Well the author suggest starting your own community. If you do art classes, yoga, social dancing etc. you will probably have less crypto bros and more woman there.
Working remotely taught me a similar lesson as the author. The most important part that I think people get wrong in general is that online friends, or your good friends from uni or your childhood youth that you only see in person once or twice a year, can't replace an active local friends group - or community as he calls it.
Cutting the daily interactions with other humans by no longer going to an office every day made me realize that - because you very quickly feel that something is missing.
I like my remote job and don’t want to leave, but I also can’t work at home because I get depressed and my productivity drops to zero.
Wework and other coworking spaces have mostly been a disappointment as a way to find community, with just two exceptions over the years (one of which was killed by covid).
i am somewhere in the middle because my work requires me to go to the office only four days per month but no one is really checking (nor they check if i go in at 9 am or 1pm).
so for me it's nice because i get to have my slow morning and go to the office during lunch break (i live relatively close).
this made me realize that i don't really mind the office (i ended up going almost every day, staying from lunch break 'till 5pm) but i loathe essentially two things:
- shitty coworkers (better to hop job at all, but avoiding them in person does help a lot)
- going to the office being mandatory (as in, not having freedom and autonomy)
in my current setup colleagues tend to autonomously organize when to meet in the office and go out for lunch together. and frankly... it's great.
the work itself has a lot of shortcomings (and i'm fixing things left and right from the first week i joined the company) but the people and the autonomy make it great.
Having online friends can be great, but you’re right that it doesn’t replace in person friend groups.
One big problem with having mostly or only online friends is that you spend all day at work in front of a computer, then if you want to spend time with your online friends you spend more time in front of a computer. It can turn into all day every day screen time.
Because they can’t reach you when there’s a power outage to check that you’re warm. They can’t share boiled water with you when the mains break. They can’t invite you to a meal when you’re lonely.
This stuff is valid, but a lot of it is more "be there in a crisis", which is not the day to day.
For me, the significant thing about having local community is the ability to throw stuff together last minute. Not every gathering has to have a spreadsheet of guests and canva invites and endless emails booking a band, a keg, whatever else.
A lot can and should just be "hey dudes, anything doing anything? Want to come over for a game/movie/whatever?" Those kinds of low-stakes hangouts are the real backbone of community, and they're hard to do if you don't have a friend group that's physically close by.
There was a period of time in my mid 20s when me and a close friend ot mine lived across the street from each other, and what you said here resonates with me strongly.
It is such a massive boost to quality of life to just be able on a whim to send a text like “i am tryna grab some food+drink in 15min, you down?” and actually make it happen more than half the time (and being able to receive similar texts from the friend too). Lots of spontaneous interactions and (barely-any-)planning for just normal low-pressure outings was absolutely my favorite part of that time period.
On a sidenote, I absolutely despise the “guest spreadsheet canva invites for an event scheduled a month in advance and endless emails booking a band” way of regularly doing social stuff. It is totally chill and reasonable to do so for special occasions and bigger events, but having it as the primary way of socializing makes me want to drill a hole in my skull.
I miss that about dorm life in college. For 4 years I lived in an arcology with people who were the same age and economic class as me. Since the commute to anyone's place was 1-5 minutes on foot, you could get food, watch a movie, and drop out whenever without worrying about the sunk cost of fucking driving 15 minutes in a car-centric city from one detached SFH to another detached SFH.
We've moved around a lot. Getting cool neighbors like this is like winning the lottery. We finally have neighbors that are fun to hang out with, and, yes, it's incredibly awesome.
I can only speak to my own experience, but for the last 1 year I have been by myself and my 2 younger daughters in a new town. I work remotely, but also have some very good friends that I can rely on when I need. Those friends are distributed all over the world and while I can call them any time off the day or night, there is a fundamental difference how I feel after a phone/video call to after a conversation over e.g. drinks/dinner. In fact I found that I sometimes avoid calling my friends because the phone call makes me feel lonelier.
So for me online communities can be a great thing, but they can't replace IRL communities, because the interactions make you feel different. I suspect that the social needs that evolution has imprinted on us can't just be fulfilled by online interactions, they require more senses than just hearing and seeing.
> The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.
> Renowned author Dan Brown got out of his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house and paced the bedroom, using the feet located at the ends of his two legs to propel him forwards. He knew he shouldn’t care what a few jealous critics thought. His new book Inferno was coming out on Tuesday, and the 480-page hardback published by Doubleday with a recommended US retail price of $29.95 was sure to be a hit. Wasn’t it?
I enjoy his books, I am currently reading one I read 10 years ago again in spanish, which I am currently learning as a language. I mean, this is fiction, the other authors are about politics and society. Why would I give a shit about how rich or what an asshole of a person an author is, to enjoy reading his fiction?
There was a brief period where ignorance reigned and Dan Brown was considered an actual historical writer. That drove a lot of book sales, when in fact Dan Brown doesn't write anything remotely historical.
I was reading Brown at like.... 12 years old. The idea that anyone legitimately thought of it as historical fact is hard for me to believe. Not impossible, though...
Did people also think of National Treasure as historically accurate?
The Da Vinci Code has a frontispiece page titled "FACTS" or similar, that lists various elements mentioned in the book and claims they're historically factual. That's the stuff lots of people believed (as did Dan Brown, one presumes).
Probably. Dan Brown got a lot more credence than Nick Cruise though. People will assume that a historical fiction is based on real history. Its like when Hollywood says "based on a true story."
I think the issue is that, for a moment, people legit thought of him as a good writer/his books having actual research etc. Then he got too popular and people started ripping his work apart because they got tired of hearing how good his books were etc. It's a pretty normal cycle for a pop author.
As for comparing him to Hitler, people gonna be people.
An alternative is that he isn’t on that list because he’s a bad person, like Hitler. He’s on a list of people GP doesn’t want to read. He doesn’t want to read Hitler because Hitler is a bad person, he doesn’t want to read Dan Brown because Dan Brown’s prose is clumsy and not worth reading, and he doesn’t want to read Ayn Rand for both reasons. (Sorry for the dig at the end. I think that’s funny).
Which was actually for me a pro argument of picking Proton. The EU has a growing need to monitor and spy on its citizens (see chat control madness). Switzerland is not perfect regarding online privacy, but even if Proton was hosted somewhere else, remember that they do encrypt (mostly) everything.
Just migrated away my personal email (with custom domains) from Microsoft 365 to Proton, and boy, it is such a better experience.
M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details.
When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created.
For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.
I agree with everything, just want to add a downside of proton which is often forgotten: there is no search. You cannot search your emails’ body (headers work, but keywords like “from:” still do not work for search), you cannot search the content of your files, etc.
It’s the price of end-to-end encryption.
The only workaround is synchronising everything locally and searching locally.
But you still can use Thunderbird for that. I recommend it no matter what mail provider is used. Web interfaces are so heavy nowadays, compared to that, Thunderbird feels so fast.
yes, so I can search my emails solely on my laptop if I install proton bridge and synchronize 50GB of emails. And in case you have ever tried to search 50GB of data with thunderbird, it’s slow.
I tried synchronising the data directly in the browser, without any email client and the search is mediocre and slow.
This is not a great experience for search.
But again, it’s not a critique of Proton, it’s just how it is with E2EE. At least it demonstrate they are really doing E2EE.
I still hope some time in the future homomorphic encryption will help, but I think we are at least a decade away from that.
This is a problem of encrypted storage in general (and hopefully homomorphic encryption will solve that), but I knew this and for me that is a feature, not a bug. I use 2-step password auth (NOT 2FA) explicitly so no one can read my emails without my consent - not the provider, nor the government.
I am assuming that the second password is like decryption key.
I have saved the second password as "mailbox password"
The way I interpreted is that first password is for the account, so verify I am who I say I am.
But since the emails are encrypted, browser can't show my messages in human-readable form.
Second/mailbox password decrypts it and shows the emails in human readable format.
This is just a guess.
I would love to hear about second password from other/more knowlegeable folks.
Proton does not have access to your email contents, no matter if you use one or two passwords. They do not have you password, neither the first one, nor the second one, they have a hash of it, to be able to verify you have types the correct password. Only the actual password (the first one or the second one) can decrypt email content. Decryption only happens in the browser (Or in the proton app).
Of course you need to trust them on this, it’s difficult to verify, but it as been audited multiple times.
The second password is an old vestige of the time where they couldn’t manage to use a single password for both authentication and decryption.
I use the second one as well, but I use it so I can use VPN on some common devices the family use as well, without having to enter the second password. So if the family device is lost or compromised, only my first proton password has ever been used on it.
To add to my own post what made me switch from M365 away in the first place besides the admin madness:
- No catch-all (yes, I use my own domain just for me, and I want a catchall to my mailbox)
- Outlook 365 webinterface becoming buggy and shitty in so many ways
- I had 2 domains set up (one private, one business) but O365 would not display which email a given was used as target (just display my name), nor would it let me choose FROM which Email I want send/reply to a mail
- O365 required re-authentication every 24h or so, but I always keep the webinterface open in my tab 24/7
Additionally, I had a Bitwarden paid subscription and looking for another VPN subscription, plus a commercial AI subscription. Proton is has all of that in a one-package deal.
MSFT is absolutely screwed, they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365) through a combination of hiring subpar cheap devs and AI code slop, and their big strategic money squeeze bet on AI is about to be severely undercut by the market. There is very little of actual value left in the company, they're only held in place by the OS monopoly.
Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.
This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.
Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.
This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.
Absolutely screwed! Every single product they have - OS (dominant desktop and laptop OS by a wide margin), Azure - (gaining in second place, now 25% vs AWS 31%), M365 (also dominant, particularly in terms of revenue). None of these show any sign of going anywhere, and if anything, the numbers for cloud and M365 are trending up.
I could only wish my own business were this screwed.
Their success is a big part of why the experience is so bad as they have to appeal to a common denominator.
At the same time, they also win on the little things that diehard opponents choose to ignore, like search that kind of works. I don't like Office 365 but I'm a paying customer because, after long research, I haven't found a competitor that meets all my requirements.
> they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365)
You forgot Github, the once-reliable and once-generally-fast but now pink-unicorn-bedraggled slow-as-molasses 'forge' site. Oh how they messed it up and am I ever glad I only ever used it as a mirror for my own repos.
How they manage to screw up just about every product they purchase remains a mystery to me but by ${deity} are they good at it.
WPS office + HarmonyOS will likely become dominant
my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back
culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever
i see future of:
HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps
then misc tablet systems
this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive
I really tried migrating to Proton, but unfortunately I found their suite not really fit for purpose and I had to request a refund.
- No search in Mail. You can use Bridge to pull your emails into something else, but this means it's no longer secure, and not really feasible for a non-techy partner!
- No search in Drive
- 3 domain limit for Mail(???)
- Drive sucks. No previewing files, viewing photos etc. due to missing docs suite
- No proper shared folders in Drive
- Pass is woeful at autocomplete
- Pass Aliases are independent of logins, so you end up with double entries for everything
- You can't sync the calendar with native apps, and the calendar doesn't show birthdays
- No contact sync
- Pass doesn't support SSH
- VPN lets you split tunnel by app on PC, app AND IP on Android, IP on the chrome extension. Some let you include, others exlcude. How hard is it to just allow exclude/include for hostnames?
There's tonnes more that I'm missing that I can't think of from the top of my head, but it seems like Proton have stretched themselves very thinly. What I would consider a lot of basic features are missing. One look at their UserVoice community shows a lot of frustration
I think it's probably best to pay for individual services that focus on one area. I ended up with Fastmail, 1Password, and Windscribe for example.
Valid points. For me the no search is feature (due to everything being encrypted), not a bug. But this is an individual decision. I have a similar list after 2 years of using (and managing) my personal M365 subscription (Onedrive on macOS sucks, search on iOS is very slow, spotlight integration doesn't work etc.). I just wonder what you use now as an alternative, because it seems the perfect solution will not exist. For M365, they also just price hiked my subscription after one year to over 40% (and what would I do, migration takes day) and I just felt Microsoft holds me hostage. This is not solved in any way by moving to just another lock-in platform, but I trust proton more to value customers and not squeeze money out of me with that lock-in. At least I trust them more than Microsoft or Google.
Unfortunately we took the simple option and reverted back to Google. I was lucky that my wife even went along with my plan to migrate everything in the first place!
I'm considering self-hosting Immich to replace photos, but not sure when I'll tackle that and don't fancy having to use Tailscale all the time. No idea about a Drive replacement as yet!
I've had no issues with the app lately, but it's still missing the feature of building a local search index to do searches based on e-mail content, like the web client can do.
Too early to say that (I used the holidays for the transition). With your custom domains you have to make sure everything is setup properly on the DNS side (MX records, SPF, DKIM/DMARC etc.) but the proton ui has checks and makes that really easy, when correctly setup all checks are displayed "green". If you have trouble of your outgoing mails to be accepted (or land in spam), I would advice making sure all is marked green for you too.
My personal pet-peeve everytime a "you don't need JS" post comes up on HN, is the disconnect between the interface designers and the developers. In my dayjob as a (mostly react) freelance contractor doing B2B and LoB apps, there are always UX designers coming up with the screen- and interface designs. I don't think any project I ever were, could have matched a screen design I was passed without JS. Whether it being business requirements (has to work in IE, or nowadays has to work in Edge), or simply hard visual design choices.
My favorite example is that of a date, date-time or date-range picker. Yes, there are HTML native elements. But they look absolutely ugly, styling only goes so far, and good luck with requirements such as "oh, but in the popup on the date-range picker, add a topbar with 3 buttons that trigger preselection and a dropdown". Now you can argue and communicate back that we save a lot of technical complexity in the stack if we stick to the HTML native solutions. But all those discussions basically end up managers and UX designers having no clue about the actual complexity and savings (time and money wise for future maintenance) and simply don't care.
And if I am the one telling them "Look, in the HTML native date-time picker, you can't add custom elements, you can't fully customize every bit and piece of behaviour so change the screen designs" they will just fire up random corporate website XYZ and show a similar version of what they have in mind (and it is always JS-based) and suddenly it looks like me being unable or unskilled to achieve something, that is clearly doable as others have done it.
Now not all is nice and shiny in the JS/React world. We use MaterialUI in a current project, and the commercial MUI-X DatePickers. They also come with their limitations, but it is just they are far more powerfull and customizable to actually meet the requirements and demands of UX and management, compared to the HTML versions.
> My dream would be that I can adb into my phone, install the .Net SDK or .Net Runtime (v 8 or 10) and have my applications run natively on Android
My understanding is that you can (almost) do that using MAUI (formerly known as Xamarin). You will not get a .Net SDK or Runtime, but the mono runtime. Since it is bundled in your app, you won't actually notice.
No, we need one level lower & zero mono. I want the sdk or runtime to be installed in the same way (and executable) the same way on android as on other linux distro's. .Net has ARM builds so it will work fine. This is without any specific framework dependencies (like aspnet, maui, avalonia etc) - just plain .net 8/10. It would actually be nice if android just bundled the runtime to begin with so we don't have to. They can just pin it to latest LTS versions and let it auto update now & then, same way as WebView/Google play services etc.
So for whatever reason you want the .NET runtime over Mono - not sure why that is a hard requirement, but AFAIK that is also the goal for microsoft. As in, merging those runtimes and have a single codebase that works for all platforms (including android). There are technical obstacles and historic codebases, but I would expect this unified runtime soon.
Cause since .Net Core 3 (first real production ready cross platformness) to .Net 10 (current LTS) is light years ahead of .Net Framework 4.8 / Mono (which is like half the performance of old .Net 4.8..). Not to be crude, but mono is pretty much trash. Should just be deprecated and the engine bro's should just stick to .Net LTS version (8 or 10, but 8 will be dead in a year). .Net 8/10 also has much better build tools, cleaner & smaller executables, better packaging tools to make deployments a breeze over the old system. The compiler is also much faster in general. You can tree-shake the hell out of your builds to get very lean artifacts. And then there is the garbage collector. And all of the low level optimizations in the CLR that just makes everything fast & less memory hungry.
Unity should really create a version of their engine on .Net 10, make the core as platform-agnostic as possible. It's fine if this variant is not backwards compatible. .Net 10 is also already on Xbox.
Its a pain though. We tried last year at work to build something a little bit more complex than their examples, and it was a pain. Gave up after a month and built our apps in Flutter instead. Works like a charm.
I’ve been building this way since 2018 using MvvmCross[0] and it's become much less painful with LLMs where you can simply ask to recreate an iOS UI on Android. I even managed to implement experimental hot reload[1] for native UIs on Android from .NET, but ended up not using it because, again, nowadays it's faster to iterate with Claude Code – it just one-shot things most of the time.
Currently I'm building an app with Uno Platform[2], which is basically .NET Flutter, and while it's cool to get things working across five different platforms at once, you can note the difference, especially on scroll. No automatic Liquid Glass / Material 3 for it either.
So it's a choose your poison situation: either building native interfaces on each platform separately, or fighting later with an additional layer of abstraction and a canvas-based UI wheel reinvention.
We must stop calling them social media and call them what they have become: media. The percentage of actually social stuff is negligible. Now you can classify having a conversation with a random stranger that you never going to meet in your life over twitter as "being social". I'd say you are just passing time or entertaining yourself. Or worse, compensating lack of real world social interactions.
> it was well known that Unity was hindered by sticking with an old and out-of-date Mono, and they were very successful at deflecting the blame
So much this. According to a 2023 blog article from Unity [0], Unity uses Boehm GC. But Mono itself introduced another, generational GC called SGen [1] more than 10 years ago that became the default at some point. It is just Unity stuck on old mono versions, missing out on all the changes and improvements that went into Mono after their fork, essentially.
A sibling comment [1] remarks that they play games with raw pointers that are incompatible with the newer GC, so it's not "just" an older runtime that's biting them in the ass.
well, it has a lot to do with people growing up during cold war and german reunification.
There were many stories where people lost faith in politics (e.g. after Chernobyl), so people gathered together to do stuff on their own. I think being "social" (to all people), decentralized and mistrusting authorities is just a left thing. so that's just a natural thing imho
That chernobyl and western politics is in any way connected is due to decades unscientific fearmongering. And Berlin has always been a hotbed for that.
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