He also had blogs about those maps: https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/

G O A T Youtube doc about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk

Dust2 (and Cobble, another map mentioned) is, IMO, both art and genius; most of us will never make anything that brings joy to so many.

It inspires me to work on things that I'm passionate about just for fun. You never know what might come out of it!

I love your work! Thanks for the huuuuge work on de_dust2!

I had seen noclip's documentary about de_dust2 featuring him before but didn't piece the name together. Very happy to find that he has a blog!

It’s an incredible map - so many fun memories!

I've started to question if GMail's spam folder is marketing more than substance. I've used the same primary email address for nearly the same number of decades. The time I saw the "most" spam in a spam folder was only while it was hosted on Google Workspace. Actually trying to skim through those "1000s per day" a lot of them seemed suspect in strange ways (why was this even delivered anywhere?) and some of them even seemed like Google just dumping random ad copy from legitimate search ads into the folder.

(Also it says a lot that right now my two biggest sources of daily spam are Google Calendar Notifications and Random Firebase Accounts. Both of those further leave me questioning if Google's approach to spam filtering is sincere.)

I've been a Fastmail customer for years and have been pretty happy with their spam filtering too. Anything that does get through either gets a custom rule to send it to the shadow realm, or gets sent to a special "Learn spam" folder that I set up which will train the spam filter on that message.

Email is fixed by avoiding the usage. I only check my email for password resets and bank notifications. I never send email. Every other channel of communication with anyone outside of work is a text message.

Email definitely has its issues, but given that every other form of digital communication is getting worse and more locked down, I have no confidence that a replacement would be better. While increasingly difficult to get self-hosted email to be accepted by the big providers like Google and Microsoft, it is still great to at least have the option of hosting a universally accepted form of communication yourself.

Do you have any suggestions on how to fix email?

From my perspective all attempts at fixing anything broke something for smaller senders. Today if you want to host a mail server you can set up everything correctly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and your email still lands in the spam folder because you have not enough reputation. There are whole IP address segments that a flat out prohibited from participating.

Email is designed to be a distributed system. That means new standards can not really be added without breaking most of the systems. We still don't have mandatory transport encryption. So I don't see how to fix anything but to improve spam filtering and accept that it will be imperfect.

There have been many fixes over the decades, but it's hard to change the fundamentals of something widely-used.

There’s nothing to fall through, email fits it’s exact purpose. Email is supposed to have 0 sending/receiving friction. So one idea to fix it is to only accept email from addresses you’ve allowed. No one wants to constantly update their address book though, they just want the email (forgetting to remove the marketing email allowance after you receive the account verification link). So then there’s nothing to fix.

The abuse is by design.