> Unless you hire a good (read: expensive) devops person to look after your infrastructure, clickops-ing your way through the AWS console will likely leave behind a pile of unused instances and components that will eat into your budget.

While this is true-ish (finding lost resources or just not creating them in the first place is not that complex), when the day comes that you will need/want to move to one of the cloud providers you will need a good devops to handle that hybrid cloud environment and making the transfer as painless as possible. cross cloud routing, DB migrations and not to mention setting up secure access for all of it is less complex in my POV then cost managing your cloud account

what is the replacement for IMAP if you are not using the browser version?

As far as i can remember, any email client i ever set up with outlook/gmail/gsuite eventually is set up using IMAP

The Exchange ActiveSync thing from Microsoft is probably the most used protocol for synchronizing mails, contacts and calendars. Given its proprietary nature there must be tremendous efforts done just to understand how it works, so it's not for me.

Moreover, more and more uses of email go through the web and IMAP is an afterthought. Tutanota can send end-to-end encrypted emails... if both parties access emails through the web interface. Or it's a link to an encrypted message, but then you have to send the secure link/password some other way. ProtonMail does the same, if you want IMAP access you need to install an additional software on your machine.

IMAP used to be everywhere, but because people like shiny things it is slowly seen as a bad thing we should get rid of

Usually DOK (saying it like short for doctor)

You can still use RSS for most news sites and some feed type sites

youtube,news(papers) and so on have support for RSS or are supported using 3rd party providers

Yeah.

Other than for news and stuff i have a google apps script that uses my RSS feeds to add new youtube videos to specific playlists I have.

Since youtube's "subscriptions" page became so bad in the past years that script is a must

If you stop pirating you would still have 30TB of disk space. you might not need it but you would still have it. Anyway, it would be much easier to download stuff on demand than to hoard the entire movie archive on your disks

An idle computer (just disk IO) shouldn't cost 45$ a month in electricity unless your prices are much much higher then the average

you don't a 40$ subscription to pirate. just buy an invite to a couple of private trackers and you are done

Desktop used for gaming or work stuff that doesn't have to go through the VPN (zoom,calendar,slack and so on)

Living room desktop running plex for stream to the google TV

my uni laptop is still being used by my SO when she needs to look at some 3D imaging which is painfully slow on her uni laptop

so i/we use 2 desktops my SO uses 2 laptops and an fire tablet when shes on the train

90% of new MacOS are in their bundled applications and not in the OS itself.

Arm and x86 is probably a huge pain though.

1.that's not pretty good C# code. Though i can't comment on the quality of PHP

2.Programming languages are more then their syntax, they are entire ecosystems. 99% of the time its not the syntax/features/paradigms that make you move fast its the libraries