NYC is very different in that regard from most anywhere else in the US. Random people tend to talk to each other. There’s a vague sense of “we’re all in this shit together”. Maybe it’s something to do with living on a cramped island, with no choice but to work together.

I find that Claude almost always ends its response with some sort of follow up question, despite my system prompt telling it not to.

I never really used ChatGPT much though so maybe Claude is just relatively less egregious?

Some mushrooms, like many oyster species, are saprotrophs and will grow on just about any waste organic material with enough cellulose.

Or Pixelfed, for a decentralized fediverse option.

We've been using Zulip for our company chat for 2 years now. It does what we need it to do — while letting us control where it's deployed and where the data is stored (!!). But the UI is dated and awkward. The general feeling I get is that everyone at our company is okay with Zulip, but no one loves it. It just has that air of mediocrity about it. It's "okay".

Glad to hear E2EE is coming soon, but it’s been “soon” for probably a year now. It’s a bit odd that encrypted notifications still don’t work, and I’d argue it’s a very big caveat with regard to privacy and security.

Our main reason for using Zulip is that we work in a highly regulated space (healthcare) and would like to be able to safely talk about things. I suspect this sort of situation is a major motivator for Zulip adoption, so it’s weird that transit encryption was left as an afterthought.

(There has always been an option to just not include message content in mobile notifications).

Cryptography is not something you can do sloppily, and requires coordination between the mobile and server teams. Zulip 11.x included the protocol, but while doing the mobile implementation, we decided to make several more changes which have delayed it to the upcoming Zulip 12.0.

Some important context is that we retired the old React Native mobile app this summer in favor of the new Flutter apps (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...), which has been an enormous improvement in the quality of the app and developer experience.

But as you can imagine, the cutover and relentlessly addressing feedback after it took a lot of time for the mobile team. We've also experienced an AI slop bombardment in the last few months that has consumed a lot of time. I'll save that story for another time.

What was wrong with React Native that caused it to be slow? How did you figure out that flutter was the reason for improved performance, rather than simply rebuilding the app with lessons learned from the old app?

Put another way, given enough time, what was not possible to do with react Native and is now possible with flutter?

Yes, exactly. The lack of any sort of permission controls for extensions in VS Code gives me the creeps

This has been “down” for me for a few months now, ever since Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training. So now you can’t filter this stuff without also agreeing to a whole swath of unrelated and opt-ins.

Ive since gone on an unsubscribe campaign, and things seem bearable now.

Same. Can’t ignore the messages when they’re all in one place, which makes hitting unsubscribe easier.

> which makes hitting unsubscribe easier.

wow, you really do that? Doesn't that just prove that the email address is read by a human and then promoted for even further SPAM to be delivered?

The Promotions tab is for marketing from companies that generally respect unsubscribing, not out and out spam.

It works with most real companies. If you signed up for it, you can generally unsubscribe from it. It’s easy to do by mistake, and some default to yes with no option during sign up.

I don’t care about whatever new shows Netflix has. Unsubscribe.

I don’t care about my DNS registrar having a sale. Unsubscribe.

Google postmaster notices when you hit the one-click unsubscribe button and severely punishes senders that continue to send. It's worth using as long as you understand that some senders will never allow you to sign up again.

> Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training

This never happened. It was a lie spread on Twitter. And now you are spreading it.

Not a lie, a potential misinterpretation if anything. Google has never factually countered the allegation, and now it’s before the courts in California. I’m going to wait and see how Thele v. Google plays out before turning this back on, and looking for alternatives in the meantime.

It’s a bit odd though that Zulip charge $ for mobile notifications but still don’t have basic end-to-end encryption for those push notifications .

It's a mix of "because they can" and "because they need to maintain infrastructure for mobile push".

The feature is deployed in the server, mobile clients are still pending the release iinm. But it's coming.

Maybe because what.cd picked up the torch and carried on for another few years? For me there was some sense of continuity between the two.

There was. Oink spawned both wcd and waffles. wcd spawned a few including RED.

Next thursday, RED will have been around longer than WCD...

Crazy

None of the successors captured oink for me (I proudly had their t-shirt), sadly.