As a datapoint from the other side, my company (big tech) is holding the party line no matter what. Lower level engineer or director - if you don’t come in the requisite number of days a week, you’re out. It’s a bafflingly short-sighted move, but company culture is more important than anything apparently.

I’ve been trying to follow, but clearly I missed it - anyone know if there’s an iOS client in the works, or will this be Android only?

Language learning is a long, long process, and it’s important to make sure your habits are sustainable. It doesn’t really matter what’s optimal if you get demotivated and stop learning, so above all, you should do whatever keeps up your learning process. Don’t force yourself to speak the flashcards aloud if that will discourage you from the whole thing.

That, and don’t worry about optimal. There are no bad habits that can’t be unlearned (and the value you’d get out of speaking would far outweigh any effort you need to invest in the future if you want to improve your accent). Speaking would be great, but as long as you’re learning grammar and vocabulary, you’re on track.

To be fair though, I’m also pretty reluctant to change emails. I switched everything over, and while it sounds like you can emulate the allowlist with other services, I reeeally don’t want to switch yet again :/

I’m using Hey, and while there are some issues with the company (namely, the CEO enacting some shitty employee policies during the pandemic), their email service is great.

Particularly, I love their email allowlist. Whenever you get an email from a new sender for the first time, you have the option to allow or deny their emails from then on. I used to always have thousands of unread emails when I was on Gmail (most things just routing to an unused “Newsletter” folder), but now, pretty much every email I get is one that I actually want to read.

It’s a paid service, and tbh debatable whether or not it’s worth the price, but the screening feature singlehandedly makes it worthwhile for me.