I still use fetchmail, while I prefer MailDrop over procmail :-)
And, yes, I 110% agree about automation revolving around emails, or simply revolving around exchanging text between people asynchronously. I still have my ascii ribbon campaign in the signature [well, mostly because I very lazy].
One of the first kind of automation, it's just mere handling, I have auto-delete for some mails not flagged, to keep my maildirs of a human size, and having them on my iron I can choose both the size and how much allow to grow without having to pay extra subscription or experimenting many third party "old mails missing" issues. But also small potatoes automation from "the smart home", bills annotations and so on. If a sufficient mass of people know how much and how simply we can do certain things like extracting attachments (uudeview, ripmime etc) and archiving them we can easily imaging e-bills (now that most western countries have them, for those who do not know e-invoices, typically XML-based with signatures or not, sometimes pdfs with embedded XML/JSON) attached and automatically archived by our desktop for future access in a snap.
Similar things about other "old tools" from usenet to RSS, just imaging your bank offering an authenticated feed of every transaction, markets changes etc with push notifications as well.
With these tools the modern world could be automated 10x the actual level with 1/10 of the actual effort needed for just the actual level. Unfortunately those who know today are less and less and very unfortunately those teaching in academia seems to have lost any interest in teaching, maybe with some incentives by big tech...
> Similar things about other "old tools" from usenet to RSS, just imaging your bank offering an authenticated feed of every transaction, markets changes etc with push notifications as well.
What a dream that would be!
Agree with everything above. In the 90s everything was trivially easy to automate and customize in any way one wanted. As the world has moved to ever more isolated siloed webapps that barely have any functionality built-in (which makes sense since every feature has to be built as a one-off addition to that specific website) and don't hook into or interoperate with any tools, we keep moving ever backwards in functionality and automatability.
Sadly true, but if you observe a larger timeframe:
- back to Unix time, unixers say GUIs are unneeded complexity, in very little time Unix add X, not like Smalltalk workstations, but still similar, one of the first based on the current 2D graphics for documents, SunWS, or DisplayPostscript server;
- back at first Windows time, Windowser say widget based GUIs are the sole GUI needed, and that last long, but, the web 2.0, QtQuick, ... state clearly no, we can't live on widgets, and we are now essentially back to a much more complex and not much more featuresful DisplayPostscript equivalent, still a kind of DocUI like the Xerox workstations ones, only NOT moldable by end users;
- at a smaller levels menus are mostly substituted with search&narrow tools, from the "classic desktop menu" to "the dash", Android preference with a quicksearch, equally present for apps menu, failed but very good Ubuntu Unity HUD, we can go till search engine and ML (LLM, mostly) prompts, all are "back" at users entering text instead of clicking around pre-made menus;
- decades after CanonCat notes are now very common even for not so power users, and notes pale and limited automation start to appear here and there (R with Quarto, where the user write a mix of data (MD) and code (R) to generate a pdf via pandoc/LaTeX (or something similar in their backend), to Zettlr note "export template" functionalities and so on, actually is the data and code of Lisp and Smalltalk systems back then, in users hands even if that part is sometimes a bit hidden.
Long story short good ideas came back, generally only after an immense amount of time and turned into Greenspun's tenth rule bug-ridden, half-backed soups, but still they are back. So well... As the time passes "digitalization" happen and some start to think, rediscovering old concepts often not knowing they are old, but still came back. Maybe in 50+ the future web will be composed of feeds, full articles in the feed, and the same mechanism will be used for releases announcements, bug tracking, vulnerability notice and so on, as well as something equivalent of emails, equally scriptable.
For me the sole key is not losing all the past memory, so we can know how bad evolution arrives and how they disappear to collect experience and a bit at a time correcting errors.
Reading history I think this same phenomenon happen in all fields, good stuff tend to die early en masses, only few survive often badly changed, but a bit at a time died early stuff came back. Sad for the humanity, sad for those who know but at least still good for future generations.
And, yes, I 110% agree about automation revolving around emails, or simply revolving around exchanging text between people asynchronously. I still have my ascii ribbon campaign in the signature [well, mostly because I very lazy].
One of the first kind of automation, it's just mere handling, I have auto-delete for some mails not flagged, to keep my maildirs of a human size, and having them on my iron I can choose both the size and how much allow to grow without having to pay extra subscription or experimenting many third party "old mails missing" issues. But also small potatoes automation from "the smart home", bills annotations and so on. If a sufficient mass of people know how much and how simply we can do certain things like extracting attachments (uudeview, ripmime etc) and archiving them we can easily imaging e-bills (now that most western countries have them, for those who do not know e-invoices, typically XML-based with signatures or not, sometimes pdfs with embedded XML/JSON) attached and automatically archived by our desktop for future access in a snap.
Similar things about other "old tools" from usenet to RSS, just imaging your bank offering an authenticated feed of every transaction, markets changes etc with push notifications as well.
With these tools the modern world could be automated 10x the actual level with 1/10 of the actual effort needed for just the actual level. Unfortunately those who know today are less and less and very unfortunately those teaching in academia seems to have lost any interest in teaching, maybe with some incentives by big tech...