I feel bad for this kid. That really is a bad warning dialog. Nowhere does it say it’s going to delete files. Anyone who thinks that’s good design needs a break.

Half the replies are basically “This should be obvious if your past five years of life experience is similar to mine, and if it isn’t then get fucked.” Just adding insult to injury.

This is good advice, because email is very difficult to make reliably private. However, it’s not the best you can get. Tutanota, for example, stores headers with E2EE, and still has a search function.

The goal should be to make it as private as it can realistically be. Ideally, any cloud service you use should only store end-to-end encrypted data.

I’m not trying to shit on Proton — it’s a huge step up from the popular mainstream email services, and the inclusion of cloud storage makes it a much easier transition than going piecemeal with 2-5 different services.

Not the encrypted mail, mind you, because they can’t do that

Just want to point out for anyone new that ProtonMail does not use E2EE for email headers. That means they CAN access your subject lines, to/from fields, and other email headers. That means they CAN be forced to hand it over to the government.

Source: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.

Personally I am disappointed in a lot of Proton’s wording about this. They frequently promise they can’t access “your data” and “your messages” when they do, in fact, store potentially sensitive data in a format they CAN access.

Using an ad-blocking DNS server solves most of those problems. Mullvad offers a public DNS server with no account required, but there are plenty of options out there.

You should still use a browser extension on top of that for pattern-based URL blocking, but a DNS-based blocker should be your first line of defense.

A good ad-blocker goes a long way. You can block all Google domains with minimal impact to non-Google services.

30 years ago, maybe. Post-Napster, not relevant. Most online piracy is non-commercial now, and it’s still illegal across most of the world.

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn’t help. Everything about environment management is insane.

This is how Arc behaves by default, and it drove me crazy. The cons of it appearing when I don’t want it far outweigh the pros of saving me a single click when I do want it.

A simpler, less ambitious alternative is Clickbait Remover: https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for-youtube

It replaces thumbnails with stills from the video. You can select between beginning, middle, and end.

It doesn’t change titles but it lets you force capitalization to lowercase, titlecase, or sentence-case. Keep in mind that this has no logic to retain capitalization of proper nouns no matter which option you choose. I set mine to lowercase just to have some kind of consistency, because I got sick of random ALL CAPS TITLES.

I haven’t used DeArrow myself. Crowdsourcing titles sounds interesting but I appreciate that Clickbait Remover behaves exactly the same way with 100% of videos.

All temperature scales are arbitrary, but since our environment is full of water, one tied to the phase changes of water around the atmospheric pressure the vast majority of people experience just makes more sense.

But when it comes to weather, the boiling point of water is not a meaningful point of reference.

I suppose I’m biased since I grew up in an area where 0-100°F was roughly the actual temperature range over the course of a year. It was newsworthy when we dropped below zero or rose above 100. It was a scale everybody understood intuitively because it aligned with our lived experience.

Who do we arrest if a crime is organized via phone call on T-Mobile’s network

I guarantee you, T-Mobile does not hesitate to hand over any and all data they have to the government. And they don’t encrypt shit, as evidenced by their many many data breaches.

or via mail?

The postal service is from a different era, and has legal protections I wish online equivalents had. Logically they should. Realistically they probably never will.

Not all use-cases require a high speed:capacity ratio.

I mean, I have an 18TB USB hard drive, which sustains transfer at about 50MB/sec in practice. It is nearly full, and its level of performance has never been a show-stopping problem.

It’s hard to imagine a use case where a NAS would be a viable alternative to an SD card.

It’s incredibly annoying, but it gets easier over time as you fill out you whitelist.

One of the big advantages to something like NoScript is that it lets you enable scripts only from certain domains. So you can enable the functionally-required scripts while still blocking other scripts.

But yes, it’s a giant pain in the ass. It’s absurd that the web has devolved into such a state.

Switching to another Chromium-based browser is a half-measure. Other Chromium-based browsers are on borrowed time.

As time goes on, it will become more difficult for them to maintain v2 support. Nobody has the resources to properly maintain a browser fork with more than minor modifications. And you can bet Google will go out of their way to make this difficult for everybody else.

I mean, sure, use what you’re comfortable with if you really can’t use a non-Chromium-based browser for some reason. But it means you’re likely going to have to jump ship again sooner or later. Why not just jump once, to something with better long-term prospects?

Then again, the folks behind Arc Browser have expressed interest in becoming engine-agnostic, so perhaps there will be a Chromium-free Arc version in the future. That would be very cool.

I don’t know about strictly “unable” but there are a million contexts where it is a bad idea and simply not done. Like a spreadsheet or financial document. Or anywhere you want your text to behave like text — with a consistent font, color, style, etc. The difference between $ (text) and 💲 (emoji) is pretty stark in most contexts.

This will likely be rejected for one the same reasons that they decided they would not add any new flag emojis. Flags come and go. Bitcoin hasn’t even been around for 20 years yet, and its future is highly uncertain.

Also, considered as a currency, it would be better as a regular text character, not an emoji. Like $, €, ¥, £, etc.

Give it time. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. Look at GitHub or Skype.

Monocultures are bad. Popularity very rarely tracks quality. And once something is overwhelmingly popular, it usually goes to shit, because the momentum is enough to keep it successful.

See: Windows. Outlook. Reddit. CrowdStrike.

everyone and their mother uses VS Code

This is usually a good reason to avoid something. Especially if that something comes from Microsoft.

This doesn’t seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.

In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.