I deleted my 11yr high karma account on 1st July. I had another before that which was a couple of years or so old.

I did it in protest but as an interesting side effect, my mental health has improved slightly. Guess actively engaging with toxicity does have an effect.

Be nice if the browser version auto loaded images like most apps do.

Out for me too, but the life360 app working fine. Anyone reported it yet?

As long as you set up SPF and DKIM records on your mailserver, you’ll never get marked as spam.

Sorry - that’s factually incorrect. If your IP is on a residential block, you’ll be downscored. If you’re on a dynamic IP, same again, but weighted even more harshly, by pretty much every antispam service. In addition, every commercial service is very secretive about what methods they use, for good reason, so you cannot claim with any accuracy that “you just need to do this $thing to get read”. (Although I do agree the original post is not well researched, knowledgeable nor particularly useful to anyone)

SPF and DKIM are essential to getting your email out, but it’s not the only thing, and sometimes no matter what you do do, your hit rate is going to be low.

Source: Me. Been running mail servers privately and commercially for over twenty years. Before then, I ran fidonet and netmail services through the 90s and into the tail end of the 80s. There’s many things I know bugger all about, but email is not one of them. (And if anyone’s interested what I do for personal email now - I use gmail, because it works and maintaining it is somebody else’s problem)

AI’s been in use in commercial anti-spam for quite a while now - and on the flip side is also being used by the spam senders. Just another front on the unending war.

But spam (and phishing, and all malware) happens because humans get fooled by it. No reason to think AI will be any smarter.

Nice quote - but I don’t think it does hold up as truly as it did in the 80s. There is an unimaginable wealth of systems and design tools available now that were not around then. Even something take for granted like a gui schema designer - hell, even SQL itself wouldn’t be around until almost a decade later, and that was partly designed to simplify database queries. Every step like that has simplified what we do today. Debugging tools are light years ahead of when I was writing C in the early 90s. Debugging then was pretty much “try and compile it and then fix the errors”. Now there’s linters, memory profilers, automatic pipelines and all the rest of that. Much of that is offset by the fact we do far more complicated things than we did, and that those very tools mean there’s a lot more to learn and master beyond the mere language.

I do concede and agree with your last paragraph. Design is more important than implementation, and elegance of code and concept is a timeless beauty. One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that thinking about coding is often far more productive than actually coding, and too many times I’ve been a busy fool, re-writing and starting over many times because I later found out a better way.

I disagree completely.

Great! It would be a boring world if we all thought alike.

Programming is inherently difficult,

That’s where we differ. I don’t think it is - and I’m not saying that because I think I’m good, it’s because programming is just a different way of thinking - that’s why there’s books like “Zen and the art of computer programming” and “The Tao of programming”. (I haven’t read “No Silver Bullet” but I’ll keep an eye open. I was actually writing code back in 1986 so it might be interesting to compare because I think programming has changed a huge amount in that time)

Not all programming is easy, just as not all of it is hard. The range of this subject is massive, and blanket statements, pro or anti, just don’t cut it when you dig into it.

I’ve heard that a lot, but I think it’s an outdated view.

Programming should be easy, or at least easier. That’s a view shared by everyone who writes and contributes to documentation on all languages and also those who develop the languages as well. (With varying success).

Every damned one of us was a shit coder when we started, that’s part of the process - not least amongst us who are self taught. Yet some go on to do great things and be wonderful coders (including yourself, no doubt).

You had a bad experience, fair enough, but it’s a big brush to tar everyone with. I think everyone should be a programmer. If nothing else it teaches them a little how software actually works and that’s a good thing.

Run the cables more neatly.

It’s hard to get noticed on Reddit (unless you make a typo!)

Unless you’re the first to post on a new topic that goes on to be popular, then no matter what you say you get read and gain karma. If you comment on something a few hours old, nobody ever reads it.

You’re one voice in a city. Whereas here, we’re a village. Less anonymous, friendlier, easier to get talking to your neighbour.

Same! HA is a really interesting thing to get into. I moved to it from Domoticz, which is easy to get going but you hit some hard limits after a while.

That’s an interesting idea - have a special tier on one or more cloud providers paid for out of that source, or even a flat payment to any server provider based on number of users/activity or something like that?

Totally agree. Really do not want this to become too popular, because then you get bots, fraud, fake news, trolls and shitposting. Being too small to interest those guys is a good thing.

I think you’re missing that point.

If you’re paying to provide a free server, and along comes another server owner who wants to peer with you. Only they’re charging their users for the same thing you’re giving away for free. Why wouldn’t you be a little bit miffed that they want to take your freely-given service and sell it to their users - because that’s what would be happening in that situation.

Monetising something that’s intended to be free is very, very difficult. Not impossible (see open source software and the businesses that grow around that), but it’s a lot harder when it’s a service.

There’s lots of ways. I’ve used an Aqara zigbee temp/humidity sensor before which worked fine, just needed protection from rain.

Now I’m using a onewire dallas sensors, along with quiet a few others around the house. They work fine too.

About a week since i read or posted on Reddit.

Reading Christian’s rebuttal was genuinely shocking to me and I decided I didn’t want to continue supporting Reddit’s management by being associated with it.

I demodded myself (sole moderator of a 13 year old sub, plus another two smaller ones), deleted all my many thousands of posts and comments and stopped using it.

I’m planning on deleting my 11 year user with a lot of karma on the 1st to join the protest then (I need to revisit to check that’s still happening)