connected to a phone because I don't like to run Google's spyware on my phone. Yet, I can use most of it's functions I care about (time & date, GPS, moon & sun, compass, steps, heart rate, temperature, sports-specific stuff) without giving up my soul to Big Tech.

That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week.

I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.

I'll second the recommendation of fiction (I love the classics) and add a recommendation for reading philosophy and specifically the history of philosophy. Learning how our frame thinking evolved from the time of the Greeks to the middle ages to more modern times has been nothing short of illuminating for me personally. I don't think you need to read the original works or the really academic stuff (you can if you want to) but having a feel of how our thinking got to be is really useful.

This is actually what I do most of the time. I feel like that anecdote of RMS where he says he wgets web pages and e-mails them to himself.

And they were caught and received 30 year prison sentences.

https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/2-sentenced-to-prison-for-...

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to their cats' behaviour when another pet dies. I remember when one of our four cats didn't come home, there were definitely changes in how the remaining three behaved. Apparently the cat got hit by a car and was found by someone and dumped in one of those bins where they dump dead animals for rendering. We took her home and laid her on the lawn so the other cats could know that she was dead. Each of the cats came one by one, giving it a sniff and concluding that she was dead. One of them however stayed with her until we took her away to bury her, an incredibly endearing display. It took a while before they all started acting like they did before.

And with the subsequent deaths of all the remaining cats, as they are all sadly deceased, I saw similar things happen.

We should not anthropomorphise animals, but that doesn't mean they don't have complex feelings or thoughts. If we find that even bees can "play", it's not that weird if cats can "grieve".

I would have done that if the venue were closer to me, but it's just a little too far away for that. There might be tickets available just before the show, but I'm not willing to risk driving all the way there just to be disappointed and drive all the way back.

Recently I attempted to buy concert tickets from a well known ticket seller. It insisted I was a bot, even after disabling my uMatrix and uBlock Origin. There was no way to prove that I was not, not even a CAPTCHA. So I decided to simply not buy any tickets.

This is just one example. I get increasingly frustrated by how shit everything is and my way of dealing with it is to disengage. It is rather sad, but I was not put on this earth to wrangle apps, QR codes, verification codes, passwords, usernames, e-mails, TOTP codes, updates, activation codes, etc.

Not where I live (ace-K and sucralose). Maybe it differs per region.

I have yet to encounter a soda that uses sugar alcohols, most use aspartame, ace-K, sucralose, or stevia. Those don't bother me at all.

But the side-effects of sugar alcohols are pretty well known (especially to anyone who has had the pleasure of eating beyond their threshold). I haven't searched for any papers but I'm sure you'll find plenty that conclude that many people have adverse reactions to sugar alcohols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_alcohol#Side_effects

Sugar alcohols will never be as popular as more obvious choices like aspartame and sucralose. Most people have at least some adverse reaction to sugar alcohols. Personally, all of them, used in any meaningful quantity, turn me into a bloated farty mess that ends with diarrhoea. Absolutely terrible stuff.

Well call me a heathen, but I've never even considered React. Instead I always generate HTML server side and spruce it up using a little JavaScript if necessary (I even use jQuery sometimes). It's reliable, works fast, easy to debug, requires little maintenance, doesn't require a build chain of >100K files of several hundreds of megabytes.

Of course I'm open to the possibility that I'm Doing It Wrong™.

Nothing is the way forward. It's programming, we make stuff that does stuff. Preferably with stuff that makes making stuff that does stuff easier and with stuff that will be supported for a long time.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but whenever something is presented as some messianistic "way forward" I just think "ah yes, another way forward" but feel we're mostly moving laterally.

Just the fact that Yarn seems to be the dominant package manager now when it seems like last week it was npm. What will it be next week?

I truly wonder, do people use this stuff for software that is expected to be maintained for 5-10 years? I feel that with the speed at which everything changes, gets deprecated, discontinued, succeeded, etc. you'll spend a good chunk of your time staying up to date with the current js ecosystem. That doesn't seem very economic to me.

It seems that https://www.startpage.com also uses Bing for its images.

If you need guard rails to keep you from performing database manipulations in your views you have other problems to worry about. And if anything people are cutting corners on SOC in the M and C part of MVC, not the V part.

Also I don't see how using a loop or conditional in PHP is any different from using one in a templating engine, aside from the overhead of the engine and added annoyance of debugging another language in your project.

1. I've seen enough terrible things in my time, but you can make a mess in any language using any number of frameworks. And it's been a hot minute since I've seen one of those 1000+ line PHP+SQL+HTML+JS+CSS monstrosities in any serious environment.

Improper use of templating engines or trying to use templating engines that aren't up to the task can give you headaches just as well. Sadly no amount of frameworks or templating engines can stop a bad programmer from writing bad code, in the end we're craftsmen who need to learn how to use our tools.

2. This could be a valid use case, but a rather rare one. XML+XSLT is something that sounds fantastic on paper, but as anyone who actually worked with it knows it ranges from a big disappointment to an absolute nightmare.

Why is it a "bad idea"? I'm genuinely curious.

It works great, it's fast and you don't have to learn a new templating language or dialect every 2-3 years. Or try to figure out how to do trivial things like loops in loops.

I don't quite get the use of templating engines in PHP because PHP is a templating engine itself.

The bad good old days, I sure don't miss writing pages with byzantine structures of tables within tables.

I do miss web pages that weren't +10MB that load hundreds of JS and CSS files that clog up your computer and may or may not contain malware. I hate that having uMatrix and uBlock Origin installed is pretty much a requirement to use the web nowadays.

When in doubt, blame your customers for not wanting your product. He's a true libertarian free speech absolutist alright.

I wouldn't worry about it, from what I gather the validity (of the claim erythritol: bad) of the study is questionable. Mainly because the study participants were very ill with hypertension, diabetes, CVD, and they didn't look at erythritol intake, just blood levels.

Layne Norton did a quick video explaining the shortcomings of the study.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad8_scQtHFM

The problem with studies like this is the reporting on them. I'm fairly sure most people reporting on this study did not actually read it (and you can't read it without paying). And it just plays into the confirmation bias that any non-nutritive sweetener is bad, despite them all being wildly different chemical compounds that all get metabolised in very different ways.

This was something that bothered me too. I found that you need to set mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new to true in the config editor (can be found under settings).

I use uBlock Origin and I never see YouTube ads.