As an Evernote user, Bending Spoons has been iterating fast over the past couple years to improve the product. It’s much better than it used to be.

Yep. The NYC area is one exception. I've worked at a company that was acquired, and they laid off quite a few of the NYC-area employees. Rumor had it that some of them were making more than their managers, and their managers' managers.

I think they’re actually named after the scene in the matrix where the little kid (and then Neo) can bend the spoon with their mind.

Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.

All companies I've worked at had (paid) on-call set up. The right to disconnect isn't incompatible with business needs and the law contemplates it. Also, nurses and doctors do it too.

An rtx 3070 ti is like $300. If you want latest gen top of the line, that's never been cheap.

A surprising number of people clearly simply do not look at their credit card bills.

Doesn't help that sometimes the charges are coded like *TST VENDOR ACCT #1541*

I don't go over my bill every month but get a notification upon every new charge, and sometimes the only way I know that a charge I just put on at a store is the same one I got a notification for is because the charge amount is some relatively unique number.

Not all MVNO are the same in this regard, some sell the same quality of service data tier.

I switched from T-Mobile to Google Voice a few years ago for this reason. With 5 lines on the plan the T-Mo version was way too expensive. But then Google Voice raised their prices and T-Mobile offered as much better multi-line discount and I ended up switching back. Also, Google Voice tech support is absolute dogshit.

There's a good reddit, i think NoContract, where you can go to learn more about MVNOs. There are several tiers of them in practice and they each have their own "catches" and "advantages". I used Cricket many years ago when they had a punishing speed cap. In the modern days some of these caps have been relaxed, but as you suspected, prioritization is the main way the actual carriers differentiate themselves from the MVNOs that sell access to the same towers. The worst MVNOs have terrible priority and in any well-populated area congestion makes them super slow almost all the time.

The thing is, this is highly variable -- and also geographically variable -- and some MVNOs can now offer similar priority as a mainstream plan. US Mobile is one, which I've been using for a couple years. Their neat advantage is that they will sell you a SIM (or e-sim) that rides on your choice of the big 3, and they'll also let you port between them without any other change to your account. They call this "Tele-Port". Some people will do that even just to go on a vacation to a state with different "best carrier", since there's nothing stopping you.

Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month.

Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better.

I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to time.

I found it to be garbage, seven years ago. I stopped using them, when my meetups kept getting stuffed with fake accounts, and Meetup would then pressure me to upgrade to the next tier.

I could never prove that the fake accounts were them, but the optics weren’t good.

I stopped using Evernote actively after they reduced a formatting bug for their exported notes from Important to Wishlist and then sold to Bending Spoons.

Bending Spoons not only fixed that particular bug, but added a lot of useful features from other tools like "Block based editing" from Notion.

They are actively improving the product in every way, and they record short monthly recap videos to talk about the improvements. They didn't milk and kill the product. It's an interesting watch.

For me, the ship has sailed unfortunately. I divided that Evernote corpus into two, and personal parts went to Notion and technical part carried to Obsidian, and converted to a digital garden.

I have no hard feelings for them, though. I wish them the best of luck.

I like Evernote but it just isn’t worth $130 / year for me. Last year they had a sale for $50 (or was it $60) for a year and I paid for that. If I can’t renew at that I’ll have to figure out how to migrate to Obsidian.

I actively use Obsidian and Notion.

Obsidian is very good for technical and static knowledge bases. I use their publish feature for my digital garden. Having local markdown files and working on them is great. Obsidian is basically a secret sauce over markdown file format.

On the other hand, dynamic content lives much better in Notion. Databases, formulae, interconnection between other services etc. makes it a great project management tool for my life. However, due to the file format and everything can be interconnected forms both a walled garden and moat at the same time.

Both serve different niches and work very differently. So neither one is a silver bullet by themselves for all scenarios.

But Obsidian is a great knowledge management tool if used right, that's true.

I was with Evernote since 07, and found it a doddle to ditch. Export the lot, bring into Apple Notes or Bear. Or a combination of the two. Sorted.

They are definitely a PE firm. They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit. They have switched to mainly relying on traditional debt rather than outside investor money recently but that doesn't make them not PE.

In fact this is much like the older form of PE, where efficiency gains were the main objective.

Bigger PE firms now usually focus on roll-up strategies (buy loads of similar companies and merge, say car washes is big right now for example, as well as dental, vet and family doctor/GP practices) as well as utilising bucket loads of leverage to amplify gains. This does not however make what bending spoons is doing not PE.

Vimeo never seemed to figure out what they wanted to be.

Did they want to be a white label video hosting provider? Did they want to be a social media network? Did they want to be prestige TV for the online age? Did they want to be IFC (indie movies) for the internet?

If they had picked one track and stuck to it they would have done a lot better but they ended up at the intersection of all those disparate spaces which ended up being a very tiny place.

They had several opportunities to become a legitimate competitor to YouTube with the number of times YT dropped the ball over the past decade but they never made the big move they probably should have.

That's not always possible.

A lot of these old services used the email address as the fixed user identifier making it much less likely (certainly for those bucket of services) that he'd have a user-facing option of changing it.

> My domain registration is just over 25 years old... I guess I'm also "legacy"?

Mine too -- I mean, I had domains in 1994-1995.

Most people who have legacy AOL emails have them from more than 25 years ago-- indeed AOL was in decline by 2000.

And "protip: go back in time 30 years ago and tell your kid self how to get a domain name, and navigate internic's overcharging" isn't quite as practical to implement.