Derbasti (u/Derbasti)

Derbasti commented on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org giuliomagnifico.blog/post... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus.

I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.

For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.

For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.

Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.

My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!

YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.

Derbasti · a day ago

I like mapy.com as a Google Maps replacement. It's essentially a very good OSM renderer, with a great website and app, including offline access, routing, and real-time traffic. Also very good bike/hike routing, if that's your jam.

But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.

Derbasti commented on GPTs and Feeling Left Behind whynothugo.nl/journal/202... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

jvanderbot · 14 days ago

I'm convinced the vast difference in outcome with LLM use is a product of the vast difference in jobs. For front end work it's just amazing. Spits out boilerplate and makes alterations without any need of help. For domain specific backend, for example robotics, it's bad. Tries to puke bespoke a-star, or invents libraries and functions. I'm way better off hand coding these things.

The problem is this is classic Gell Mann Amnesia. I can have it restyle my website with zero work, even adding StarCraft 2 or NBA Jam themes, but ask it to work in a planning or estimation problem and I'm annoyed by its quality. Its probably bad at both but I don't notice. If we have 10 specializations required on an app, I'm only mad about 10℅. If I want to make an app entirely outside my domain, yeah sure it's the best ever.

Derbasti · 14 days ago

This rings true to me, but I'm not a frontend dev. So I'm not a good judge if what makes good frontend code. Where I do know my stuff, I'm not at all impressed by LLM code.

So perhaps LLMs are just entry level devs in general. Who can't learn. Who won't ever gain seniority. It would make sense, after all, they were trained on the Internet and Stack Overflow, which is mostly filled with entry level questions and answers.

Derbasti commented on Python performance myths and fairy tales lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

quantumspandex · 18 days ago

So we are paying 99% of the performance just for the 1% of cases where it's nice to code in.

Why do people think it's a good trade-off?

Derbasti · 17 days ago

Because Matplotlib and Pandas etc. save programmer time, even where they waste processor time.

Derbasti commented on iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras candid9.com/phone-camera/... · Posted by u/sergiotapia

dangus · 25 days ago

Which I’m personally failing to witness consistently by the “evidence” in this article.

Most of the photo examples here were somewhere between “I can’t tell a significant difference” and “flip a coin and you might find people who prefer the iPhone result more.”

Even less of a difference when they’re printed out and put in a 5x7” frame.

Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0. You already own one. You were going to buy a smartphone anyway for other things. So if we are going to sit and argue about quality we still have to figure out what dollar value these differences are worth to people.

And the “evidence” is supposedly that people aren’t getting their phone photos printed out. But let’s not forget the fact that you literally couldn’t see your film photos without printing them when we were using film cameras.

Derbasti · 25 days ago

> Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0.

Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality, I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.

Derbasti commented on YouTube's new anti-adblock measures iter.ca/post/yt-adblock/... · Posted by u/smitop

tlogan · 2 months ago

Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?

We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?

This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.

Derbasti · 2 months ago

How much is a media service worth? How much does it cost to produce? Can I pay a reasonable fee to the right people?

Most websites do not offer reasonable payment options. They'd earn fractions of a cent from the ads they'd show me, but the cheapest subscriptions they offer are several dollars.

On YouTube, the value of the service is provided by creators, but too little of the subscription is going towards the creators. To make matters worse, Google seems to pull every string they can to make creators as miserable as possible. Their actions are a detriment to the service, and not worth supporting. An 80/20 revenue split would seem much more reasonable.

Derbasti commented on Making C and Python Talk to Each Other leetarxiv.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/muragekibicho

SandmanDP · 3 months ago

I’ve been curious, what are the motivations for most projects to use Lua for enabling scripting in C over this? Is the concern around including an entire Python interpreter in a project and Lua is lighter?

Derbasti · 3 months ago

I've done both. Let me tell you, embedding Lua into a C program is magnitudes easier than embedding Python.

The main reason is the endless fragility of Python's garbage collector. To be clear, the API is trying to be as helpful as possible, but it's still a whole bunch of complexity that's easy to mess up. Incidentally, this discussion is left out in the linked article, which makes it less than useless. In my experience with many a third party C/Py interface, data leaks are incredibly common in such code.

Lua of course also has a garbage collector, but it essentially only knows two types of values: POD, and tables, with only the latter needing much consideration. The interaction model is based on a stack-based virtual machine, which is more complex than Python's full-function abstraction, but conveniently hides most of the garbage collector complexity. So long as you're just reshuffling things on the stack (i.e. most of the time), you don't need to worry about the garbage collector at all.

Derbasti commented on Reinvent the Wheel endler.dev/2025/reinvent-... · Posted by u/zdw

fizlebit · 3 months ago

People say don't reinvent the wheel usually in a business context because writing from scratch is usually a lot more work than using existing technologies. Sure reusing technologies is also a lot more work than you would expect because most things suck (to different degrees), but so will your newly minted wheel. Only after a lot of hard lessons will it suck less, if at all.

That said there are also contexts in which the existing system that was built sucks so bad that rewriting it usually a boon, even if the new wheel sucks, it sucks less from the start.

You at a minimum should engage with the existing wheels and their users to find the ways in which they do and don't work.

In your own time I think it is great to tinker, pull apart, assemble your own things. Every Jedi makes her own light saber right?

Derbasti · 3 months ago

Especially at work, I find existing solutions often lacking. We tend to overestimate the complexity of reinventing many things, and underestimate the cost of ill-fitting abstractions.

In particular, Google-scale frameworks are usually harmfully over-engineered for smaller companies. Their challenge is solving the Google scale, not the problem at hand. At the same time, their complexity implies that a small-scale solution will likewise require a hundred-programmer team to implement.

But I find that far from the truth. In fact, many problems benefit from a purpose-built, small-scale solution. I've seen this work out many times, and result in much simpler, easier-to-debug code. Google-scale frameworks are a very bad proxy for estimating the complexity of a task.

Derbasti commented on Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/josephcsible

fifticon · 3 months ago

Interesting how this will stop me from taking a picture with my mobile phone. The amount of effort people will go to, to make people's work more cumbersome. I am not screenshotting for espionage, I am screenshotting to accomplish my job.

Derbasti · 3 months ago

Could you trivially circumvent this by running Teams in the browser?

Derbasti commented on Try Switching to Kagi daringfireball.net/2025/0... · Posted by u/Ch00k

neogodless · 4 months ago

About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense.

This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.

What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.

But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.

I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

Derbasti · 4 months ago

I finished my 30 day trial the other week, and went back to DDG. After a few days, I realized I didn't miss anything, so I'll happily stay with DDG. Perhaps I'm not a very discerning searcher. Most of my searches are bang-searches of Wikipedia or CPP or Python anyway.

Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.

Derbasti commented on Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law ca.finance.yahoo.com/news... · Posted by u/Aldipower

mrtksn · 4 months ago

>the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after

It's also probably the most dangerous for Apple. It creates a cash incentive to push people outside of Apple's walled garden and show them what's outside.

I really really hope Apple gets its act together, they are the greatest "the user experience comes first" company and they actually have great hard tech but they show signs of rent seeking behavior which can destroy them.

If Apple just play nice with EU, open up and focus on bringing the greatest experience possible they will keep winning. If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.

The Apple's AI blunder is mostly a blunder only because they insist to do it all by themselves so to have higher margins on the services revenues. IMHO those blunders will be more damaging as the Americans no longer have the higher moral grounds than Koreans or Chinese.

I hope Apple is treading carefully.

Derbasti · 4 months ago

> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.

But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.

I suppose Linux, Playstation, and Nintendo, then?