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thimp

337 karma · joined January 31, 2024

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thimp··on Show HN: Swift Mail. Fastmail's modern mail standard delivered natively on macOS
Yeah good question. I do a lot of email on planes and travel where there is no internet. In fact I refuse to use any software that isn’t offline first these days.

I was a Fastmail customer for many years but moved to apple’s iCloud+ when they introduced custom domain support as that works entirely offline on all my devices. Also that gives iPhone/mac integrated contacts and calendars with zero hassle that actually syncs to everything properly. It’s cheaper per seat as well (£25 a month for that plus Apple Music for 6 people a month). No brainer.

thimp··on Rotten Apple
A very good point.
thimp··on In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)
Someone had to stay behind and muck out the stables...
thimp··on In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)
This. Just silo the monolith out into tenants.

Salesforce, not exactly a small monolith company, did this for a very very long time.

thimp··on Show HN: Swift Mail. Fastmail's modern mail standard delivered natively on macOS
Got it. Fuck that. JSON has no part in an email stack. Have we not learned from our failures as a species.

Edit: I've got 99 problems and 98 of them are JSON on a regular basis. Poor parsers, problems dealing with numeric values, terrible terrible schema support, poor encapsulation support, large things attached to it in base64 (difficult to stream on most parsers), difficult to read without external tools which actually tend to mung or fix the problem you are trying to see (jq does this), completely arbitrary and random metadata jammed in everywhere by everyone trying to make it self-describing, shitty enapsulated types i.e. ISO 8601 date in a text field rather than a principal type.

Urgh kill me. It's a hammer made of poo and no one knows any better any more. It's the PHP of wire formats. The COBOL of representation encapsulation.

Edit 2: the only positive is it's probably less bad than CalDAV but that's not even supposed to be part of an email stack is it? Everyone has outlook brain.

thimp··on Show HN: Swift Mail. Fastmail's modern mail standard delivered natively on macOS
I like the look of it but I don't know what JMAP is and what the advantage is over say IMAP / SMTP.
thimp··on Rotten Apple
I envy you :)
thimp··on Rotten Apple
The web site whitelist is global on iOS if all engines are Safari. As are any VPN tunnels. Which is the issue.
thimp··on Rotten Apple
Yeah he was persuaded to do it, ironically considering YT is Google, using a video on YT which was trying to sell him VPN software. I blame the paranoia from the constant VPN industry adds being forced down your throat really but the point is that it still does happen.

I will add that I have a lot of unsigned APKs on my device as well, but not from those sources!

thimp··on Rotten Apple
It's pretty obvious. They're not disallowing it. They are removing the integration with the home screen so that it will run in third party browsers. That limits it to the smallest common API surface which is "open link". Everything else was a luxury.

I don't think you work in IT if you haven't had an infested windows, android or macOS box before. Hell I just spent the other day cleaning my father's Mac out of two VPN turds fighting with each other he installed after watching crap on YouTube. My daughter's windows machine got destroyed by unsigned crap from a Sims mod. You just don't get that on iOS apart from the odd calendar subscription turd.

As for spotify, they use their own subscription system, not the app store.

thimp··on Rotten Apple
ALL problems are human problems. Don't try and write this off with that one.

I can go all day on these. Second one ... corp Android phone. App update ships own browser engine to display about box. Flaw in about box implementation allows user to hit Google. End user uses about box to exfiltrate data from device.

Not possible on iOS. Same browser engine and controls.

As mentioned I'm an Android user, just a better human than most when it comes to using the devices.

thimp··on Yulia Navalnaya’s X account was suspended
I'd like him to leave for Mars. I'm not bothered if he gets there or not...
thimp··on Rotten Apple
Well exactly. The point is that both sides of the argument are somewhat more nuanced as they are disingenuously promoted.
thimp··on Rotten Apple
This is actually a big problem on Android. My ex father-in-law literally had his bank account ripped off (£18000) from rogue app installed from outside the app store. And Google's stewardship of the play store is terrible.

Note I'm mostly an Android user.

thimp··on In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)
Yep. Microservices! AWS! Everything Gartner and Thoughtworks says! It'll look good on my resume...

..several years later..

Escalating cloud costs, high staffing cost, staff turnover, heavily reduced margins, decreased productivity, burnout, clients unsatisfied, C-suite paving over this by hiring more marketers...

thimp··on Rotten Apple
Perhaps this is just "all we could deliver by the compliance deadline without compromising platform security"?

The truth is usually a lot less interesting than the hypothesis.

thimp··on Rotten Apple
Ah yes, the poor end users suffering and the security being bullshit.

I really can't wait to clean the first malicious browser out of a relative's iPhone and try and unsubscribe from Tim Sweeny's app store with his own 30% margin to spend on blackjack and hookers.

The new status quo will be worse than the old one.

thimp··on Have front end frameworks destroyed the web?
I've heard this a lot over the years but I disagree entirely. It's a matter of self motivation. I started on BASIC in 1981. They taught us Pascal at university. I moved to C on Unix and eventually into embedded C. Then back out to C++ and then more recently Go.

What I tend to see from the FE developers I've worked with is someone told them this was a gold mine and they did a code camp to get where they did. There is no care, consideration or self motivation past getting paid thus the understanding is limited only to the direct thing that needs to be done via whatever means it can be done quickly.

If it's a means to an end, then you do not learn. You have to enjoy and care for what you do and cultivate it.

thimp··on Have front end frameworks destroyed the web?
I like clown-fiesta. That's accurate. I've been a clown.

It's about plastering layers of shit on top of something which was never designed to do the job it is doing by people who have no idea what they are doing and selling this as an ideology while sticking your fingers in your ears and hiding from the numerous security problems and smoke coming out.

Personally I avoid the hell out of web applications of any sort these days. HN is the limit of my tolerance. I will go out of my way to find something that is an actual desktop application so I have my data local, my experience local and I don't have to teeter my entire existence on the top of this stack. Please just leave the web for content delivery and put together some apps that aren't shit in native UI frameworks please please please.

thimp··on Have front end frameworks destroyed the web?
No they haven't but they have destroyed usability, my laptop battery and left a lot of brain damaged people who are incapable of seeing when a simple solution for a problem will do.

Case in point, a number of years ago I built a static web page for delivering software distribution for an SME. This is hosted in S3 on cloudfront. It is one HTML page, one image and one CSS file. There is a bit of plain DOM javascript which pulls the software versions out of metadata files on the CDN and updates a SPAN in the page. Someone came along and couldn't work it out so rewrote the whole fucking thing with AngularJS. It looks the same. There was no benefit to doing this. It was just that's how we do things. The first page hit is 220k. I don't even know how they managed to do that.

thimp··on DJI – The ART of obfuscation
Ban anyone over the age of 60 from politics. It’s all senile old men trying to kill each other with younger people.
thimp··on California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired
Glad to know that :)
thimp··on California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired
I had a girlfriend who unpackaged a lot of stuff she bought at the checkout so she wouldn't have to deal with the trash. I thought it was insane for a bit but no it's quite reasonable actually when you think about it.
thimp··on California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired
Yeah that's about it. They slowly made them prohibitively more expensive. I've actually had the same shopping bag for 27 years and have gone from being seen as a hippy weirdo to never being questioned. It was just normalised that you got bags free before. That should have never been the case in the first place!
thimp··on Laughing Off the Dark Mode Lobby
Precision 7670 with OLED screen
thimp··on Laughing Off the Dark Mode Lobby
I dislike dark mode because I have to use a laptop with the shittiest reflective screen ever made (Dell for ref). Anything dark and I can see myself better than what is on the screen.
thimp··on Agile Is a Tainted Term
It's somewhat more difficult to start their own companies and eat though which is why a lot of us eat shit and work with project managers.
thimp··on Agile Is a Tainted Term
It's worse than that. Any sufficiently motivated person can phrase data any way they choose, particularly when their bonus is tied to it. Nor does the consumer of the data always validate that data. I've never seen a manager read a report they requested. That is on top of your suffix which I agree with a well.
thimp··on Agile Is a Tainted Term
I think that's a vast simplification. It doesn't have to be repeatable at all. Objectively repeatability is about elimination of waste and expenditure. The big one is qualification and testing because that's what filters all the crap out. Actually I've worked as an engineer where we had to throw 20% of the products we built out because they didn't pass qualification.

And of course that is where the cost savings are usually made because it is seen as a null function in some businesses. It creates waste and reduces delivery and ROI. Those are all symptoms of other problems in the business but that's how it is generally perceived. And sometimes clients are happy to receive muck if it's cheap.

But that's also how we get planes that crash and Microsoft firing their entire QA and delivering shit for the last half a decade.

And that in turn is because management and project management culture is data driven by people who have no idea what the fuck they are doing whatsoever.

thimp··on Agile Is a Tainted Term
I’ve seen agile done well once. Yes it does happen. The process was not described, spoken of or even considered. It just existed between a few like minded decent engineers.

Their manager got an “agile PM” forced on them and it broke.

The problem is charlatans, dictators and career ticket shufflers that deliver little to no ROI and generally abject chaos.

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