pomatic (u/pomatic) - Readit News

pomatic commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025) · Posted by u/david927

A promptlessly intelligent, highly organised email client. Has very opinionated design with auto-organisation, beautiful sub-sections, genre-grouping, and thread resolution like never before in the history of email.

I particularly enjoyed building the last one. Emails in a thread no longer have those ugly blockquotes indented one below another, making it so much trickier to make sense of.

I started building Faraday out of my own need to fix my disorganised email. Couldn't accept email to be this outdated even after 40 years of its existence.

Have built many more intelligent, nifty conveniences that early users are thankfully noticing and appreciating.

Do check out at https://faraday.email

pomatic · 2 months ago

I don't think your sign up process is GDPR compliant - you need to say why you are collecting the information you are asking for, what you are going to do with that information, how long you are going to retain it for and how one can request for it to be deleted.

pomatic commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

keepamovin · 2 months ago

My language learning trajectory (from 10 years old) was 8086 assembly, QBASIC, C, Perl, Java, MAGMA, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, Python, Haskell, C++, vibe coding

pomatic · 2 months ago

How old are you now? Mid fifties here. And 'vibe coding' in what exactly - it is not of interest from a programming perspective, but from a 'what does the AI know best perspective'? I've followed a similar, but not identical trajectory and now vibe in python/htmx/flask without needing to review the code in depth (NB internal apps, not public facing ones), with claude code max. Vibe coding in the last 6-8 weeks now also seems to make a decent fist of embedded coding - esp32/arduino/esp-32, also claude code.

pomatic commented on Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot? · Posted by u/pugworthy

jonathanlb · 3 months ago

> What model do you have?

I have an Advanced Bionics Naida. Battery life has consistently been around 8h for a few years. Then recently, my batteries decided they wanted to work part-time.

> Is there any way you can know about this, e.g. from the app?

As far as I know, there isn't a way to verify sound connection issues within the app. They happen too quickly, but usually the giveaway is that the part of the cable that connects to the coil feels like it's about to fall off. It's at the ends, usually, that most of the failures occur.

pomatic · 3 months ago

I had a Naida, now have a Marvel. The difference is night and day. The Marvel is hands-down the best hearing setup I have ever had (I am mid 50's, have worn aids of one type or another since I was 3 yo). Bluetooth is a game changer. The Roger On is fabulous in meetings and with computers (it appears as a USB sound device, it's far more reliable than BT for that). Battery life is fantastic, it lasts more than a day, and there's a fall back to disposable cells if required. Mobile app is a bit 'meh', but the rest is so good I can't complain!

pomatic commented on How AWS is losing the younger generation with complexity theregister.com/2025/11/0... · Posted by u/ohjeez

pomatic · 3 months ago

Quite sure the complexity of AWS is forcing the SME types out - even the most basic operations require reference to chatGPT to find the details buried in the UI. It's gone from being 'good enough' - I mean the UI 15 years ago was basic, but adequate to labyrinthine. We don't have complex needs, they're met by AWS, but the combo of premium pricing and a diabolical UI will force our migration eventually.

pomatic commented on Use Plaintext Email (2019) useplaintext.email/... · Posted by u/cyrc

kevincox · 8 months ago

Yeah, the occasional bold word, inline link, heading or even the occasional image can make a message much more readable. If you don't like bold words your client can ignore that tag.

I think this is partly an over-reaction to some senders that go way overboard with bright colours a hundred images and complex layout that doesn't render right on your screen size. But just because a capability can be used poorly doesn't mean that it can't be used well.

I can also understand that some people choose to prefer the text version of messages because it is so common to "abuse" HTML. And for those people I even include a text fallback in case their client doesn't have the ability to do that.

pomatic · 8 months ago

I'm sure markdown email has been done? But just didn't gain traction?

pomatic commented on Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser github.com/nxtscape/nxtsc... · Posted by u/felarof

_fw · 8 months ago

I’m using Dia a lot for work at the moment and frankly it’s a gamechanger. granted I’m not a developer but being able to interact with an LLM that has access to the page I’m on is extremely useful:

Instead of manually hunting across half a dozen different elements, then copy/paste and retype to put something into a format I want…

I can just get Dia do it. In fact, I can create a shortcut to get it to do it the same way every single time. It’s the first time I’ve used something that actually feels like an extension of the web, instead of a new way to simply act on it at the surface level.

I think the obvious extension of that is agentic browsers. I can’t wait for this to get built to a standard where I can use it every day… But how well is it going to run on my 16GB M1 Pro?

pomatic · 8 months ago

What is Dia (perhaps provide a link)? I'm aware of the diagramming tool, but that's clearly not what you mean here?

pomatic commented on Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8x... · Posted by u/lleims

Kon-Peki · 10 months ago

> Small diesels could be an option but they're harder to pull start for a given size.

I once needed to jump-start a small marine diesel, many miles from land...

There was a small lever that cuts compression. You have to get it spinning really fast before restoring compression! It's definitely a lot of work!

EDIT - Here is a cheap modern small marine diesel [1]. The operation manual suggests that you don't have to do anything to get it spinning quickly, you just have to crank it 10 times, put away the crank handle, and then flip the compression switch. That's progress!

[1] https://www.yanmar.com/marine/product/engines/1gm10-marine-d...

pomatic · 10 months ago

Lister diesel generators are much the same - half a dozen cranks, restore compression and off they go. The hand cranking can easily break your arm if you get it wrong though.

pomatic commented on Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf? theahura.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/theahura

surgical_fire · 10 months ago

> Why couldn’t OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor competitor?

The obvious answer is that vibecoding does not work.

If it did, OpenAI wouldn't need to buy Windsurf

pomatic · 10 months ago

This is patently wrong - as an experiment, I've vibe coded* four apps in the last 10 days. I did not write one line of code myself. Two are crud style, one is DNS related and one is for an embedded device. They were non-trivial use cases, built using claude desktop with various MCP tools. I was blown away by just how good it was.

*the original definition of vibe coding involved using voice to dictate the prompts to AI, I prefer to type.

pomatic commented on How I install personal versions of programs on Unix utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve

pomatic · 10 months ago

The only time my home directory gets cleaned up (it is littered with random binaries) is when I get a new machine... It feels very wrong, but also quite cathartic at the same time!

pomatic commented on Tailscale has raised $160M tailscale.com/blog/series... · Posted by u/louis-paul

groby_b · 10 months ago

That depends entirely on how you raise the funds. Yes, you can say "Here's the growth rate we'd get without your money - based on that, this investment gets you an ROI of x%."

With x% high enough, sure, you can get VC money without too many strings. (Also, reading the Series B post, they were planning to invest - just in organic growth instead of the usual growth hacking)

And if you read the Series C post, you'd know what they're spending on - GPU (and general) cloud interconnectivity.

There's really not much need to guess, Tailscale's financing announcements are about as open as you can get.

pomatic · 10 months ago

What is tailscale going to do with GPUs? It's about as far removed from NL interaction as you can get, I really don't see any sane AI fit. Maybe they are using them for AI driven dev work? Probably need to think more laterally.