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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Oh, he is a threat. He is a huge threat for the fascists.

    He’s a threat because he’s not on their side. He’s a (much needed) icon of disunity.

    They’re right to be afraid. They need to stop him and anyone like him at all costs. If there’s just one county whose sheriff isn’t wagging his tail to goons like ICE, that’s unacceptable.

    And this isn’t about some sheriff election, it’s the mayor of NYC. Y’know, the place where Rudy Giuliani became the greatest mayor in the entire history of the US (until he blew it by siding with Trump). Of course they’re afraid.

    If people can find shelter from ICE and the rest in just one county, that’s bad for the fascists. Having it be a huge place like NYC would be a disaster in their eyes.

    He won’t affect global policy. But he will affect the populace of US places other than NYC. If he wins, some may look at NYC and think “Why can’t we have this?”. That’s what’s dangerous.







  • Thunderbird on desktop Linux, no mail on mobile.

    I love the UI. Looks nice, feels nice and mostly functional.

    About the mostly:

    1. Search is terrible. Mail is listed in one way in “regular” display mode. As you search, the regular display gets filtered. Cool. But, as soon as you hit enter and commit to the search, for some godforsaken reason Thunderbird opens a new tab with your query. In some ugly (probably legacy) display. Oh, and sugar on top: the results are different than before hitting enter. Probably different by being completely empty. Apparently Thunderbird can’t search.

    2. The address book and calendar are very lacking. They do look nice like the rest of the app, but the actual features availiable are so few and far between it’s comical. I gave up on using that quickly.

    3. The tabs. I love them as a concept, but I don’t get why having one tab would make the tab bar disappear, having two splits the bar into two giant tabs, and having a lot splits it into tiny, ewualky unmanageable tabs. Probably the remnants of a time long by, which i’ll touch upon shortly.

    4. The new message window. Making it a modal (like on pretty much all web clients), with the additional option of popping it out (for example like Firefox handles videos, but with an icon in the taskbar) would be nice. Since i used Gmail web for 10+ years, I tend to forget about the half-written message somewhere beneath the other windows. Not a dealbreaker, but a bit annoying. Again, probably a remnant of simpler times.

    5. The folders. They’re a bit hit or miss. Better than any web client I’ve used, but still with its own quirks. For example, making a new folder is easy. Moving or deleting one is next to impossible.

    6. The calendar notificantions. I don’t want to use my mail client as a perpetually open calendar. Ideally, it’d have my appointments so I can jot new ones agreed in the e-mails I get and suggest new ones according to the schedule in the calendar. I do not need to be reminded of my appointments. Especially not when I check my mail a few times per day and reck up a few calendar entries in between mail checks. Getting bombarded by a (small) shower of notifications (on by default and boring as hell to remove from each entry manually) gets annoyig fast.

    Now for the likes:

    1. The filters. Simole yet quite powerful. While not as good as I’d hope (ideally doing first-pass triage for me), they’re still something mail clients don’t have. Great for filtering stuff into large categories and discarding old mail, with how old is too old being heavily category-dependant. Usually I don’t use the “run automatically every” option. I feel it’s overkill, and I like having a look before filtering, running filters when I feel is necessary. I also love to look at the filters run and the numbers on folders move. Very calming, unlike the calendar notifications.

    2. The privacy. Specifically, the option to disable fetching remote content (mostly images abd fonts). They’re unnecessary, use up bandwidth and slow down loading, sure. But why I like it is that it removes the visual clutter of images, as well as rendering the text in a more “textbook” format, as opposed to a flyer. Useful for quickly glancing at the text and getting its meaning out fast, instead of having to decipher highly stylized bullshit.

    3. The “old-fashioned” way of dealig with (some) stuff. Tabs, calendar, search and address book get a fail in this regard. They shoukd be uodated and improved.

    3.1 I love the way Thunderbird asks you to compress your mailbox. In today’s world of Electron apps not caring about anything, let alone storage space, Thunderbird (although being huge itself) still asks to compress your 40 MB mailbox, and tells you to how much it compressed it to. Is the telling you neccesary? No. But it is a nice touch.

    3.2 I love the way Thunderbird puts PGP signatures front and center. I also love the fact it tells you generating a pair if keys will last “a few minutes”, when it’s in fact seconds. While PGP has mostly been driven out by more modern stuff, I like its simplicity. Generate a new pair of keys whenever you want and sign with any amount of keys. But it’s also powerful. The signature stays on-device by default. That’s actually useful fir me to differentiate mail sent once in a blue moon from my phone or a public computer (no signature) or from Thunderbird. The ability to aslo encrypt with PGP is also nice. While I’ve never used it, it does seem like a good extra layer of privacy. For example, sending a private email from a monitored work account, or keeping stuff private from the mail provider (since the signature is client/device based).

    I use gmail. I’d absolutely love to jump ship, but it’s just too ingrained in my life. I tried switching from it about three years ago, but didn’t manage. I’ve already been using it for too long. While not longer than Thunderbird, i did use it consistently unkike Thunderbird (I’ve used Thunderbird in the early 2010s, but dropped it when I started using gmail), and for some reason I still don’t use the new (or did I ever use the old Thubderbird) so much I’d consider myself intimately acquainted with it. Unlike gmail.

    Gmail is fine. It works. It has its quirks, to which I’m perfectly used to already. What I hate the most is opening the web client on a public PC every blue moon and having to go through new privacy popups and saying “No, thanks” wherevar it lets me. The Gemini stuff is also annoying. I want to write an e-mail, not have it do it for me with potebtially disasteous consequences. The privacy stuff is also a huge issue I’d like to tackle, but couldn’t.

    But, if you asked me “I’m building my own web service with its client (web or ohberwise). What should I shamelessly rip off from the one you use?”, my answer would be "The general look and feel (UX) of Gmail. However, not the new one. Maybe a 2016 or 2018 snapshot. Perhaps one or two older ones as well. Gmail is pretty much the mail sevice a lot of people use. The tech-unsavvy ones will adjust easier, and the tech-savvy ones woukd feel at home.

    As for my workflow: I check my email 2 to 5 times a day (while not on vacation), including weeknds. I have a bunch of filters set up. As I already said, I use Thunderbird desktop and run the filters manually. The first group of filters seperates stuff into categories. Stuff like “Bills”, “Insurance”, “Work” (further divided into “Meetings”, various current projects, “HR stuff”, “Payroll” etc). You get the idea. Bills also get their own subfolders. Each vendor/utility gets its own subfolder in Bills. Insurance is seperate from bills because it’s a special can of worms that apparently needs special treatment. Oh, and there are a bunch of other main folders. Listing them all would take too much time and space.

    Inside of the main folder (e.g. Bills), each subfolder has its “new”, “general”, “paid”, “unpaid”, “old” abd “retained” subfolders. A bunch of filters look into the inbox and sort the appropriate new mail into the apropriate “new” folder. Mail in the “new” folder older than two weeks ia moved into the “general” folder, since if it’s not paid, unpaid or old, it’s clearly not important. Stuff from paid and general gets moved into old after a year. I do all deleting manually, since the volume of mail I get never required me to have filters for clearing mail altogether, just for sorting. When deleting, I usually open up the relevant old folder, have a quick glance at the mail subjects, select everything and delete. Every now and then I do get the odd mail I feel might be important. That gets moved manually into the retained folder by hand before purging. Rinse and repeat a similar process for the other main categories of mail.

    That’s aboit it for my little disertation on my use of Thunderbird. As this ebtire thing was somehow typed up on my phone, pkease excuse all the misclicks and typos up there. I just can’t be bothered to read all of that again. Sorry.


  • It’s not “assumed” to be secure.

    It’s out there and visible for all to see. Hopefully, someone knowledgeable has taken it upon themselves to take a look at the software and assess its security.

    The largest projects, like all the ones you named are popular enough that there’s no shortage of people taking a peek.

    Of course, that doesn’t mean actual security audits are uncalled for. They’re necessary. And they’re being done. And with the code out there, any credible auditer will audit all the code, since it’s availiable.

    Compare that to closed-source.

    With closed-source, the code isn’t out there. Anyone can poke around, sure, but that’s like poking a black box with a stick. It’s not out there. You can infer some things, there are some source code leaks, but it isn’t all visible. This is also much less efficient and requires much more work for a fraction of the results.

    The same goes with actual audits. Usually not all source code is given over to the auditers, so some voulnerabilities remain uninspected and dormant.

    Sure, not having the code out there is “security”. If someone doesn’t see the code, it’s much harder to find the weakness. Harder, but not impossible.

    There’s a lot of open-source software. There’s also a lot closed-source software, much more than the open-source kind, in fact.

    What open-sourcing does is increase the number of eyes looking at the code. And each of those eyes could find a weakness. It might be a bad actor, but it’s most likely a good one.

    With open source, any changes are publically visible, and any attempt to sneak a backdoor in has a much higher chance of being seen, again due to the large number of eyes which can see it.

    Closed-source code also gives lazy programmers an easy way out of fixing or not introducing vulnerabilities - “no one will know”. With open source, again, there’s a lot of eyes on the code - not just the one programmer team making it and the other auditing it, as is often the case.

    That’s why open source software is safer in general. Percisely because it’s availiable, attacking it might seem easier. But for every bad actor looking at the code, there’s at least ten people who aren’t. And if they spotted a voulnerability, they’d report it.

    Security with open source is almost always proactive, while with closed source it’s hit-or-miss. Many voulnerabilities have to cause an issue before being fixed.


  • Sure.

    However, assuming two exceptional employees rated consistently 7-10, there’s a measurable difference between an 8.2 and an 8.6.

    The alternative is 3 vs. 3.

    People also like to have options. Having a sad face, a neutral face and a smiley doesn’t really cut it for pretty much anything.

    Having the option of 1 being “utter shit” and 4 being “bad but workable” seems like it has benefits.