I dunno. Have you used Elm? I hadn’t until recently, but after getting past the learning curve, I honestly can’t recommend any more safe/painless framework for a web FE. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but to me this is a feature, again: its surface area is thin enough that there haven’t been any security issues in the same code for half a decade, and code from that long ago still works today.
I maintain a React app on the side, and a few other projects, and would still recommend it just due to developer availability, but there’s a saying among some of the Elm folks I know: “Good React code in 2025 looks like good Elm code from 2015.”
(To be fair: teams, and devs new to FP [myself included] will create complexity monstrosities in any paradigm, but Elm’s strong FP setup means huge subsets of those monstrosities won’t ever compile, and usually offer a clearer path for later cleanup.)
Given that both grep and find are weird/inconsistent between BSD/GNU versions, and I typically use them piped together for the same things anyway, I’ve found that ripgrep is a nice/faster/universal alternative that is pretty unproblematic to install in whatever environment I want: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
For your second, I think you don’t understand why people buy/use iPads. First off, I don’t really know anyone who uses an iPad mini for anything productive (other than as a test device). A 7-9” screen is just not useful compared to a 13” iPad for things like Sidecar or reading sheet music in live performances. The 7-9” screen being an unfolded phone doesn’t change this.
A folding iPhone could eat the iPad mini, but that’s never been a cash cow for Apple or something power users cared about - it’s more of an “iPod touch” for kids. (And frankly, the Switch 2 kind of obsoletes it.) The thing that would eat 13” iPads’ lunch is something more like Apple Vision.
Weirdly enough, the iPad Mini is probably the iPad most used for work. The size & weight are perfect for many scenarios. Pilots, warehouses, and field work of all sorts.
For me personally, it's my travel machine. I've done all sorts of things with it on the road. From SSH to using Photoshop to make some last minute edits. It (barely) fits in my pockets so I don't even need a bag for it. Probably my favorite machine ever at least in terms of form factor.
Screen size does seem to be a personal choice. For me, I've always liked small screens for portability. I'm the weirdo who actually got work done on the first gen Asus EEE PC and didn't mind it. But I can understand that wouldn't be for everyone.
The iPad Mini form factor with cell connectivity is pretty great when you're travelling light.
My normal international travel load-out is a backup smart phone + an 8" LTE tablet with eSIM + bluetooth keyboard. It's about as minimal as I can get while still having a real keyboard and functional screen size to handle travel logistics.
Pilots use iPads for all of the charts and checklists. Even having two iPads (one as a backup) is much lighter and thinner (and easier to update) than the paper copies it replaces.
Web3 and blockchain are not the only form of decentralization. Email is a decentralized protocol that has stood the test of time.
The bigger problem is having mega-entities like Google, Meta, and Amazon dominate the web. Instead of crypto, there should have been a focus on allowing mid-size players to have more power.
For anyone about to disagree with this; you've been lied to.
Many thousands of admins are currently operating independent email servers with zero problem, and have been for decades. Mine is going on 15 years. In practice, you have to actually try pretty hard to misbehave enough for Google and Microsoft to notice and block you. For the vast majority of independent servers, we have no problems at all routing to gmail or outlook.
Reports of the death of decentralized email have been greatly exaggerated. Independent mail servers are alive and well to this day, just as they always have been and (probably) always will.
> In practice, you have to actually try pretty hard to misbehave enough for Google and Microsoft to notice and block you.
As far as I can tell, the "misbehavior" that got me blocked by Microsoft was being hosted on Linode... where I'd been for around ten years at that time, all on the same IP address. Tiny server, had never emitted a single even slightly spammy message, all the demanded technical measures in place, including the stupid ones.
Because of the huge number of people stupid enough to receive their email through Microsoft, I had to spend a bunch of time "appealing". That's centralization.
On edit: Oh, and the random yahoos out there running freelance blocklists can do a lot of damage to you, too, by causing smaller operators to reject your mail.
They probably threw a fat CIDR block in their IP blacklist to fight off a spam campaign, and your IP was caught in the dragnet. This is how the big companies do it. They’ll evaluate for risk of false positives and as long as that stays below a threshold, they proceed.
> Because of the huge number of people stupid enough to receive their email through Microsoft...
Can you please elaborate on this? I use Outlook (@outlook.com) for my personal email management, but would definitely switch if there is a better alternative.
Microsoft will cut off your account if any of its abuse detection heuristics misfire. You will probably not get it back, ever, period. And, by the way, I don't remember if it was for email or storage or both, but Microsoft has admitted to going so far as trying to brute-force the passwords on encrypted ZIP files to run those heuristics.
Microsoft will (intentionally) lose your incoming mail if, say, it comes from the wrong AS. You have no control over most of that, and you will not be told about it.
Microsoft may or may not be data mining the actual content of your email. Possibly also after trying to break your encryption.
Since you not only use Microsoft to process mail, but have also inexplicably decided to use Microsoft's domain name for your address, you'll find it difficult to ever move away from Microsoft. If your account gets deleted without warning, you'll be permanently screwed. If Microsoft, say, decides to go out of the email business in 10 years, or start charging some ridiculous fee, you'll probably at least get some notice, so you'll only have to scramble to change your address before the hammer falls.
AND you're contributing to the centralization of the whole damned Internet.
The better alternative is to self-host. Even though you'll then constantly have to worry about your outgoing mail getting dropped, at least you'll be in a position to notice if that happens.
If for some reason you can't handle that, then at least register your own domain and host it with a smaller provider that gives you some guarantees. You will, of course, have to actually pay a small to moderate fee for the reliability.
Fantastic breakdown -- very much appreciated. I don't mind creating a new email address if needed, even though I've had this one for over a decade. What you mentioned are very real risks that would be catastrophic should they actually come to fruition.
I'm taking some networking courses online which will hopefully help in terms of being more tech literate and being able to do this.
Regardless, I'm definitely going to start the transition. I also use their cloud storage and have very important documents in there.
I had my mail hosted with my managed server for 10 years, then they started charging ridiculous amounts of money for SSL certs, so I moved all websites to a self-managed 10 times cheaper yet more performant webservers. Then they wanted to force Microsoft 365 on me and I migrated the mailserver in a similar fashion.
I use mailcow and did the migration over a weekend. It took a few hours after to get all the spam stuff right (SPF, DKIM etc), but now it works flawlessly since 3 years and I use maybe a few hours per year to run updates.
Who's your host? My primary VPS host and my home connection both block the only port I'm supposed to use for mail.
(A curiosity to me, as someone trained on HTTPS, which doesn't really care what port you're coming from. I wish there was just mail-over-HTTPS, since port 443 can't be blocked by a reasonable host.)
A lot of VPS hosts will unblock the port for you on request. I think that is better than open by default as that attracts spammers and gives IPs a bad reputation for future users.
Yeah... I think that one of the biggest "gotchas" with the web3 crowd is misunderstanding different levels of decentralization. Is it architectural decentralization? Institutional decentralization? Geographical decentralization? etc
Can you really say that email is a decentralised protocol that has stood the test of time? It’s more centralised than the web that you complain is dominated by Google, Meta, and Amazon. What proportion of mail isn’t sent or received by Google or Microsoft?
Even if there are 1 million independent email servers, if Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple send, receive, or pass along 98-99% of emails, there's still a fair bit of centralization in the network which should be acknowledged, though this is admittedly not the same as the protocol being inherently centralized.
How do you messure this? Every university in my country has thousands of mail accounts that are constantly used and having worked at an university IT department I have never heard of any numbers collection coming by to ask us how many mails our users sent to each other.
I wouldn't be surprised if that percentage was made up by the big ones to give you the feeling that self hosting mailservers is useless.
You're probably right, I hadn't considered the volume of mail being sent within institutions that might host their own mailservers, so maybe we should say more than like 50-60%.
Is it still a good example of federation though if a vast majority (99%?) of mails between such institutions or outside of orgs large enough to have a campus, tend to go through Microsoft/Google/Apple/Amazon?
But those thousands and thousands of independent email servers mostly just send email to and receive email from Google and Microsoft. And even if they didn’t, compared with the total volume of email, they basically round to zero.
Quick search reveals Gmail and Outlook add up to about 62% of email accounts worldwide. That's a lot, but certainly not enough to make other providers a rounding error.
The average person in the capitalist west is so ridiculously wealthy compared people that lived pre Industrial Revolution, or in any communist or socialist country.
The US is the only capitalist country in the west, and our life expectancy is decreasing. Is paper wealth worth a short, miserable life where you work all the time?
Moreover, most of the rest of the world’s poverty exists so that a few greedy pigs here can be even more wealthy. We have the CIA and the one-party system that controls it to thank for that.
At my company, as developers, we rotate taking support tickets and working directly with customers on the issues our (very capable) support team can’t handle. We and our customers are both very happy with the results.
What you're describing is customer success, which is almost always post-sales. Engineers working with customers post-sales is a great idea. *Pre*-sales is where it gets tricky.
Yeah, this drives value for almost all roles. No need for a separate focus group when you can ask the people who are already using and/or paying for your product.
I remember when I was a kid people would just copy other people’s essays and just reword the sentences. So people who want to cheat will figure out ways to cheat on homework, etc. AI is just the new vehicle.
I think grades should be based 90% on exams, and 10% or less on homework. Homework should be practice not what your grades are based on.
I’m pretty sure it’s not illegal to vape on your couch, and again, there’s also not really a social stigma about it, nor a good way to detect it as compared to cigarettes.
I maintain a React app on the side, and a few other projects, and would still recommend it just due to developer availability, but there’s a saying among some of the Elm folks I know: “Good React code in 2025 looks like good Elm code from 2015.”
(To be fair: teams, and devs new to FP [myself included] will create complexity monstrosities in any paradigm, but Elm’s strong FP setup means huge subsets of those monstrosities won’t ever compile, and usually offer a clearer path for later cleanup.)