Open source doesn't imply no limitations.

Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Even if the case is laughed out of court.

Btw I hope you didn’t forget to pay the Linux license fee to SCO.

¥

"A Spaceman Came Travelling" - Chris de Burgh

I follow the mantra "Inbox <20". Inbox 0 is not flexible enough and freestyle Inbox is not manageable in the long term.

Together with filters, freely reporting as spam/unsubscribing, my Inbox <20 becomes a sort of todo list which I can review and handle whenever needed (this include flight/hotel bookings, getting back to complex emails, etc.).

When I was a prof, I used to get a lot of emails. My system was that every few hours I would go through all new emails in my inbox and archive all of them in the following fashion

- Some emails required a one line immediate response. I did that.

- Some emails required a longer reply. I tagged them (in Thunderbird) as ToDo and archived them.

- Some emails had information I would need at a later meeting. Tagged as TempInfo and archived.

- Most emails were read once and archived.

Now, inbox is zeroed. Next, can attack items in ToDo one by one, and untag them, so the ToDo list is always short. Similarly, as soon as the relevant meeting finished, untag TempInfo emails.

Now, I work somewhere where Slack is used, resulting in an endless deluge of messages that cannot be controlled.

In Slack you can set reminders, add todo and such.

Pretty good, especially with sending delayed messages.

Nothing is surprising once you know the answer. It takes some mental gymnastics to put yourself in someone else's shoes before they discovered it and thus making it less "basic".

Either you got used to their evolved dark patterns or you haven't booked with them recently.

I was also Pro-Ryanair: they allowed to see friends and family across Europe with a student budget.

Now, it's an 8-step booking process where you try to figure out what is actually optional and avoidable and what's included in the advertised fare. Depending on the airport, they threaten to charge you if you don't print your boarding pass beforehand. Depending on the flight, they become pretty aggressive in weighing your carry on, mainly to try to catch you out and make an extra 50 euro.

The company went from no frills budget airline to antagonistic and aggro where literally anything is cranked up to 11 to extract value from you.

I used it once since COVID, last year, didn't seem too bad.

Given the mood in the thread, I do indeed think that I may have a high tolerance for such practices and pay careful attention to fine prints. After all, I had all the training while applying for numerous Schengen and other visas, immigration paperwork. After those, dealing with Ryanair that faces at least some competition and scrutiny is not that bad.

If you're using Firefox, it's a known bug and you can fix it by reverting the bitwarden extension and then wait for the fix.

You call it government intervention, we call it good government.

Vision is not a dictator, it's just having half an idea of where you'd love to be in X years.

It can and probably will move as you age and gain experience.

But if you're thinking you'd love to be your own boss and, as you have that vision, you find something much more interesting, you can still re-assess.

This resonates with me.

Three years ago, I left academia after finishing my PhD in Economics, frustrated by how little real-world impact my hard work seemed to have. I moved into IT, wanting to build things that would be more immediately useful and practical. Still, the dream of using science to create positive change never left me.

I was invited to work with AI at a company that develops software for the public sector. It wasn't the dream (I wouldn't be using my academic expertise) but it felt like a step closer. At least I'd be providing tools to support people who directly affect others' lives. From the start, I told my boss that I hoped someday to offer not just AI tools, but real socioeconomic statistical analysis as a service for the public sector. And while I've been happy working with AI, I've always sought out opportunities on projects that were more data-driven.

Three years later, some clients expressed interest in having our AI chatbot provide real-world socioeconomic data analysis. My boss just gave me a promotion to lead both the AI team and this new socioeconomic data initiative.

I was reflecting the other day on how fortunate I am, my dream "chased me." But it wasn't simply luck. I had always stayed attuned to the opportunities that arose.

That's a good point. I find it very hard to find the optimum balance between flexbility / vision.

Don't let optimum be the enemy of good and enjoy the ride.

My entire professional life/career has been a tension between trying new things/opportunities and trying to be intentional in what/where/when/how I make changes. I'll probably be done in about 10 years so I'll let you know how it worked out then.

You have a wayyy too skewed perception of the general tech person.

I normally get way better and varied recommendations from my philosophy friends, for example. Here it's generally just the usual mainstream sci-fi stuff about tech, space, ai/robots and such.

And forefront of culture is by definition going to be full of known stuff, else it wouldn't be culture-defining if almost nobody knows it.

What would you put in your top 5 "I'm very smart" 30+ yo book list?