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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2026

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  • I have been using Runbox for several years and I’m happy with them. I choose them because they are one of the few email providers that allow you to create aliases/identities.

    They are not non-profit, but they say they take ethical (and other) responsibilities very seriously. They do use LLM, but again they say they use it only as a tool and it is used responsibly. They do take transparency seriously, so they have all this information written on their website.



  • From what I could gather:

    RCS is not supported by the Android system - probably because Gurgle doesn’t want to (not sure about iOS). Also quite few carriers still do not support it. So if you manage to send a message, you have no guarantee that it would arrive in the same format you would expect.

    The only advantage it has is that you don’t have to create an account anywhere and you can simply use a phone number to send it. However, that is also it’s biggest downside, because you would have to give your phone number to other people or services, which is not a good idea in this age.

    It may have been a good idea around 2007, but it’s too late now.





  • Japanese language is highly contextual. Quite often they omit the Subject in sentences because it is “obvious” from the context… although the context could come from a conversation that happened before. Sometimes they even omit the Object or the Verb. Not sure if it works the same for Mandarin. Anyway, in some cases the context could help you understand even if you don’t know the words, so it could be similar to Mandarin.

    Japanese people are always trying to be friendly, so if you start speaking (even broken) Japanese, their eyes will start to glow and will start saying how your Japanese is perfect (even if it may not true). So, if you speak a broken Japanese, they will try to understand you and sometimes even correct you if you say something wrong. So this is probably similar to Chinese people.


  • As someone who has been learning Japanese for a very long time, I can tell confirm that Japanese grammar is quite complicated, as others have said. One example could be that adjective clauses go before the noun, instead of after the noun, which could be hard to wrap one’s head around it.

    The other issue is that the sentence structure is different from other languages. Japanese language uses Subject-Object-Verb structure instead of Subject-Verb-Object - to put it simply, sentences end with a verb. It could be a problem for a beginner, or even when you get to the intermediate level, where you could start hearing 3 complete sentences before getting to the first verb.

    And another potential issue is that there are multiple levels of politeness. Each level changes how you say verbs and some other words. The highest levels even change some verbs to different verbs with the same meaning. But this is mainly issue only when you are planning to live there or work in Japanese company.

    I don’t know much about Mandarin Chinese other than that it uses different tones to pronounce words. And if you are like me, who doesn’t hear those tones, it could be impossible to learn.

    I believe learning Japanese pronounciation is going to be easier for some people, but it really depends where you come from. I never had to learn Japanese pronounciation because it is almost identical to my own (slavic) language.




  • That’s why I hate banking apps. It’s 5-factor authentication for me and it’s seriously annoying.

    The factors for logging into the internet banking are:

    1. Having a password manager - Something I have
    2. Remembering a master password - Something I know
    3. Having a banking app on the phone (🤮) - Something I have
    4. Using a password to log in to a user that has the app installed (I have a GrapheneOS and the banking app requires Gurgle services, so the services and apps must be separated) - Something I know
    5. Using a PIN inside the banking app to confirm the login - Something I know





  • I have written my CV in HTML, CSS, little bit of JavaScript and handlebars.js library (single JS file). I have all the texts inside JSON files (one file per language). I can switch between languages simply by changing a variable and refreshing the page.

    When I need to update the CV, I just change the text and print the CV as a webpage into a PDF using an Ungoogled Chrome (Firefox has a bug that causes the page to print in a slightly wrong size).

    It may be overkill for some, but for me it was easier to properly style the page using a CSS than using Writer/Word.