Hacker News: sylens

New comment by sylens in "The IBM-ification of Google?"

sylens — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:39:10 +0000

Our AWS account team is incredible. I could ask them for anything and they would get back to me in a day

New comment by sylens in "Last.fm is now independent"

sylens — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:24:34 +0000

I recently left streaming and started buying music again and in the process dusted off my 20 year old Last.fm account to begin scrobbling again

New comment by sylens in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

sylens — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:37:17 +0000

I just checked my email and saw that my earliest use of Dropbox was with its 3rd alpha for Linux in August 2008. That is an awfully long time to be using a service. I remember how exciting it was when they released an Android client for my HTC Incredible to run

New comment by sylens in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

sylens — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:36:45 +0000

This is key. As a kid I still wanted to play sports outside because the sports video games were pretty limited

New comment by sylens in "The IBM-ification of Google?"

sylens — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:42:51 +0000

Our team at work uses all three major public clouds and our Google Account Team is by far the worst of the three. Nothing like having to explain the same problem I’m having from the start again on every monthly cadence call because they don’t note anything or try to help resolve it

New comment by sylens in "Google I/O"

sylens — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:21:09 +0000

Google Wave was ahead of its time. It could've been a meaningful Slack competitor

New comment by sylens in "Why we lose our friends as we age (2023)"

sylens — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:58:28 +0000

Having kids really changes the game in a lot of ways. For me to consider doing something now, its not just that I'm interested or if I have the money, I also have to make sure childcare is lined up - either my partner or a family member. It makes you very judicial in what you choose to do as you have a finite amount of childcare to spend (unless you are really lucky and have a family that is always available to watch your kids).

I don't really see movies in theaters anymore because I'd rather use the childcare to go out to dinner with my wife or take in a baseball game, for example.

New comment by sylens in "Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin"

sylens — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:30:09 +0000

Plexamp is actually a really good music app for phones

New comment by sylens in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

sylens — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:44:23 +0000

So many of the off-the-shelf hardware options linked to are out of stock or discontinued. Feels like DIY is the only way right now

New comment by sylens in "An MCP Server for Fastmail – National Email Day"

sylens — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 02:32:44 +0000

> To be clear about what this isn’t: we have not integrated AI into Fastmail. There’s no chatbot bolted onto the inbox, and your mail isn’t being piped through a model in the background. The MCP server is simply another API endpoint for you to use, if you want to, with the AI client of your choice.

>That distinction matters to us. Our long-term values include “Your data belongs to you” and “We are good stewards of your data”. The pattern we try to follow is: rather than continuously reworking our UI to follow every new trend, we give you the interfaces to use your data however it suits you. MCP continues that pattern. It’s there if you want it, and nothing changes if you don’t.

This is really refreshing and makes me feel like I made the right decision in moving off Gmail after 20 years to Fastmail last year

New comment by sylens in "State of Homelab 2026"

sylens — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:59:11 +0000

The upfront costs are pretty big but over time it’s not too bad to do 3-2-1. I doubt you’ll come out on top of Google every time - there’s a reason their prices are so low, and that’s more of an incentive to leave than to save a few dollars.

For me, I run Immich off a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC, with the photos themselves stored on my Synology NAS. Every night, I backup the VM with docker that runs Immich to the NAS, then the entire NAS gets backed up to Synology’s Cloud. My upfront costs were the NAS, the drives, and the mini PC, and my ongoing costs are electricity and the cloud storage fee for Synology’s cloud (about $70/year for a terabyte). That’s not cheaper than Google, but it does prevent them from having access to photos of my kids and family.

New comment by sylens in "France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech"

sylens — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:45:56 +0000

Many government orgs have spent the last decade and a half slowly transitioning old legacy applications and platforms to browser-based alternatives. That old ERP software that used to require a thick client? Now it runs in Chrome. Microsoft recognized this and smartly moved to keep these customers locked in via an ever growing Microsoft Office bundle - subscription based, with Teams for their chat and then building up additional capabilities to extend the dependency, like InTune.

Where we are at now is that the pain of moving away from Windows is acceptable for many larger organizations and governments, especially those with flat or decreasing budgets. You can just swap out the OS layer and keep other processes the same - keep using Office with just the browser versions if you want, or move to an alternative (like EU-based). Teams works on Linux. There is no moat on Windows anymore

New comment by sylens in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

sylens — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:02:49 +0000

Curiously, JMAP is on the roadmap for the iOS client, but I don't see it in the desktop client roadmap https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap. But seeing as how it will power their Thundermail service, I would assume all clients would need the support

New comment by sylens in "Dropping Cloudflare for Bunny.net"

sylens — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:24:22 +0000

I would probably switch off Cloudflare if I didn't also make use of their Cloudflare Tunnels service for sharing some stuff in a way that doesn't require me to punch a hole in my home network. I realize Pangolin and such also exist, but it's nice to get it for free

New comment by sylens in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

sylens — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:22:20 +0000

2008 had its own version of React and it was called Adobe Air

New comment by sylens in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

sylens — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:12:24 +0000

Apple did introduce one this past fall as part of Spotlight

New comment by sylens in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

sylens — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:07:07 +0000

A Mac Pro without external GPU support was always a dumb idea. They just made this to shut up the hard core fans who were complaining about the outdated Mac Pro in 2018.

New comment by sylens in "Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app"

sylens — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:41:27 +0000

Ente offers E2EE photo hosting, the storage they sell through subscriptions to that is their business model. Their main selling point is that all machine learning to cluster faces is done on your devices. I would assume that they want more users to train their models on to improve their core offering

New comment by sylens in "Migrating to the EU"

sylens — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:11:14 +0000

It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync

New comment by sylens in "Windows native app development is a mess"

sylens — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:19:54 +0000

Author raises several good points. Why isn't the latest .NET runtime pulled down into Windows 11 devices via Windows Update? Why isn't there a better path forward for deployment?

It's another example of how they have completely abandoned any attempt at providing a good user experience across their products