ares
Commander, USN (ret). Former Googler. Computer programmer.
User ID: 2527
Hey, what do you know, I just migrated off Gmail last week, and would love to talk about my experience. I'm now using ProtonMail (https://proton.me/mail) with a Proton Unlimited subscription, and have my own domains through Cloudflare. Here's what I did:
Step 1: Create a free-tier Cloudflare account and transfer/buy a domain or three. I have had (mylastname).tech for a while, which makes my email address firstname@lastname.tech, and I like that. But if you want to buy a .vodka or .christmas domain for your primary email, go for it. I was using Gmail and Google Domains, but with Google Domains shut down I had to migrate, and ultimately Gmail doesn't play nicely with Cloudflare so I needed a new email solution. Domains will generally cost $10/year.
Step 2: Create a Proton account and buy at least Mail Plus so you can add your custom domain. You can do parts of this with a free account, but I decided it was worth paying a little for the extra features, especially the ability to send mail from my domains.
Step 3: Proton has a wizard that guides you through setting everything up to receive email from your domain, and a help center article with pictures specifically for Cloudflare. The steps include setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC so your emails don't get sent to spam, and enabling the catchall address so that you get all emails sent to your domain.
Step 3a (optional): You can also configure Cloudflare to receive your emails and forward them to your proton mail address. This gives you Cloudflare's protection and tracking. This is what I did, and this is what you'd do at the Proton free tier.
Step 4: You may experience some pain, because you get to change your email address on all your accounts to point to your new domain. I had already done this a while ago. The nice part about this step is that you can create a new email address for every place you interact with. I use amazon@mydomain.tech for Amazon, themotte@mydomain.tech for here, and linkedin2@mydomain.tech because I was starting to get spam at my old linkedin address and it's easy to set a rule to autodelete them now. But it's not actually that painful: you can change a few of your main accounts and worry about the rest later, because...
Step 5: Forward your Gmail to your ProtonMail. I did this in the Gmail settings, but you can also use ProtonMail's EasySwitch tool to do it for you.
Step 5a (optional): Set up a tag in ProtonMail for emails forwarded from Gmail, then rule to automatically set it. Any time you get an email that's not actually from Google the company telling you about your Google account, that's a reminder for you to update whatever account it is. Or, as I'm discovering, a reminder to unsubscribe because why was I actually subscribed to this shit in the first place?
And that's pretty much all I needed to do. I'm creating occasional filters, folders, and tags to sort things how I want, but it's been a very straightforward and easy process. And now I'm not tied to ANYONE. If Cloudflare and ProtonMail go out of business or decide to blacklist me, I can move my domain to another registrar and pick a different webmail host, and my online accounts will remain mine.
Edit to add additional thoughts: I continue to use a KeePass database for password management, and since it's encrypted at rest I am comfortable using Google Drive to backup and sync it. I'm not planning to switch to Proton's password manager since I like the open source option. I haven't moved my calendar yet, and that might involve moving my wife over to Proton since we share calendar items all the time. I may never do that. For now it's easy enough to just open the Google calendar when I want to see my schedule.
ares
6mo ago
Thanks for sharing! So you're running a local version of your nitter and miniflux on your home PC or hosted somewhere, then connecting to that when you're browsing from mobile?
ares
7mo ago
I also highly recommend this book. It's hilarious and fascinating.
You should also pretend that the movie doesn't exist.
ares
7mo ago
Not every woman in Hollywood needs to shapely and big breasted.
No, but damn I miss the days when there were more of them in our media.
ares
7mo ago
Kulak, I love your stuff, but you're being a whiny bitch. Correctness is important. Quit making excuses. Proper grammar is a gift from the writer to the reader that makes the writing easier to understand.
Pay $20 for Claude or GPT-4, or get an open source one (WizardLM-2 came out today), and feed your posts through it tuned for copy editing. Not hard.
ares
7mo ago
Hence, it's good advice to "learn not to get caught". I don't parents think telling High Schoolers not to do highly inappropriate stuff has a history of being effective.
ares
7mo ago
a teacher left Jennifer Crumbley a voicemail saying that her son had been looking at bullets on his phone in class. “Lol I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,” she wrote to her son in a text.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Looking up ammunition on your cell phone is completely normal behavior, and I do so occasionally to keep an eye on prices. If I was somehow back in school, where administrators and teachers are stupid and afraid of all things firearm related, then the correct advice is absolutely "learn not to get caught". Why is everyone under the impression that this text message is damning?
ares
7mo ago
I'm here from the Quality Contributions thread to say that the style of teaching you're thinking of is called "Direct Instruction". It's such a generic name for the specific method that it's near-impossible to remember, but NIFDI sounds like "nifty" and might do a better job sticking in your brain. It also doesn't help that Google deprioritizes references to it in search results since "authoritative" sources on teaching are generally the same ones who hate Direct Instruction.
ares
9mo ago
If we're on the topic of carbon monoxide detectors, note that the alarms will trigger when you have deadly levels, but they generally won't go off for slow leaks. I had a coworker whose family was getting headaches, waking up tired, everyone just generally feeling cruddy. Many tests and doctors later, no answers, but doctor #3 mentioned carbon monoxide and my coworker went out to buy one with a readout. It was a carbon monoxide leak, at some fraction of the level that the alarms would go off for. He got his furnace fixed and the headaches went away.
That was enough to convince me to add one of the plug-in CO detectors with a display to my house. CO generally spreads evenly through the air, so don't worry about placing it floor level or bed height or whatever. I found a plug that we never used but was in eyeshot occasionally, and there it has sat for many years.
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9mo ago
Could you point me to some freely available smart contracts that would do this? Because right now I'm pretty confident that almost nobody is doing this.
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9mo ago
I do not believe there is broad support for the effects of significantly limiting factory farming: less meat available and far higher prices.
Most Americans aren't political, don't care about broader issues, and just want to hang out with their friends and "watch the game". They care about social signaling, so they'll say they're against factory farming when that seems like what they're supposed to say. I would not count on them to maintain that stance once the effects of significantly limiting factory farming become apparent.
ares
9mo ago
People will certainly distinguish between the three in some ways. I agree with @FarNearEverywhere that it's far from certain whether "blasting" imagery of any of them would result in more or less support.
ares
9mo ago
That sounds like regular old depression. There's plenty of info out there about how to deal with depression. For me, getting some sunlight on my skin every morning and working out 4x/week for 30+ minutes does more for my mental health than anything my psychiatrist recommended.
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9mo ago
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9mo ago
Neoreactionary internet denizen Jim has an old post where he coined the term "generational loss of hypocrisy", and I wish it was used more widely. His given example sucks, which is probably why. I'll try to convey some other examples without waging the culture war or consensus building, and feedback is welcome if I fall short:
- As described in your post, where Soviet politicians give lip service to things because they're expected to, and the newer generation of politicians believe them sincerely.
- Jim's example is people expressing shock that a female prison guard would aid the escape of male prisoners she was sleeping with. He claims "everyone knew women were like this". Personally, I find the leap from "women like bad boys" to "women will break their bad boys out of prison" too large, and that's why I'm sad that there isn't a better defense of the concept somewhere.
- Trends of work and play preferences for men and women. Boys and girls play differently (paywall bypass), but after a generation of trying to remove the stigma of boys playing with dolls, Damore got fired for his memo. Set aside the arguments of the actual culture war issues and look at the "generational loss of hypocrisy": The belief that "boys shouldn't play with dolls" is very dated, and its believers are mostly in retirement homes now. While the Baby Boomers will (broadly) approve of letting children play with whatever toy they want, they also (broadly) believe that there are gendered preferences, and going against those is abnormal. They just don't say that last part out loud. By the time we're to Generation X, there's significant support for equity as defined by the social justice movement, and expressing the unsaid beliefs of the Baby Boomers creates a hostile work environment to the point where you will be fired.
- Some climate change scientists and activists present short timelines for catastrophic destruction. There's a history of extreme claims from environmentalists since, for example, Earth getting destroyed after whales go extinct gets more donations and support than statistics, charts, and threats of "loss of biodiversity" that most people just won't internalize. People in power pay climate change lip service and make a donation, but generally don't behave as if the world actually is going to suffer these catastrophic effects any time soon. Buying houses at sea-level is an example of this hypocrisy. Greta Thunberg took the proclamations at face value and is upset that people in power aren't backing up their talk with action. Criticisms of AOC's Green New Deal include plenty in the category of "You're taking climate change too seriously": if the more catastrophic predictions are correct then it would make sense to take significant economic loss now in order to prevent it.
- Police/prison reform. Though I'm not very knowledgeable on the history of these movements, I think a lot of the older generation knows that some people are just anti-social criminals who shouldn't be free (related study), but the newer members of the movements has been pushing for the actual abolition of prisons and police.
ares
10mo ago
That's a simple A or AAAA DNS record to fix. I wonder if that's a Substack problem or a Scott problem.
ares
10mo ago
We had a similar issue with a neighbor playing loud music, which we resolved thanks to a bit of luck. This won't map perfectly onto your situation but may give you some ideas.
First we texted, and we also walked over a few times, asking them politely. We suspected the neighbors were inconsiderate but we started with polite and direct confrontation anyways. After that didn't work for a few weeks/months, we'd text once asking them to turn it down and call the police with a noise complaint when they didn't. This worked out great, because the neighbors (being inconsiderate assholes) had some friends over and decided to start revving their motorcycles in the driveway very loudly at the exact same time the police came by because of the noise complaint. That ended up getting them a court date, which we learned about after they complained to us about it.
Whatever happened in court, they no longer blast their music late at night.
ares
10mo ago
One of the common failure modes of liberalism is to assume that being good means being nice when the truth is that sometimes the best and most compassionate thing you can do for someone is to tell them "Get your fucking shit together dude"
This calls to mind "The only Theodore Dalrymple article anyone reads", as Scott Alexander described it. It starts:
Not long ago I asked a patient of mine how he would describe his own character. He paused for a moment, as if savoring a delicious morsel.
"I take people as they come," he replied in due course. "I'm very nonjudgmental."
As his two roommates had recently decamped, stealing his prize possessions and leaving him with ruinous debts to pay, his neutrality toward human character seemed not generous but stupid, a kind of prophylactic against learning from experience. Yet nonjudgmentalism has become so universally accepted as the highest, indeed the only, virtue that he spoke of his own character as if pinning a medal for exceptional merit on his own chest.
ares
1yr ago
It sure does stick with you. I haven't had to deal with that for over a decade but I still have strong feelings whenever I think about it.
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1yr ago
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1yr ago
I often wonder whether neurotypicals can read minds, since they so often as though they can.
Your post reminds me of captchas where the user is presented a single picture, divided into squares, and asked to identify all squares with a bicycle (or whatever) in them. Sometimes there are perhaps a few pixels that are from the bicycle on the edge of one of the squares. Does that count or not? What if the pixel in the square is only partly colored by the bicycle, and the other half of its color comes from background? What about reflections? I used to get a bit stressed trying to answer correctly based on my understanding of what "correct" was. That is wrong. You are not being asked to identify all squares with a bicycle in them. You're being asked to reproduce how an average person would respond to this task, given the prompt "identify all squares with a bicycle in them". An average person doesn't think about reflections, or subpixels, or any of that. And so I am no longer stressed about captchas.
It's not reading minds exactly, but it is a combination of "not overthinking" and "enough shared culture so that they all understand those critical, unstated assumptions".
ares
1yr ago
Lobotomy is a legitimate therapeutic intervention and is still used daily all over the world to treat patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy.
Are you thinking of electroshock therapy?
ares
1yr ago
You could do some military jobs!
- Leave Papers, Please: Reviewing and processing leave forms (penalties for approving too many, or approving ones with errors)
- Sweeping the same 50 square feet for an hour, making sure you look busy the whole time even though you've finished after 10 minutes.
- Navigating a warship at night through a busy shipping lane, trying to keep your closest point of approach (CPA) greater than 2000 yards for every ship out there so you don't have to wake the Captain, whose standing orders require you to tell him if you're ever going to have a CPA under that.
- Polishing your dress shoes
- Mess crank: like Cooking Mama, but you have to cook 10x the quantity, some of the ingredients are rotten, and you can't tell the difference between tablespoons and teaspoons.
- Leverage an LLM to determine how effective your speech is after telling your division not to get any DUIs over a holiday weekend. Additional levels could be to convince them not to buy a Dodge Charger at 26% APY, and not to send half your paycheck to the Filipino prostitute you met at the last port call.
ares
1yr ago
(Points if you can guess roughly how far into the linked NPR article you can get until the author writes the sentence "That really started to change in 2020, when police officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.")
Goddamnit I thought you were kidding. That really is in the article. So zero points for me, I guess.
Nice! This seems pretty lightweight. I wonder if this would work on the free tier of some cloud hosting providers...
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