I'll never, ever forgive Google for killing the "Basic HTML View" client mode for Gmail.
I’m still mad about Google Reader
Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
801–810 of 865 posts
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please do not call it malware, because it is not. It is just bad software UI.
ok then. Malformed Software. or, malware.
Malicious, not malformed. Malformed would include buggy software, which is not right. Malware intentionally acts against the users will. Buggy software unintentionally acts against the users will.
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your concern is just having access to your emails if someday shit hits the fan and you’re locked out, why no smtp ? Seems easier.
SMTP is to send mail and that's how I send it from my laptop and from my phone. POP3 is to read from a mailbox.
Or imap !
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#804Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "nobody left there with enough courage to stop them" I'd add it's also that there's nobody left to compete with them, either. They own the only desktop browser that matters, and basically the entire concept of the mobile phone itself outside the US (Android), and it seems like 50% or so of the corporate email market, 80% of the consumer email market, a high percentage of the advertising market. I don't think pre-19…
> I'd add it's also that there's nobody left to compete with them, either. Except for the largest and most profitable company in the world, that is.
You mean the one that accepts a $20,000,000,000 check from Google every year to support and further entrench their power?
The one that has a 20% smartphone marketshare worldwide?
The one that has agreed to buy a white-labelled Gemini to help them finally get an AI assistant?
In our HN bubble, where most people are high-income (heck, most of us have enough secondhand iPhones to make sure our parents and grandparents are blue-bubble too) and a lot of us are American it's easy to think this is at least a 2-horse race, if not an outright Apple win. But worldwide, Apple is not an important factor in Google's dominance.
And they only challenge Google in a few ways, none of which strategically threaten them. They enhance Google's dominance in advertising with the Search deal and, whether intentional or just out of cheapness, by making their offerings like iCloud uncompetitive on the free tier. iCloud has had a 5GB total storage cap since it launched 15 years ago, for instance.
Competition would look like them putting momentum behind a Google competitor for search/advertising (including perhaps a homegrown search engine) and for AI, making their mail offering more powerful, adding a serious and compelling business productivity offering (replace Gmail/Calendar/Docs, and no, the thing they announced a few months ago is still a joke).
Of course, I have zero expectation they'll ever do any of that, I'm just pointing out what it would look like if Apple had any intention on competing with Google. Apple sees Google as a customer who pays them for eyeballs, allowing them to outsource the dirty work of privacy invasion that goes into advertising. Google also saves Apple a lot of hard work in building and running web properties and server infra -- work that Apple has proven really bad at time and time again.
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not pretend that fact is anything but a happy accident, though. The only reason AI has been practically scrubbed from their website is to try to make us forget the time they preannounced fantastically brilliant AI capabilities and then delivered less than nothing -- not even fixing Siri, which is the obvious #1 product in the world that needs to be rebuilt on LLMs.
The Newton failing wasn't a happy accident either. They waited until the right opportunity to try again after the dust settled in the industry.
OK, but it's easy to retroactively declare the "late entry" into smartphones as a galaxy-brain move, to let all those suckers at BlackBerry, Microsoft, Handspring, Nokia, etc. beta-test all the ideas and formfactors, then swoop in as soon as they knew what they had developed would torch the whole market - we know the outcome, and that's frankly quite accurate.
But the difference here is, this iPhone was obviously already far along in development in 2005, when the BlackBerry 8700 was shipping.
In this case, due to their own announcement, we all know that Apple had intended to have LLM technology ready to ship in late 2024. We also know from the copious leaks that they eventually made massive, flailing pivots, and did major reactive internal reorgs to try to get back on track. They've had a lot of setbacks which push them later and later, and unlike in 2005 there is a great likelihood that their competitors can use the delay to significant advantage. (A chance. Of course, Google is the only other player in mobile and they seem sure to do mostly boneheaded things, like the subject of this article!)
But anyway, pretend we don't know any of that, pretend WWDC24 never even happened either. If the assertion is "Apple being at least 3 years late to the market for a major tech industry trend is in this case a sign that they are wisely taking notes from the sidelines, and will eventually pounce with a product that blows us all away, iPhone style" -- my reply is, from the outside and from this moment in time, isn't this also how it would look if they were repeatedly fumbling hard on the execution of this idea, with no clear path to shipping and no clear path to having a superior product to show for it?
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#806Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do casual computer users use the word "malware"? I think people only know the term "virus" but when I say "windows is a computer virus" everyone thinks I'm insane.
"Computer virus" is the wrong term, because it (neither Windows nor Gmail) does not spread and replicate itself through technical means. Computer viruses are a subset of malware, and it is more correct to say the general term in this case.
Thanks captain pedantic
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.
>use any number of clients to access your email. Your car can have any colour, as long as it is black. All native email clients are stuck in 2005, lack most basic features, and have bugs not fixed in decades. Also, most providers have poor support for new IMAP features, such as NOTIFY.
I loved Mimestream when I worked at a place that was on Google.
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Fastmail has a fantastic Web UI, have been using it for years.
Nothing is more fantastic(er) than a native application handling multiple e-mail accounts without effort or lag. Thunderbird and macOS mail are great for that. Supporting everything from GMail to personal mail servers, and everything in between.
What is Thunderbird written in. #lazyweb #nollm ;)
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#809Earlier quoted context omitted.
SMTP is to send mail and that's how I send it from my laptop and from my phone. POP3 is to read from a mailbox.
Or imap !
IMAP usually means that mail is stored on the provider server even if one can download and delete. Furthermore POP3 is a trivial protocol that could be operated via telnet before everybody went TLS.
The real reason I'm still using POP3 is that I'm using the mailboxes that are bundled with my domains. One on the registrars announced IMAP support a few days ago. All the others are still on POP3 probably because POP3 servers have been available since forever.