Joël de Bruijn

  • 3 Posts
  • 98 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • We as a species make up terms on a daily basis, so I feel the liberty to do the same. Glad it doesnt give any results because it indicates original thought.

    If large parts of the supply chain consist of suppliers (vendors) on the other side of the earth, one can focus on one vendor lock-in or one by one (for analytical purposes) and optimise for that but often the bigger picture of a complex supply chain is missed.

    Hence the aggregated lock-in.

    But to avoid futher confusion maybe supply-chain lock-in is a better term and yields searchs results.






  • I don’t know.

    • I don’t need formatting but it doesn’t get in the way either. So I am not bothered by it.
    • Also pdf and especially PDF/A standard is widely used for archiving and compliance regulation concerning archival and preservation.
    • If you want text the same tactic goes: just export in bulk to txt instead of pdf

    My main point is: Why would you want a mail specific stack of hosting, storage, indexing and frontends? If it’s all plain text anyway so the regular storage solutions for files come a long way.

    There is an entire industry (which has its own disadvantages) to get communication artefacts out of those systems and put it in document management systems or other forms of file based archival.


  • I had roughly the same goals ( archive search 2 decades of mail) but approached it completely different: I export every mail to PDF with a strict naming convention.

    • Backend: No mailserver, just storage and backup for files.
    • Search: based on filenames FSearch and Void tools Everything. I could use local indexing on pdf content.
    • Frontend: a pdf viewer.







  • Also I’m very much cautious about them on anything browsing related. Discovered (after others also) they let their search-pages-in-a-shop get indexed.

    Meaning I could go to Caterpillar, search for “Wabtec is better” and then this search url (with 0 products) would turn up in Google searches and that URL persisted. Text and all.

    Basically one could spray-paint and tag sites with this graffiti. Shop admins didn’t even have means to remove it.

    Problem ignored and stayed this way for months.




  • I looked briefly through their site:

    • Heavy on partnerships and ambition. Which is a good thing.
    • Light on technical details and implementation.
    • Hinting at former hype (blockchain) and current (AI)

    But for me the biggest concern is development of a “new” decentralized protocol. IMHO there are enough protocols around to choose and pick from and help moving them forward instead of making one from scratch.