mynameisash

> Already looking for exit strategies.

Leaving Proton has been in the back of my mind for a while, and this is probably the last straw for me. I've previously heard that Fastmail is good, but I'm interested in what others are doing. I agree with you that email privacy and security are top of the list. I don't care about a private AI feature (eg, Proton's Lumo), and I don't need their productivity suite (docs, sheets, meetings). Just do one thing really well.

Looking for others' input on the right way to offboard from Proton.

Except:

a. Even if this model were reasonable, removing trees isn't ameliorated by letting them grow back in 2.5 days. As an analogy, if I steal $100 from you, it's not reasonable for me to say, "But it only takes you x hours to earn that $100 back." No, you're out that $100.

b. Tree growth (eg, carbon sequestration) is non-linear. The first year of growth of a tree is much less productive than the 50th year.

> and nothing's changed

One thing has changed. At some point, they introduced the 'shared management queue', and any random person can attach a subdomain to my domains, and apparently I have to explicitly deny these. Until then, scammers can create a subdomain on my domain, point it to whatever IP they want, and use it for their nefarious purposes.

I get that I'm a freeloader: I haven't paid for FreeDNS, so I can't complain much. But this seems like a terrible 'feature'. If I were a pro subscriber, my domains would be private and therefore not available for scammers to use. I've migrated all but one of my domains away from the service (they were all trivially easy - just haven't finished the last one).

Whether the story is true I can't say, but you're right about IBM. From Chip & Dan Heath's book Switch[0], page 173:

> In the 1960s, an executive at IBM made a decision that ended up losing the company $10 million (about $70 million in 2009 dollars). The CEO of IBM, Tom Watson, summoned the offending executive to his office at corporate headquarters. The journalist Paul B. Carroll described what happened next:

    As the executive cowered, Watson asked, "Do you know why I've asked you here?"
 
    The man replied, "I assume I'm here so you can fire me."
 
    Watson looked surprised.
 
    "Fire you?" he asked. "Of course not. I just spent $10 million educating you."

[0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Switch/ad5ktG0oe00C?hl=...

> Estimated 33 trillion trees

Where did you get this number? According to Yle[0], you're off by more than three orders of magnitude: "Earth is home to [over 3 trillion] trees", and "the number of trees in Finland at around 22 billion."

[0] https://yle.fi/a/3-8282753

> i really don't want to die because the downstairs neighbor wants to make his own craft vodka

Without any snark or rudeness, your comment betrays how little you know about distilling.

I've been distilling liquor for probably 5+ years, and it's quite safe if you have any common sense. And the same comment could apply to brewing, canning, cooking, vehicle repair, skateboarding, etc.

This immediately made me think of "smart water bottles" that detect how much of your drink has left the vessel. They can detect what kind of drink they contain and what temperature it is. And so on.

You could not pay me to use such a stupid device. No clue why people invest in or purchase such a product.

This is a different point. Surveillance pricing isn't used in parking, which is the point made by GP.

On the parking enforcement side of things: maybe you could argue that it's surveillance? It depends on what you mean by surveillance, a term that I think is easily overloaded so as to conflate different things. Depending on the definition, that's also how retailers detect and mitigate shoplifting, and it's also how the barista knows that I'm ready to place an order, and myriad other things that could potentially qualify as "surveillance".

I'm surprised - aren't AU & NZ super close culturally and aligned politically? I would have thought the US, CA, et al would be vying for a distant second.

> Curl has a well earned reputation for high quality code.

SQLite also has a very good reputation. I vaguely recall hearing about one SQLite vulnerability discovered via AI, but I thought it turned out to be a nothingburger. A quick search turned up CVE-2025-6965[0,1], published on 2025-07-15, which affects SQLite < 3.50.2 (versions published before 2025-05-29[2]).

I'm not much of a security nerd, but my naive reading of this implies that it was already known and fixed as of the time of the CVE; in other words, the AI discovery didn't seem particularly helpful (though one could argue that it did successfully discover a CVE).

Has AI found many/any other vulnerabilities in SQLite?

[0] https://cybersecuritynews.com/sqlite-0-day-vulnerability/

[1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2025-6965

[2] https://sqlite.org/releaselog/3_50_2.html

Worse than rolling coal? Worse than golf courses? Worse than cruiselines?

> Oh yea. Getting downvoted for saying the truth. So modern Hackernews

I didn't downvote you - and I agree with the sentiment that Whole Foods is also Amazon - but the meta complaining isn't beneficial to the conversation.

When my wife and I finally got rid of our Wells Fargo accounts -- having sold our house and thus eliminated that mortgage, and having already moved our personal banking to a credit union -- we legitimately celebrated by going out to dinner.

The first link you cited[0] shows up on the Wayback Machine[1] for the first time on 2022-05-16 - more than 11 years after it was purportedly written.

[0] https://www.greyblake.com/blog/vim-preview-plugin/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220516225844/https://www.greyb...

I guess I should have asked about the technical mechanism of what causes and what actually 'breaks', and then what the technical remedy is.

What breaks the hunger response, and how does one fix it?

Maybe it's well-known, but I read the starvation response Wikipedia page[0] and didn't grok it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation_response

C# used to be my favorite language, but having spent a lot of time in Rust using its algebraic data types + match statements + Option & Result types, then returning to C# to build a few moderately involved libraries, I'm horrified by the enums and null & error handling that I used to deal with all the time.

I knew that enums were really just named integer values and nothing more, but I had forgotten than you can build a perfectly legal enum from an integer out of the bounds of the enum's range. And a switch statement is non-exhaustive. (As I said, it had been a while since I used C# extensively.) What would have been a few lines of code in Rust turned into dozens to try to exhaustively protect against invalid input.

I know C# is a mature language that has been around for decades, but how janky everything feels comparatively really shocked me. I only very briefly played with F# about a decade ago, but my guess is that I could try to pick that up and call F# from C#, getting much better ergonomics with a combination of the two.

According to this article[0]:

> HSBC Global Investment Research projects that OpenAI still won’t be profitable by 2030, even though its consumer base will grow by that point to comprise some 44% of the world’s adult population (up from 10% in 2025). Beyond that, it will need at least another $207 billion of compute to keep up with its growth plans.

This article is from six months ago. Was HSBC wrong; did something dramatically change in the last six months; is OpenAI not, in fact, profitable?, or are they in fact doing well but doing a huge investment (as was the case with Amazon 25ish years ago)?

I genuinely do not know, but my impression is that they're burning investment capital trying to compete with others' investment capital and Google's bottomless pockets.

[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/26/is-openai-profitable-forecast...

> Amazon was unprofitable for over a decade, and they were public.

Amazon was unprofitable because they poured their revenue into growth. On paper, they were in the red, but everyone - especially investors - saw what was going to happen, given their trajectory.

Is it the case that any of these AI companies are actually making a ton of money and growing accordingly? AFAICT, we've just got [a] big players like Google that can subsidize AI in the hopes of waiting everyone else out and [b] private companies raising capital in the hopes that when the market returns to rationality, they may be solvent.

I think my browsing habits may have changed, as I rarely see captchas. However, just the other day, my son was frustrated by one that he said had taken him fifteen or more tries, and he still hadn't succeeded.

> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1.

That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.

He started writing his answers in French so that his peers wouldn't understand:D

My son is taking an AP chem class - he's doing really well, super interested in the subject. It's a difficult class, to be sure. Many of his peers are just goofing off and don't understand things. My son regularly tells me about people in his lab group that are cheating off his papers (and, I think, even his test). He tries to cover up answers, but it's not always possible to do.

What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it. Maybe one could argue that, in the end, these students fail to learn and will get their just rewards. But it seems to me that the lack of immediate corrective action (eg, an F on an assignment) is a failing of the system.

My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She lucid dreams very regularly, and she says she spends a lot of that time flying.

I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.

I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.

My first and really only experience with Kubernetes was a project I did about six years ago. I was tasked with building a thing that did some lightly distributed compute using Python + Dask. I was able to cobble together a functioning (internal) product, and we went to production.

Not long after, I found that the pods were CONSTANTLY getting into some weird state where K8s couldn't rebuild, so I had to forcibly delete the pods and rebuild. I blamed myself, not knowing much about K8s, but it also was extremely frustrating because, as I understood/understand it, the entire purpose of Kubernetes is to ensure a reliable deployment of some combination of pods. If it couldn't do that and instead I had to manually rebuild my cluster, then what was the point?

In the end, I ended up nuking the entire project -- K8s, Docker containers, Python, and Dask -- and instead went with a single Rust binary deployed to an Azure Function. The result was faster (by probably an order of magnitude), less memory, cheaper (maybe -80% cost), and much more reliable (I think around four nines).

Years ago, there was a TED Talk[0] from the guy that started Open Source Ecology[1]. The TED Talk was really cool, but I haven't really followed what they did. It sounded promising to have open-source technology for use in this space.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S63Cy64p2lQ

[1] https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page

> Car and Driver estimates that the vehicle will run at least $60,000. Ram’s gas-powered truck, meanwhile, starts at $42,000.

I don't know how much of this is attributable to truck culture, how much is newfangled tech, and how much is the changing landscape of capitalism, but this drives me nuts.

Until two years ago. The most expensive car my family had bought was US$20k, a then four year old CR-V. Last year, we bought a then two year old ID.4 at a little over $30k. That was a bit of a tough pill for me to swallow, but I wanted a vehicle with less maintenance than an ICE car and less fuel cost. Admittedly, than $30k will take a long time to recover (but electricity is certainly much cheaper than gas, especially today).

But a $60k vehicle? There is no way I'm going to rationalize that kind of purchase. I already said 'no' to that when Ford hiked the price of the Lightning and my only option was an upper-tier model around that price point.