Notices by Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)

@trwnh I think I’ve said it before but: a quote is just a louder reply

If it starts M, its almost certainly ASN.1 DER starting with a SEQUENCE. If it starts MI its probably an X.509 certificate (its a biig sequence).

LS0t is the base64 encoding of --- which is the start of a PEM block. It’ll probably be followed by LS(something) because there are five dashes to a PEM block.

dW5kZWZpbmVkCg== is just undefined and that one is in my brain as the result of an append only database, a buggy JavaScript frontend and a backend with insufficient validation at a previous job…

MI, LS0t and dW5kZWZpbmVkCg== truly are some of the most recognisable base64 prefixes/strings of all time

Half Life 2, the first game I ever pre-ordered, is 20 today.

Please excuse me while I go and shrivel up into a cabbage.

I love sending email to GMail users :akko_sad:

The more I think about it, the more I feel that Postel’s law (“be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”) is an aphorism that is very applicable to file formats and much less applicable to protocols

With protocols you have the opportunity to reject then and there; with file formats, you generally just have to deal with whatever garbage someone emitted 30 years ago and in general you can’t know who the recipient is so all content adaptation has to be done on the recipient side (or by the sender providing graceful degredation alternatives)

Anyway I don’t know how much they’re actually paying (or would actually be paying) for bandwidth, but in context of them paying >$1000/mo for compute it’s not beyond reason

$3600/mo or so if you store it all in S3, of course

I saw someone saying Hachyderm’s egress traffic is 1TB a day. So, dear internet, I wonder: how much would you expect serving 1TB/day (~30TB/month) to cost, just in bandwidth costs?

Delivered on a fiber cable to you: almost certainly less than €150/mo. You could get down lower with a sufficiently friendly carrier.

Some VPS providers will do much cheaper but you may be gambling a little on network quality pushing that much

@ireneista @aeva @CliftonR For better and for worse, its our understanding that if you properly implement and handle the List-Unsubscribe header most of the bigass e-mail providers won’t classify your email as spam too.

For better because most mail clients now have an “Unsubscribe” button on marketing emails and it actually works. For worse because they don’t get autofiled into your spam box for you

@ireneista @CliftonR @aeva (Also so much of the marketing crap is coming from Mailchimp/Sparkpost/a handful of others these days so you can get rid of so much of it by filtering list IDs ending .mcsv.net or sparkpostmail.com)

@CliftonR @aeva @ireneista Sometimes it feels like I receive more marketing e-mails disguised as service-related transactional e-mails these days than I received actual spam 10 years ago.

Sigh.

@CliftonR @aeva @ireneista I do not blame anyone for having a disaster inbox; keeping things under control is hard. I recently learned Fastmail lets me do address+folder.path@domain.com, which helps shovel the transactional e-mails off to the side pre-emptively (everything gets a unique e-mail address starting with +bulk. so that if there isn’t a dedicated folder for it, it gets shoved into the Bulk folder)

But it really shouldn’t be like this. It shouldn’t be this hard to keep control of one of your primary communications channels.