stormbrew

> While LCDs work poorly in bright sunlight, e-ink works poorly in darkness

I think if you took the backlight out of both of these options you'd find that the lcd doesn't perform so great in the dark either.

I would hate this, and probably instantly bail out of any flow that tried to force it on me.

Being able to receive mail on an address should not necessarily imply a capability to send from it. This scheme rules out many actual or potential schemes for email anonymity, especially in a world where very little email is still transactional relatively speaking.

I do not give (almost) any website an address I send normal email from, nor do I want to. And my default configured client for mailto:, if I even have one on the device I'm using, is not going to be set to the single use mail I want to sign up with.

> my job isn’t that stressful.

If it wasn't that stressful, you wouldn't be posting this. Feeling unfulfilled is stressful. You are stressed and you are probably burning out (yes it's possible to burn out on boredom).

Change things. Start with easy low risk changes and work your way out from there. If you want to stay in the job you have now, you likely need to change your approach to how you try to make an impact, because what you're doing now obviously isn't working.

But there are likely teams in your company where you'd feel more fulfilled. If not, being promoted at one megacorp is basically catnip for recruiters at others.

I'm still mad at whoever decided to hide the entire menu bar in a burger menu and made everything in it take twice as long to find and use.

I mean, bundler goes back a pretty far distance into the history of rails at this point and has been the defacto mechanism of dependency control for ruby for most of its history by now, so barring old gems being yanked you should be able to run any rails app with a lockfile if you also find the right ruby version.

Js (or specifically npm) and python were far slower to adopt this convention, to the point that I think it's fair to say that neither have fully adopted it yet.

Js at least has made almost no backwards incompatible syntax or core lib changes though, which is a point in its favor. Ruby 2 and python 3 were major breaking changes.

3c by 2100 seems on the optimistic end of something that appears to be a non-linear process, though. Especially since we have yet to meet even a single global emissions reduction target. Kinda feels like they picked a number that would be alarming enough to spur action, but not as alarming as a more realistic "if we continue to fail to do literally anything" number that would be taken as scare mongering.

> in their effort to solve a problem that only exists on HN

I don't understand why your takeaway from the fact that they're implementing it is that the people saying they want or need it are irrational and only exist on hn instead of "hmm, maybe I'm wrong and this is a legitimate feature request".

Anyways, let me assure you that the people who get "reamed" are in fact anyone who even causally mentions they want this feature who get a bunch of very dedicated people telling them how utterly wrong they are, no one should ever want that and anyways it's impossible actually.

Trust me.

I think that people's experience with the privacy and significance of their phone number varies a lot by demographic.

I'm not saying they need to grow. I'm saying that arguments resting on the importance of phone numbers to the growth of their social graph are also resting on the idea that signal must grow. I am, in fact, saying that while this may be important to them it is not strictly important to me.

And I never said everyone I need to talk to is on it. I have like 6 different messaging apps and accounts because nothing has everyone. And I'm pretty conservative about which ones I'll use compared to most people I know.

I would rather use signal than most of those, other than the fact that I also frequently need to communicate with people who have no business knowing my phone number.

> I genuinely believe there is a lot of commentary on this thread from people who have never designed a secure system.

Gosh that's quite the conclusion. I hope my employer never finds out about this discovery of my competency based on some comments on a message board.

I think you've very much lost the thread of what I'm saying here, because at no point have I suggested anything about 100% security or 100% privacy. It would actually be pretty weird for me to be advocating for that while also asserting that you're making maximalist arguments.

I also never said email is inherently more private than phone. I assert that it's a different privacy tradeoff, and one that I'm more comfortable with for various reasons. I could get into those if you want but I don't think they're relevant. (1) is the more interesting question in the end. (3) is just "it's open source you can fix it yourself!" which is .. not very useful on any level. Yes, I can go make my own signal-based platform and talk to precisely no one over it. No I'm not interested in doing that. I've been to the social network rodeo and have the mental scars to prove it.

So ok, assuming we go with email addresses as the alternative mechanism, and the email addresses still require verification same as the phone numbers, and you still have to mutually have each other on our contact lists to communicate through signal: How, specifically, has the threat model been weakened?

I agree, it's an exhausting repeated conversation. It's almost as if there's a frustrating unmet need with signal as it stands for a lot of people that isn't actually placated by the repetition of an argument about how they grow as a ~~business~~ (sorry, as a non-profit).

And again, signal is the only thing that can talk to people on signal so "use something else" is not helpful.

That may be their product management premise, but it's not why I use it. I use it because people I need to talk to are there and it has proper e2e messaging. I'm not beholden to their expectations of why I want to use their product.

Also I'm not advocating for anything to be kept server side, nor do I see any reason why other identifiers couldn't be kept client side. An address book is just a list of identifiers, it's not magical just because it's phone numbers and already on my phone.

We've had this conversation before though. I remain unconvinced.

Except that like I said, users are a feature here. The perfect thing may exist but it doesn't matter if no one's using it. I don't know about you but I lost belief in the idea of a perfectly meritocratic world of social products a long time ago.

You've said something like this many many times and I just don't see the logic of the question. You're talking about a feature that you admit is a privacy compromise and then comparing it to an absolutely maximalist alternative, or a world where people only connect in literally one way (through their phone contact lists). Is it really so hard to imagine that other compromises may be possible, or even coexist?

The answer is I give them my email or username. They give me theirs. We connect.

Using phone contact lists shortcuts this process, but the exchange still had to happen at some point. Is it really so hard to believe some users might choose to do it again? Or, god forbid, with someone they'd rather not give a phone number to?

fwiw I am a user of signal and I am expressing my need. Allowing it access to my contact list and my phone number is a privilege I extend nearly uniquely to it among similar apps and I want that gone. Because I can't just "not use signal," because signal is where the people I need to talk to are. Users are a key feature of any social product, you can't just "all else equal" them away.

It's not really my problem if it's hard. That's for them to figure out. Until they do I will continue to be an unhappy user of their product, and no amount of people on the internet willing to defend their choices as if they were their own is going to change that.

> I'd get a "So-and-so joined Signal!" notification for a bunch of randos

One of the reasons I wish I could use something other than my phone number and access to my contact list to work with signal is these notifications creep me the fuck out and I would rather never get them, or have anyone get them about me.

I'm fine with it being a feature for people who want it, but I don't. I want to make my own damn choices about who I talk to through it.

> If this is the product you want, then go use it.

This is great advice if your goal is to send messages to yourself. In the real world, though, a messaging app that you're the only one using is about as useful as a bag of ice in a snowstorm. People don't need "like signal but with usernames," they need "signal with usernames (or email addresses or...)" so they can communicate with people who use signal.

Brilliant people are expensive. Bleeding companies need to cut costs. Layoffs are usually a mix of poor performers, high cost talent, and tenure ordering. Sometimes entire departments full of brilliant people go because the department isn't profitable.

Again, you have in your mind a spherical cow of a layoff.

If your team is unaffected by layoffs then you're very very lucky. This sounds like you're imagining basically the spherical cow of layoffs.

Layoffs don't happen when everything is hunky dory and just needs some tweaks.

The gibberish name ones may be targeting backscatter. They might have a reply-to with the address they're really targeting.

And that may have dropped off because there was a concerted effort to make it harder to do that around then. In particular, that's kind of what killed qmail as an in-vogue MTA, because it wasn't being updated and you had to use awkward patches to stop backscatter.

If you had offers and your company announced layoffs but you weren't one of the people being laid off, would you stay?

I mean whether you clump them or not they're still time taken out of a very short period. I wouldn't (and haven't) minded so much with longer sprints, but 2 weeks minus planning/retro minus "one person takes a Friday off and another person is out one of the weeks" always leaves me feeling cramped.

I think the best structure I ever had was 3wk "actual work" sprints and 1wk to address tech-debt and do planning.

> To the contrary -- in between each sprint, there's a review, a retrospective

"in between" is overstating things a bit. The current norm seems to be two week sprints and all these things are done at the beginning and end of them. To be honest, I personally do feel like this gives the feeling of 'sprinting' because it usually means at least 2-3 days of the sprint are 'wasted' on meetings and that counts for a lot when it's 2/10 or 3/10.

And a lot of the terminology around this kind of process are geared to give you a sense of urgency. Right back to "Extreme Programming".

I definitely like the idea of this but it seems like the tendency is always the opposite because it's much cheaper to build a pedestrian overpass than a car one, even though they're also an accessibility nightmare and usually kind of a terrible experience and aesthetic blight in their own right.

Those crosswalks tend to be -in my experience - some of the most stressful to interact with. If they're controlled then you've just made the whole thing even worse than they were before. If they're not then you've got a much harder time as a pedestrian to figure out when it's safe to cross (because of the curve) and the traffic all wants to free flow.

I dunno. Maybe I just haven't experienced the right ones, but my experience is that the most pedestrian friendly urban spaces have mostly (roughly) straight lines and right angles and lots of natural or man made barriers to free flow of cars to prevent them from going too fast. I don't know how you can square that circle.

I think there are two problems with this in practice:

1) In the end those people will leave anyways once it's obvious the ship is sinking, so I think you wind up with a double whammy of attrition.

2) Mass layoffs don't usually allow for a particularly good perspective on who is a high preformer because it's hard to vet decisions on that scale. Also this assumes that performance is the primary axis, and not cost or tenure. You will likely lose high performers along with low and medium in a top down layoff.

Fwiw there is a more normalized practice that resembles this and is, afaik, not a massive hr risk: openly offering a voluntary severance with defined benefits.

Obviously it's not a great signal to those who don't take it about the health of the company, and you might lose a bunch of people you'd rather not, but I think allowing some level of self-selection is good when it's possible.

> you'll eventually miss out on a movie you'd really enjoy.

You will either way. Attention and time are finite, media is effectively not. There's no inbox zero for movies.

A lot of walking would be eliminated too if you actually completely got rid of perpendicular intersections. You kind of need cars to stop sometimes to make it possible for people not in vehicles to get through safely.

I think this is a thing where "how did people used to dispose of clothes" is one of many tips of a much bigger "the rise of the atomic family reduced our interconnectedness and our ability to share resources" iceberg.

People talk about using hand-me-downs but it's become a lot less common to have enough people in your life to get or give things to, outside more formal channels like thrift stores that will only accept certain kinds and qualities of goods (for good reasons).

If I had a kid right now I wouldn't really have anyone in my life who could give me outgrown clothes, nor would I have anyone to give them to. My life just isn't built that way and I don't think that's uncommon.