I gave up on my first play through of Chrono Trigger because I couldn't figure out how to progress in the future world. Didn't realize that the clouds in the dome were supposed to be transparent and not something that I need to trigger a different event to clear up.
The workaround for this was to assign all the buttons to the same key before chasing the rat (I had this exact problem with zsnes, though my first few playthroughs were on the original cartridge)
Yeah I'm not sure how I figured that trick out, probably just monkey mashing buttons at some point, then I figured out SNES graphics were layers and it was a lot of fun switching the various layers on+off. And hey that turned out to be useful!
Their engineers have been working tirelessly to make Sharepoint/Office/Active Directory as terrible as it possibly could be while still technically being functional, while continuing to raise prices on them. I've seen many small business start to chose Google Workspace over them, the cracks have formed and are large enough that they are no longer in a position were every business just go with Office because that's what everyone uses.
It is the one thing that makes me wonder about Microsoft's future. It had seemed like they were willing to throw Windows and Xbox under the bus so long as the server cash cow continued. But it that starts to fade, they could be in some real trouble a decade from now.
I've let tech pass me by many times, then the tech that passed me which I was never in a position to use got replaced by the next big tech innovation. I've found that you can climb aboard the train at anytime since everything new is a lot easier to get started on than learning C and having to manually allocate memory.
Back in the day the feature I liked most about my TI-82 was the amount of information that could fit on the display, the formatting options available, the ease of entering and editing what you entered, and the amount of past entered formulas that would be saved and how easy they were to retrieve. It made doing large blocks of basic BEDMAS math very quick and less suspectable to errors caused by accidentally hitting the wrong key entering in large formulas, and very easy to go back and find out where I messed up and quickly retabulate everything.
All of that mostly comes up in physics and chemistry were its about knowing what long formulas you need to plug the numbers you have available to you to find out what you need to know. Oddly enough their seems to be very little benefit to using a graphing calculator in a actual math class.
If there was any increase of reported incidents of ED over the 30 years I would hazard to guess that it would have to do with the fact that various medications have been released over the last 30 years to address it. Fewer people will report an embarrassing issue when there is a narrow chance it can even be fixed.
A person is also more in control of what's going on around them personally, the larger that scope increases the less any normal individual has any effect. The ant can be optimistic about it's chances of surviving the winter while still pessimistic about what the fate of all of the grasshoppers.
There was no chance that everyone would be running their own email server, but if it wasn't for the lack of IPv6 adaptation a plug and go home email server solution would probably see a decent amount of use. I'd bet we'd already be seeing it as a feature in most mid-ranged home routers by now.
The mail server in a router is easy to host, the problem is:
1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries)
and most of all:
2) "Trust"/"Spam score"
It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted.
If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my emails won't arrive due to these filters.
I use a small local provider (posteo) and have 0 problems with spam.
So a 20 pound monkey can also throw around some weight. To be fair I only use it for personal stuff its probably different if you need enterprise scale l.
I've seen plenty of Gmail accounts over the years and they pretty much look the same.
The only Gmail accounts that are "overrun by spam" are those of people subscribing to lots of spammy newsletters and then not knowing how to unsubscribe from them (or figuring they'd stay subscribed in case the next newsletter is the Magical One™). But that's 100% self inflicted and you can't save those people with any technical solution.
Email spam isn't a day to day problem for Gmail (at least) since Bayesian email filtering was first implemented.
The specific concern around uptime & reliability was baked into email systems from almost the start - undeliverable notifications (for the sender) and retries.
But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.
Its not a device/MTA issue, SMTP just is not a secure protocol and there is not much you can do in order to 'secure' human communication. Things like spoofing or social engineering are near impossible to address within SMTP without external systems doing some sort of analysis on the messages or in combination with other protocols like DNS.
SMTP isn't at fault, the social ecosystem is at fault. Every system where identities are cheap has a spam problem. If you think a system has cheap identities and no spam, it probably doesn't have cheap identities — examples are HN or Reddit.
Trust / spam score is the largest one I think, second to consumer ISPs blocking the necessary ports for receiving mail.
Even if your "self hosting" is renting a $5/month VPS, some spam lists (e.g. UCEPROTECT) proactively mark any IP ranges owned by consumer ISPs and VPS hosting as potential spam. I figured paying fastmail $30/yr was worth never having to worry about it.
For "Trust", I believe patio11 described this system as the "Taxi Medallion of Email".
e.g. you spend a lot of money to show that you are a legitimate entity or you pay less money to rent something that shows you are connected to said entity.
Without some kind of federation or centralization, it seems hard to distinguish a hobbyist from a spammer if both of them are using a plug-and-go. Forcing that responsibility into the hands of Google, Zoho, and Microsoft seems like the best compromise, unfortunately.
For one, if my power goes out for an extended period of time I'd still like to be able to access my email. Communications really can't be hosted locally.
Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?
Usually when I hear about people using ChatGPT they are usually just using it as a search engine that delivers summarized results. The average person wouldn't use email if they had to pay for it, good luck making money off of all of those visitors without just becoming another ad tech company competing with the other ad tech companies.
Also manages to sustain itself on it's own weird brand of whales, a handful of disgruntled users with enough money to just keep buying accounts using random characters as a username just to get immediately banned after their first post. Some taking a dump in the middle of your living room isn't so bad if they are paying your rent and you can just kick them back out.
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