x0x0 (u/x0x0) - Readit News

x0x0 commented on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org giuliomagnifico.blog/post... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

x0x0 · a day ago

I'm going to plug fastmail. Rationale:

(1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times.

(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail;

(3) They have continued actively developing their UI, with nice updates released perhaps in the last 6 weeks.

(4) keyboard shortcuts that work

(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.

(6) I just had a decade-anniversary there and I've never regretted it.

x0x0 commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

rossjudson · 3 days ago

What do you think Photos should do instead?

x0x0 · 2 days ago

1 - Not deprecate the api that allowed people to run incremental backups. They took positive action to intentionally break this. If they feel the need to break the api for ginned-up security excuses, provide a working solution for incremental backup.

2 - Fix takeout not to be entirely broken and hostile to users on 2 axes: usability and reliability. Usability: emit photos once only with a separate json specifying group memberships. Like, you know, competent engineers. Because that's how they store it internally.

2a - Either (i) fix whatever brokenness in their system regularly causes zip downloads to fail; or (ii) figure out or build a reliable alternate solution. Forcing users to wait hours to a day or two to access zips that they can't download is nothing more than a symptom of total disdain for their users while checking a compliance checkbox.

x0x0 commented on Sequoia backs Zed zed.dev/blog/sequoia-back... · Posted by u/vquemener

spudlyo · 3 days ago

The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.

Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.

x0x0 · 3 days ago

Sure, but given the existence of vim/nvim, emails, visual studio code, cursor, etc the price for editors has largely been driven to zero, or at least capped by what JetBrains charges. My concerns are more this is a big bet on a different thing, not the editor (which is quite nice, even if using typescript regularly makes it balloon to 15gb of ram), making them a giant pile of money. With the editor as a free complement.

x0x0 commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

mg · 3 days ago

The people at Google seem to think much more like me than the people at Apple.

There are 3 primary decisions Google made that click with me, while Apple's choices are a mystery to me:

1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles.

2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.

3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.

I'm sure people who prefer iPhones have their own set of "this clicks with me on iPhones and puzzles me on Pixels" aspects?

Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?

x0x0 · 3 days ago

A counterpoint: google intentionally broke the ability to backup photos in Google Photos.

Yes, takeout sort of exists, but it doesn't work. If you sort pictures into albums, you get duplicates of each photo for every album. So one copy in the automatic year album; one copy for each album you have put a photo into. My 80gb of photos triples in size, and oh, sometimes downloads fail on the zips they put them into. And since I use a mac, who has 600gb of free disk to download and extract the zips for my dedup script to run.

Additionally, they intentionally broke their api (well, just disabled it... but only for most users; it seems to still be available for Microsoft) to do incremental backup. tada!

It's the most Apple thing.

x0x0 commented on I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer drobinin.com/posts/how-i-... · Posted by u/valzevul

x0x0 · 8 days ago

on security theater: the morons running my garbage company demand not just a email + pass but also security questions in order to login and... pay your bill. That's the functionality available.

Example security question: favorite book. Which is, naturally, case sensitive.

Someone wrote this to prevent people from stealing my password and paying my bill.

x0x0 commented on Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025? · Posted by u/lincoln20xx

muzani · 10 days ago

Everyone says this but personally it's been fine for me in 2025. It won't land you a job or funding because people are afraid of it. But if you're going to just build tools, it works.

x0x0 · 9 days ago

Sure, but pointing even a single eng team at it is a multi-million dollar investment annually. I can't do that for sdks w/o firm support or enough industry adoption that the industry can shepherd ongoing development.

x0x0 commented on Gartner's grift is about to unravel dx.tips/gartner... · Posted by u/mooreds

jaybrendansmith · 10 days ago

Agree. If you get past the baloney, the typical Gartner analyst is speaking with 50-100 CTOs per month. This is incredibly useful, as it provides a great general understanding of what companies are implementing, what is working, what is failing, what is no longer important, what is important. This allows them to become true mavens on their specific vertical or sub-vertical, sharing best practice. So this is definitely valuable, depending on how cutting-edge you happen to be.

x0x0 · 10 days ago

and the author totally misunderstands this. ctos / execs generally are not offering their candid thoughts on how company X's products work to youtube. ec.

x0x0 commented on A case study in bad hiring practice and how to fix it tomkranz.com/blog1/a-case... · Posted by u/prestelpirate

nlawalker · 10 days ago

> If you want people in e.g Bay Area to consider you at all, you'll have to offer them more than you'd need to get the attention of people in Warsaw. That's why remote salaries can still vary by location.

Then why not take what you'd offer to people in the Bay Area and also offer that to people in Warsaw? That's what the author is taking issue with.

EDIT: This was posed as a question for rhetorical purposes, it's obvious that businesses don't do this because they don't have to and it's cheaper not to. Parent said they didn't agree with the author's logic, but the author's statement about companies paying based on value wasn't attempting to make a logical assertion, it was a lament about ethics.

x0x0 · 10 days ago

Because employees are very expensive, and I don't live in magic pixie land where money is free. Every penny spent on an employee is a foregone opportunity to hire more employees, or require less sales to break even, or deliver dividends to the owners of the company, ie rent for the capital borrowed from them.

You can see this in how engineers don't volunteer to take pay cuts so janitors and fast food employees get paid the same...

x0x0 commented on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation theverge.com/news/757461/... · Posted by u/Handy-Man

Eric_WVGG · 12 days ago

Are there any improvements to be done to Git? It seems like kind of a solved problem, like word processors or spreadsheets… most “improvements” to those are diminishing returns.

I don't mean to sounds like an MS apologist, btw. I fully predicted and hoped for an exodus from Github to GitLab or something back when it got acquired — I'm from the Microsux generation.

x0x0 · 12 days ago

Their CI / script runner tool is still total garbage. Starting with the rampant security holes (oh, make sure you pin everything you use by hash, which essentially nobody does; what was that about secure by default rather than secure by extra effort again?) and following with the only way to test it is to deploy over and over.

x0x0 commented on Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025? · Posted by u/lincoln20xx

vladdoster · 14 days ago

Flutter is a super compelling framework (https://flutter.dev/multi-platform/desktop), but I’d live in fear of it randomly being sent to the Google graveyard.

x0x0 · 14 days ago

It had layoffs in 2024. And Google has emitted a bunch of words about their support for Flutter, but hasn't taken the most obvious step towards solidifying support: guarantee a minimal spend level on Flutter dev for a decade, either internally or by donating to an external foundation. eg we will spend $x on Flutter until 2036. :shrug: So they've carefully retained the option to cut support at will. Which is their choice, but I recently wasn't comfortable starting a greenfield project in it for that reason.