Oh cool, a product of Waterloo's Craig Kaplan, most famous for his work on the discovery of the einstein monotile

I don't have children and I prefer permanent Standard Time because I have the apparently weird belief that noon should be at noon.

(i.e. the time 12:00PM should be when the sun is overhead)

I'm not a "capitalism gives you brain worms" kind of person, but the idea that it is somehow better to literally change the location of the sun in the sky because the holy hours of 9-5 are sacrosanct is so strange to me.

I lived once in Ecuador. Pretty much the whole year the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm. I very much prefer Spain: in summer the sun sets at almost 10 pm at its peak… best summers of my life. I lived in Poland once too, where in winter the sun sets at 3pm: I wanted to kill myself

Summers in Spain, e.g. Madrid can be extremely hot. Having the sun not set until very late can create an unpleasant city life experience.

With people acknowledging heatwaves and energy issues, I find it interesting how that's seldom part of the conversation.

I miss sunset times from Spain. It makes days feel longer

9-5 aren't sacrosanct. When the 9-5 song came out approximately nobody worked from 9-5. Standard working hours were 8-5 with an hour for lunch. Starting at 7 was far more common than starting at 9.

The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour, so started an hour later than her boss.

Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades after the song came out.

> because I have the apparently weird belief that noon should be at noon

But why? Because it's not even in standard time, except for around 1/60th of a time zone at best, if you're rounding to the minute.

If solar noon jumps from being at 11:35 in standard time, to at 12:35 under DST, at your coordinates, what does that matter?

Noon was at noon before the railroads. But ever since time zones were invented, that's no longer been the case.

Digits on a clock are just a number. If you care about when solar noon is, just memorize it.

This is it. Ultimately the best interfaces are designed for experts, not beginners. "Usability" at some point became confused with "approachability", probably because like in so many other areas, growth was prioritized over retention. It's OK if complex software is hard to use at first if that enables advanced users to work better.

Really, the most efficient interfaces are the old-style pure text mode mainframe forms, where a power user can tab through fields faster than a 3270-style terminal emulator can render them.

But what if most of your users aren't "experts"? I think it's a good thing that computers are usable by a majority of the population today.

So why care about wysiwyg when we have LaTeX?

Thanks for posting. That's actually a much more interesting story.

(2024)

Just FYI article is two years old

An AI agent cannot be held accountable

Neither can employees, in many countries.

So... things where the producer doesn't respect the audience? Because any such analysis would be worth as much as a 4.5 hour atonal bass solo.

You can get an AI to listen to that bass solo for you

But can you get an AI to zone out on a fluffy couch at the center point of a dank hi-fi setup with the volume cranked to 11, while chillin' on 50mg of THC?

And will you enjoy paying someone else to let the AI to do that?

What are you going to do instead? I am very close to moving from a 20-year-old GMail address to a custom domain and was planning to use Proton as the email host.

I was in your shoes a few years ago. Just move already. Don't worry about it. Get your own domain and point the MX records at literally any email service out there. If you don't like it you can just switch later. Just start using your own domain as soon as possible.

It really is life changing. When you have your own domain switching email services is risk free since your addresses don't change. You can literally try out all the email services out there.

For the record I'm a happy Proton customer. They seem to be the only ones who still care about PGP. I even interacted with them here on HN a few times.

I've been reasonably happy with Runbox. Decent features, pricing, and servers in Norway. The webmail isn't great, but I don't really use it. If you must have encryption, I think the only option is Tuta.

Fastmail is worth considering. Ive used it for several years and it just works.

Downside is that their main servers are in the US, which may be problematic these days if you are from outside the US.

I just moved away from Fastmail after 10+ years for this reason.

as of this week, I've been going through the rigmarole of self-hosting my own email (again), for the same reason as you

any avoidable dependency on the US has become a red line

don't forget to tell fastmail that the reason you're leaving is because they host in the US!

(I also told them if they open a DC outside the reach of the US regime: I be happy to become a customer again)

Out of curiosity: Where did you migrate to?

Proton. There are some other good alternatives. But since the rest of the family was also using Fastmail, I needed a solution that was user-friendly enough. Besides that, Proton Drive also made it possible to finally move away from our Dropbox Family subscription.

I’ve been very happy with mailbox.org. The proton mail bridge was a huge pain point for me.

Last year I started self-hosting and went with [MXRoute](https://mxroute.com/). It was pretty easy to switch and I really like their pricing model.

I' migrated to purelymail.com around 2 years ago and. Reaaally cheap, easy to set up and without any bloat whatsoever. The webpage might look sketchy at first, but don't judge a book by its cover :)

I use migadu.com for setting up email for my domains. I have very low usage and their pricing model is just perfect for me.

icloud mail support custom domains.

I am using them.

Sending an email from catch-all covered email is not a big issues also, create use, delete and it still works.

I am slowly transitioning to icloud from gmail, was thinking of proton but reading the above comment made me change my mind, good custom domain support is a must for me.

Seconding fastmail.

I have a catch-all and can reply from any address I please. If I reply from an email sent to retailer@mydomain.com it even auto populates the "from" address for me with "retailer", or I can choose to reply from one of my named accounts. It's really slick.

I think the big downside for a lot of people is that it's hosted in the USA where the government is definitely headed in an autocratic direction that is abusive of most countries who don't comply to rantings from an orange madman. Definitely a huge downside.

Love this too (customer for 5+ years, I can't believe people who can afford Fastmail don't migrate from Gmail).

I just wish they were more privacy-friendly.

Let's not overlook podcasts

Old recipes are more memory cues for experienced cooks than the modern step-by-step guide for amateurs we are used to. They're scanty in detail because they assume quite a lot of existing knowledge.

It's the difference between "a chicken stew flavoured with turmeric and cumin, then rice enough to cook in and fully absorb the broth" and "first, take 500g of boneless skinless chicken thighs..."