TechTakes @awful.systems BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems 2 wk. ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th November 2024

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.

I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output of format-patch into the web client but, first, I am lazy and don't wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so that git am doesn't eat it without cleanup.

Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.
- huh, I just switched to Tuta and that’s a very good point — there isn’t even a command line mail client, much less an IMAP bridge. the official word from a couple years ago is “write it yourself but we don’t support automated email” which is several kinds of wrong
  
  so far I’m not hating Tuta but it’s definitely much jankier than Proton. I’m kinda surprised I’ve heard good things about Tuta’a UI compared with Proton — it’s faster, but functionality so far varies from somewhat barebones to mildly broken
  
  no regrets on the switch on my end so far though, but this might come to bite me at some point. I wonder if a dedicated transactional mail provider could alleviate some of the pain? I can DM you a recommendation for a good one if that seems like it’d be handy
  
  Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured it'd be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.
  
  But honestly, I feel like there just isn't a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Proton's bridge was a pain to get running properly with send-email because for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isn't even private. It's mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).
  
  Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization I'm starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.
  
  that’s absolutely valid, and I’ve come to effectively the same conclusion: good encrypted email is effectively a different protocol (one which, as of now, is proton-to-proton and tuta-to-tuta only) and should be treated as one. daily unencrypted email is a legacy protocol that can effectively be handled client-side as a different account.
  
  encrypted mail should be federated, possibly with something like activitypub (though I don’t have a good solution for attachments), but every time I float this I get a lot of very angry feedback about how I shouldn’t propose a new email standard without solving spam first, whatever solving spam means. some of the people giving feedback then float solutions that are basically warmed-over hashcash and then I stop listening.
  
  the difference between modern webmail and what activitypub already does is very thin — a lot of it is intent, UI (email’s focused on long messages and potentially long threads), and features like attachments going from best-effort priority to crucial. there’s absolutely room in the world for better email — I just believe that internally, it’ll look closer to e2e ActivityPub with something like Soatok’s federated keyserver concept on top, rather than the shitty half baked shit we do now to make PGP work with email

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