Maybe I'm just too American to understand, but it still baffles me that WhatsApp is used for business purposes. It makes a lot more sense for regular personal messaging, but it seems incredibly unprofessional to me. I would think it bizarre and a bit invasive if my boss tried to text or iMessage me. Are they at least using different accounts for work messaging?
Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...
Alot of people use iMessage or WhatsApp for out of band messaging.
The global usage is nuts. All of my Indian friends live on WhatsApp even if they are iPhone users. When I was in Portugal and Spain recently it’s literally the way businesses work.
Plus, you’re out of your mind for putting Teams on a personal device.
At this point, I'd assume those hiring managers are also being forced to use AI in their jobs (or pretend, at least) and probably wouldn't read too much into it if it's not a substantial portion of their resume. I do feel the same way, though.
That’s correct. I’m a Visa holder. I have the right to free speech, but I don’t have the right to be in the USA. And when I’m outside of the USA, the government really doesn’t care about my freedom of speech one way or the other.
I applied for a visa and crossed borders enough times to remember this: visas can be refused and revoked for any reason at all. And a border guard is within rights to deny you entry for any reason whatsoever.
Understanding these things made my life much easier.
The US Constitution limits the legislature's ability to pass laws restricting speech. The Executive revoking a noncitizen's student visa does not breach that Constitutional protection.
Have you run into any serious complications doing that? I'm a bit worried that I've used my google account for so long and for many things that I might accidentally lock myself out of something important without it.
I migrated away from my main email, it wasn't a Google mail but it was on the providers domain.
First I signed up with Proton Mail and added my own domain, they fit the bill for me, YMMV.
Then I did a search in my password manager and went through those accounts.
Then I just let the old account sit there for a year. Each time I got an email from something I cared about I'd log in and change mail.
It's been a year now, and I'm about to terminate the old account. All I get there now is occasional spam.
I really dreaded this, but all in all quite painless. And next time it should be easier since I now own the email domain.
edit: Forgot to mention I use Thunderbird, so old email I archived to local folders. That's part if why I ended with Proton, their IMAP bridge allows me to keep using Thunderbird.
I started doing this a while ago, but made the mistake of buying a .io domain. With the future of that domain uncertain, I’ve been rolling that back, not back to Gmail, but to the underlying Proton account for the moment.
I’ve also had some bad experiences with rates being raised on domains. That still ends up feeling like a risk to me, as the problem of domain squatters has not been solved, and the “solution” being employed seems to be continued rate hikes and exorbitant pricing for “premium” domains. It makes buying a domain for email not seem worth it… or at least not without its own long-term risks.
My current project has been trying to reduce my footprint, by deleting old and unused accounts, so any future migrations will be easier. I’ve found with many sites, this is easier said than done. For example, I deleted my Venmo account at least 2 months ago, yet I just got an email from them yesterday about reviewing privacy settings. Did they delete my account? They sure didn’t delete all my data if I continue to get emails. I’m betting they just set a ‘delete’ flag in the database. The lack of accountability and transparency on these things is really bad.
> My current project has been trying to reduce my footprint, by deleting old and unused accounts
I've actually split the accounts. I have a Gmail which I use for "throwaway" accounts, like shopping sites where I don't care if I lose access. But it's probably better to exercise some account hygiene and do some spring cleaning every now and then.
I exported all my email with Google Takeout, and Claude Code was able to write me a threaded email viewer local web app with basic search (chained ripgrep) in about 10 minutes, for any time I need to search archived emails.
One thing I've not seen mentioned when people talk about moving to an owned domain is what happens when you don't own it anymore?
There are a million services that assume that if you have access to the email content you are the account holder. Google claims they don't recycle email addresses, but if you lose your domain, the next owner has access to all emails from that point forward.
If something happens and you're unable to renew your domain, are your next of kin out of luck?
> If something happens and you're unable to renew your domain, are your next of kin out of luck?
I'd say "don't do that". I had a friend pass which I knew had a custom domain for email, I told the relatives they had to be on the ball regarding renewal.
At least my registrar will keep sending invoices for a few months without letting go cough cough, so should be enough time to get the certificate of probate. With that the heirs should be able to get the invoice so they can pay.
Nothing. To the contrary things work BETTER outside the google eco system. The way to do it is incrementally. You don't just yolo delete you Gmail day 1. I still have mine, it's just getting almost no traffic today. Start by moving to an alternative email provider. I use proton. Buy a domain so that you can move providers easily in the future and use catch all email. Do a Google takeout and store the backup somewhere safe (I just use two hard drives sitting and home, replicated). Move the thing that you need day to day somewhere else. You can pay for someone to host it for you or self host. I'm self hosting immich for my Google photos replacement. I'm using proton calendar and email for Gmail service replacements. I was already using signal for most communications, but do that. I moved to graphene to get off of android and there are some sharp edges there if you want off Google play. I had to give up Android auto and gps tends to work worse (graphene does support android auto but I didnt like the tradeoffs). Nothing dealbreaking but can be annoying.
For general security, I also use a yubikey for all services that support it, froze credit with all agencies, and added phone support passwords to all my financial institutions.
> I just use two hard drives sitting and home, replicated
The failure modes of that are fire/natural disaster, and thieves. Do that, but also have a geographically redundant backup scheme. Either encrypted eg Backblaze or a relatives house in another state.
Damn that’s wild to me, because Gmail absolutely refuses to send things to spam despite me incessantly marking them as spam.
I honestly assumed that everyone had a rotten time with Gmail spam filtering but I guess it’s just a me problem. I suppose that means I’m up for an interesting time dealing with it as I move to a custom domain somewhere else.
Anyone have any recommendations for providers that have exceptionally good spam filtering? Hell I’d even just settle for ones that honor “mark as spam,” because Gmail absolutely does not.
Interesting, I have used Fastmail for probably a decade plus at this point, and whether it's my obsessive rating of false negatives and positives, it is amazingly rare that I get spam slip into my inbox (maybe one message a week from ~100/day received, while my spam folder gets about 10/day).
I, too, mark all positives and negatives obsessively, but still get the same obvious spam in my inbox too often for my liking. Still, though, I love Fastmail.
I've run into one government website that required email addresses to come from gmail.com, outlook.com, or another common domain, and several websites that won't let you change your email address once registered. It also makes it really confusing if someone needs to share Google Docs with you. So I've moved as much as I can off of Google, but some stuff will linger forever.
I've run into this, too, and found it hilarious because I remember when some sites wouldn't allow you to sign up with hotmail, gmail or other free email provider (over 20 years ago).
Personally, I deleted everything I could but kept the Gmail account for a couple of years with a forward to my new account, and after that, I also deleted it. Google Takeout is a very useful way to quickly create a backup of everything Google.
Company is now telling media this is intended behavior and users knew these files were public / shared the URLs themselves. We need to get some media with wider scope to challenge that.
Right? On what planet does someone think that if they share a doc in a private 1on1 chat on Fiverr, that means the doc is going to be indexed by google. Shameless.
Personally, this is the funniest one to me. It turns out Fiverr uses cloudinary for their internal documents as well. (Note: this one is not confidential and is public information)
Absolutely worthless pieces of paper. We had the ISO 270001 and the physical security "walk tour" or whatever it's called; I could've outsourced that to a bunch of preschoolers walking around the offices and data center rooms and would've gotten the same result. The only _actually_ working way to protect your org is to continuously attack your own systems and see what part of it breaks or leaks data.
I almost solely use HN on my iPhone browser. It works very well and the scaling is well implemented, although it is a little too easy to accidentally fat finger and vote/flag something without realizing it. I actually find the desktop site (on my laptop) to be a bit hard to use due to its narrowness and small font size, but I'm not sure how universal that is.
The kids are smarter than most people give them credit for. They see their future being destroyed in real time, and AI is only accelerating it and largely being celebrated/promoted/used by the same people currently destroying their future. To them, there are few benefits beyond being able to cheat on their homework, and an enormous amount of downsides.
I think it's only a matter of time before we see some more serious, organized opposition to AI (and perhaps even the internet and other technologies) by these young people.
For some kids, they see their parents get themselves in a mountain of college debt, work for 50 years and struggle to afford necessities, and decide maybe trying to be a streamer/tiktokker is worth a gamble and could set them up for life instead.
Makes sense. I think it’s hard to argue against someone that uses the platform and others as an example of entrepreneurial pursuits. Not “all social media is bad” when to use different lens types.
It's the modern day "I'm going to be a hollywood actor." Every one of my kid's friends has said at some point they were going to grow up to be a famous YouTube or TikTok streamer. The vast majority are not serious, and of those who are serious, the vast majority won't make it.
You might be surprised by how many of them are
aware of the harms of social media, while acknowledging that it’s impossible not to engage with it. It’s not their fault we built the toxic slot machine world for them that we have. And besides, I’m pretty sure my boomer parents spend about as much time scrolling slop on Facebook as kids do on TikTok.
Totally right! The folks who were very recently telling us we were all going to be trading NFTs in the metaverse are the clear eyed optimists not motivated by anything but rational consideration for the truth.
It seems like you get personally offended by people using their critical reasoning abilities.
I know a folk who did a PhD in the area, and work at one of those frontier labs as a researcher, and privately he is as sceptical as the most "stubborn" HN denizen you mention.
Unbounded enthusiasm for AI without any reservations is something that can only be born out of minds utterly deprived of imagination and creativity.
Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...
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