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bsoles commented on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org   giuliomagnifico.blog/post... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
mxuribe · a day ago
Hi @TranquilMarmot, first off, i think the recommendation from @AnonC on their long term approach to registering a domain name is absolutely brilliant! Do that!

Another recommendation you should consider is to find a domain that ends in one of the common top-level domains - like .COM, .NET, or .ORG - because for using with *vital government services* you would not believe how many good natured civil servants (or for that manner even customer service folks in private/commercial companies too!) have no idea that email addresses can end in something other than .com, .net, or .org...and if you try to give them an address that, say, ends in like .FR, or .CC, or .ME, etc...They will try to place a ".com" at the end of it! My experience shows that folks in the U.S. know far less about other TLDs...and are more likely to commit this error, but folks outside of U.S. are perfectly cool with all manner of different TLS. I have had a somesurname.CC domain name as the mailbox for all my family members for more than a decade...and they are all trained to be LOUD and explicit when they communicate to government workers and customer service folks. So, i should have just gotten an easier TLD, but ah well. Live and learn! :-)

EDIT: Forgot to add that choossing the more common .COM, .NET, or .ORG TLDs for a domain name *tends* to be cheaper than many premium domains names. Each registrar wil of course vary, but mostly these tend to be reasonably priced.

bsoles · a day ago
That hasn't been my experience in US. Login.gov, Social Security, Global Entry, etc. all work perfectly fine with Proton (@pm.me) domains. At least, so far.
bsoles commented on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org   giuliomagnifico.blog/post... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
TranquilMarmot · 2 days ago
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.

bsoles · 2 days ago
I am also in the process of doing the same with Gmail to Proton. The process isn't really that painful and kind of fun, actually. Anytime I get an email on Gmail, I go and update it to point to my Proton email.
bsoles commented on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org   giuliomagnifico.blog/post... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
colesantiago · 2 days ago
How do I get my family to move off of Gmail?

I keep telling them that Google spies on you, but they don’t care because it is free and it works.

How reliable are these providers and what are the chances these providers emails would bounce or go to spam when sending an email?

bsoles · 2 days ago
I did it by moving to the Proton ecosystem: Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, and Proton Pass, with the added bonus of Proton VPN.

As much as I don't necessarily like it, I think we have to put a price on our privacy and personal data. And for me, paying for the Proton family plan seems like a good trade-off, at least for now. So far, I haven't got any emails to bounce when using the @pm.me or @proton.me email addresses, except once (I forgot which web site).

bsoles commented on Vibe Debugging: Enterprises' Up and Coming Nightmare   marketsaintefficient.subs... · Posted by u/someoneloser
itsdrewmiller · 2 days ago
> I suspect best practices for "vibe coding" will end up like test-driven development: a proven method for writing better software that many engineers still choose to skip.

I’d like to see the proof for TDD; last I heard it slowed development with only minor reliability improvements.

bsoles · 2 days ago
TDD doesn't work for the same reasons why Todo lists don't work. I don't have a good explanation why that is so, but I know from countless examples (mine and other people's) that they don't work.

In general, doing things work, planning to do things don't.

bsoles commented on Why do software developers love complexity?   kyrylo.org/software/2025/... · Posted by u/kyrylo
bsoles · 2 days ago
As a data point of one, I don't like complexity.

Often, complexity is the result of not really understanding the problem space well, which results in organic complexity as one solves the problems as they are discovered. React is a perfect example of this. You solve the happy-path of state management and all the non-happy-paths create additional complexity in the framework. But nobody actually questions why those edge cases exist in the first place and why it should really be "solved" or not.

bsoles commented on Everything is correlated (2014–23)   gwern.net/everything... · Posted by u/gmays
bsoles · 2 days ago
Any two linearly increasing or decreasing datasets will be necessarily highly correlated. But that doesn't mean anything unless you also have a plausible explanation why it is so.

Also correlation is often taken to mean linear correlation. For example, you can have two nonlinearly varying dataset to be perfectly (rank) correlated while their linear correlation can be close to zero.

People often attach undue meaning to correlation.

bsoles commented on All managers make mistakes; good managers acknowledge and repair   terriblesoftware.org/2025... · Posted by u/matheusml
selecsosi · 2 days ago
IME the gap in management between ICs is accountability. It's easy to say you are sorry, or say things won't happen again but good management, and what I strive to do is hold myself accountable.

To me, that means 1. To identify the issue that occurred (especially when you caused it), and much more importantly, 2. Put systems into place that prevent it from happening again.

Employees can feel very clearly when a manager lacks accountability and as part of mid and especially high level management (if your goal is actually improving both output and quality of people's lives) to not just say you did something wrong, but actually put your skin in the game ensuring what happened will not happen again (usually it means being better at saying no or aggressively managing prioritization rather than heaping additional tasks on people).

bsoles · 2 days ago
> Put systems into place that prevent it from happening again.

Also called wishful thinking... Often such measures do definitely not work. There is even an internet law named for this: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

bsoles commented on Ask HN: Tell me about the best programmer you worked with    · Posted by u/jvanderbot
bsoles · 7 days ago
The best (algorithm) programmer I know routinely puts stuff in code that could be published in top engineering journals. He doesn't care much about publishing, except for some of his work that went into patents. I like him a lot but he is not an easy person to work with, especially if you are an engineering manager without some level of technical depth.
bsoles commented on Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode   github.com/tanrax/org-soc... · Posted by u/tanrax
metalliqaz · 9 days ago
Because that would require leaving emacs, I guess.

Just a guess. I'm a Vim user so unlike emacs users I do know how to shower but like emacs users I can't manage to carry a conversation with someone in person. We only think partly alike.

bsoles · 9 days ago
> Because that would require leaving emacs, I guess.

Yeah, but if this kind of social network was hosted on Vim, nobody would be able to exit it I guess.

bsoles commented on What are the real numbers, really? (2024)   infinitelymore.xyz/p/what... · Posted by u/EthanHeilman
bsoles · 9 days ago
I am no mathematician, but the idea of real numbers as the limit of rational numbers that don't belong to the set of all rational numbers blows my mind. And to top, the set of real numbers is so much bigger than the set of all rational numbers!

u/bsoles

KarmaCake day744November 28, 2023View Original