Like you, I am a happy long-term user of Fastmail. In addition to the excellent mail and calendar service, their tech support is top-notch: fast and generally providing the correct answer in their first communication.

How dod you that? I am paying them thousands per year and support is neither good nor fast.

And my requests are usually well written as we deal with emails a lot and understand how it works (if you pardon my slight bragging)

I'm surprised to read this. We just email support@[the expected domain name]. Perhaps our queries are simple enough they can be handled easily.

Probably so. My volume is around 750k email per day roughly.

Recently they started tinkering with spam filter, which worked fairly well before. Now it doesnt work - good mails go to spam, spam garbage goes inbox. Support tried - I'll give them that - but almost all their advises were either not working or working just partially.

My guess is they integrating "AI" with spam filter, hence the quality decline.

I use just use help-> Open ticket and getting one response per day (this is to address timely responses). Granted I am in UTC+7, but from company as big as FastMail you would expect support around the clock.

I write almost exclusively with fountain pens, and it hasn't helped my handwriting at all. Not sure why you think it would help.

Well it's not magic, you still need to learn the skill of how to use the pen properly to write cursive.

My argument is simply that it's significantly easier to learn to have good handwriting with the right tool than with the wrong tool.

Surely there are also people with excellent handwriting even writing with sub-optimal tooling.

It does not really help my handwriting, but writing with a fountain pen is much more pleasant. I also like the objects, the ink bottles and the small refilling ritual every now and then. But yeah, my writing is still terrible.

That's probably because YOU use a cheap fountain pen. ;)

I use a cheap (£20) fountain pen it doesn't affect how good my writing is. That's practice not tools :)

You sound like one of the never tired shills of the Peasant's Handwriting Tools Club. Your terrible lot really knows no shame. :(

I don't know what that is and googling gets me nothing. I'm also unclear how saying "you don't need a £200 fountain pen to write well" offended you. Have a great day anyway.

it seems there are two kinds of people

This doesn't take into account that you need to live somewhere.

If you spend $2K on rent (which gets no return) and put $1K into the SPY500 every month or put all $3K into your house, you will be far, far ahead with real estate.

I don't know why you think this is not taken into account by those calculator. They obviously include the cost of rent for a similar place...

Of the many good comments, this is the one that IMHO is the most helpful.

I got my first real job in a very down employment market--much worse than today. Got skills, learned how business worked. Found a pigeonhole where I could profitably work for myself based on the new skills. Built a reputation. Was hired by folks who needed my expertise, etc. The key for me was to get an accurate read on the employment market and let it guide my decisions.

My path night not be directly reproducible, but the orientation in OP's post nails the kind of thinking that's needed.

Cal Newport's book Deep Work gives excellent insights on how to break out of this pressure.

They didn't lift and shift many employees. These are primarily legal changes. Safra Catz is still in California (as are most senior execs), Ellison in Hawaii.

They've done a ton of stuff with Java, including open-sourcing it in its entirety.

Is there a reasonably good IDE for Nim that provides debugging, specifically the full debugging experience (Nim code rather than C, breakpoints, inspect/modify values, etc.)? That's been the gating factor for me trying it. What's the present situation?

I'm using Claude Code... And then for manual review and editing, using Zed with Nim extensions: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/nim

Sorry, I don't really do debuggers... I mostly step through code interactively using a REPL (INim).

I ran into some problems with Zed and Nim which I eventually solved by enhancing the LSP’s settings. This might be useful for anyone interested https://blog.ameri.coffee/using-zed-for-nim-development

I see comments like this fairly often and in my entire career (I'm 53) I've never had to use a debugger. For inspection of values, I write small functions and unit tests or just output to stderr in debug modes set with env vars. I've always thought that the need to use a debugger was a code smell- too much cyclomatic complexity of single functions.

Have you ever used rr though?

https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr

it... goes backwards in time?

OK, THIS is interesting!

Does Nim not output the #line directives when compiling to C? That alone should help with the debugging experience.

Sure! Just compile with nim c --lineDir=on or drop `lineDir=on` in your $HOME/.config/nim/nim.cfg (or per project NimScript .nims or per file foo.nim.cfg or ...) and source-level debugging with gdb on Linux works..

mostly at the level of Nim source, although various things are likely to "leak through" like mangled names (though in fairness, lower-level assembly notions leak through in "C source level" debugging...).

Beware, though, that since around Spring 2024 this can make the tinycc/tcc backend infinite loop (but otherwise tcc can be a nice way to get fast development iteration).

Also recently Nim’s generated C code started using Itanium name mangling, which oddly has become the defacto name mangling method for C++ on Linux and other platforms.

Meaning you get pretty function names with generic types and all included with debuggers that support it. Works better with ldb as gdb seems to refuse to recognize it.

> I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way

I have a completely different experience of HN than you do. There are the stray toxic folks, sure, but overall, this is one of the best dev forums--actively moderated, generally filled with intelligent comments, and often offering good advice. Just look at the thoughtful and understanding answers to this very post.

Yeah, it's currently full of AI shovelware because that's what the hype bubble demands, but there's a lot more good stuff here than not.

But they also have only had an account for an hour and clearly didn't read the whole post so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

OTA.

One time accounts.

HN ain't safe from stylometry.

It's a tongue-in-cheek style.