Absolutely agreed. These two big corporate players with the biggest market-share are actively ruining the email ecosystem for their profit. I wish people would drop them and stop choosing them. Hopefully, the EU may soon do so.

As of when I'm writing this, three stories on the front page of HN (17, 18, 19) are about two bigtech companies dissing (for the lack of another polite word) their customers and third party vendors. I don't know how long it will take for the world to realize that these companies have nothing but at most contempt for you, except for your money which they want all for themselves. I'm not going to hold back on the fact that these multi-billion and trillion dollar MNCs lack any sort of scruples or integrity and their relationship with you is purely parasitic in nature.

I know that jailbreak is an option. But that's a rapidly closing avenue. Devices are getting harder by the day to jailbreak. The only correct solution is to vote with your wallet in favor of your own self-respect and independence. To not be their economic slaves. Consistently choose products that value your freedom, even if it's inconvenient and costly. Choose local stores, even if that requires you to walk to the nearby shop. You stand to gain a lot for those sacrifices. In fact, those gains may be things you can't afford to lose in the first place - like the democracy. (It's not a big secret that many of them have fascist ambitions.)

But whenever I raise this point here, somebody or the other rebukes that with some nonsensical argument about 'market demand' or something similar. First of all, market demand is decided by the consumer, unless we concede that right to the market manipulators. Secondly, this isn't something novel. Boycotts and preferential consumerism have been practiced successfully for ages and is in full effect as we speak. Can't you see how the citizens of entire nations are resisting fascism and hegemony through their shopping preferences? Due to this, I have serious reservations about people who make such counter arguments.

The technically proficient people like the HN crowd are the ones who should raise the alarm about technological exploitation and techno-fascism among the larger population and suggest the solutions. Instead, these people are out to defeat all such efforts and expose the population to the greedy cabal. I don't know if it's nihilism or outright betrayal. But don't be like that, please! Your knowledge and voice are valuable and they command respect. Use them to free your society and yourself from this economic exploitation and hegemony. Please start preaching publicly for the sake of all of our future.

> But that's a rapidly closing avenue. Devices are getting harder by the day to jailbreak. The only correct solution is to vote with your wallet in favor of your own self-respect and independence.

Sorry, "vote with your wallet" doesn't work on technical topics that average consumers don't experience viscerally on a regular basis. The only correct solution is political action that results in legislation and regulation.

The market is not a mechanism for maximizing consumer benefit, it's a mechanism for minimally meeting it. That's why enshitification happens: it's MNCs figuring out how much they can get away with, or part of a pot-boiling exercise to allow them to get away with more.

You are making the exact same defeatist argument that I consider harmful. The reasons are further down my comment above. There are better answers than 'it's doesn't work'.

> And this is what's informing the thought-leaders in the US administration.

More like them choosing what to listen to. There are a lot of pacifist preachers around. Why don't they ever catch these people's attentions?

The 'thought-leaders' don't form their beliefs around their spirituality. They form their spirituality around their beliefs. They choose what's convenient to them, so that they can claim divine authority to justify their bigotry and the atrocities they commit.

> about a person that, say what you will, is nowhere near the list of planetary "really bad guys". Even if we limit it to tech, the list starts with someone way richer, then goes through four or five way-shadier people.

You really don't need to go that high up the ladder to find members of the 'list of planetary really bad guys'. Sam Altman is single-handedly responsible for starting the current DRAM crunch - that too based on an untenable economic framework. He's also an enthusiastic participant in the AI bubble that threatens to cause a massive global economic depression when it pops. He's also involved in the cabal that wrecks the labor market (wages) by hyping up the 'AI will replace labor' narrative. On top of all that, he and his ilk are on a building spree of data centers that will guzzle huge amount of energy and dump tonnes of extra CO2 into the atmosphere, as if there's no tomorrow. This wrecks all the hard efforts of millions of others before him to rein in the damages caused by the climate change. Needless to say, all of these have pretty deleterious effects on the economy, biosphere and the welfare of ordinary people, including loss of innumerable lives.

But does he care? He is one of those people who simply ignore the trail of serious damage and enormous suffering they leave in their wake, because they don't see anything beyond money - more money than they can spend in a hundred lifetimes! Nobody needs a justification to see him as one of those 'planetary bad guys'.

> What does it say about your viewpoint?

As someone else here said, it goes without saying that lobbing Molotov cocktail at anyone is a no-no. I don't support physical violence in any form. Having said that,...

> If you're OK with victim-shaming here

It's sad that the aristocratic society didn't learn anything from the murder of Brian Thompson. The 'victim' had caused thousands of preventable deaths per year, and his death saved thousands by forcing the industry to deal with the problem. Suddenly, even the pacifists (like me) are left wondering if the death was unethical. If true justice existed, the state would have stopped them from their crimes (aka professions), if not outright execute them for the lives lost. Whom will you choose when they pitch their own lives against thousands of innocent lives? You can't claim victimhood after putting yourself in that position.

I read the New Yorker article like most people here. I didn't find anything incendiary enough in it to provoke a Molotov attack. I wouldn't put it past him to have arranged it himself, given how much he lies and what he stands to gain from it. But let's assume that the attack is real and is connected to the report. The reply seems overly dramatic and self-righteous, given that the attack was against his iron gate! He's milking the situation to indulge in virtue signaling, sympathy farming and gaslighting the critics. This is one hell of a victim posing! But I have no sympathies to spare if it distressed him so much. He shouldn't be able to sleep anyway, if only he had a conscience. Advocating sympathy for the unsympathetic super-privileged is a bit tone deaf under such circumstances. Evidently, nobody is in a mood to oblige to such manipulations.

>Selling an axe that's known to be so defective that it breaks upon use and impales anybody nearby. Even worse, it is sold as great for axe murders.

Please provide ChatGPT/Gemini marketing materials advertising it as good for mass killings.

'Source Available', not Open Source. It says so right in the README. The distinction is very important, since there are some who intentionally try to cause confusion between the two.

While I prefer open source over source available, I appreciate the fact that the intention here is clear from the start. I don't like the rug pull of converting an open source project into a source available project in the middle.

Yes! Moar Wars! That's what we now!

I couldn't read the entire article due to the paywall. But you have to hand it to the WSJ for publishing such an opinion piece when the entire world is suffering from an energy crunch caused by the ill-concieved misadventures of some bloodlusting mad men. Don't they have anything more important to worry about? Something like,... I don't know - health care, housing, food, education, child care and pensions for the masses? Do they instead want to provide yet another unsympathetic oligarch with the economic incentive to lobby the government into even more bloody and destructive wars?

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 explicitly prohibits stationing of nuclear weapons and other WMD in space. While it doesn't prevent conventional weapons from being fielded, what is the threshold for what is considered as mass destruction, given the lethality of today's conventional weapons? (Consider thermobaric weapons, for instance.) But the bigger question is, do we even want to go that route, given the genocides and the massacres of children that's happening around the world now? The current warfare isn't revolutionary enough?

Forget wars and fantasies like space datacenters. How far along are we to landing a starship on Mars or even just the Moon for which they were contracted and paid in bulk by NASA? You can accuse me of being an armchair critic (I was involved in the development of a mid heavy launcher). But I don't care. I haven't seen another launcher that hasn't entered orbit after ten development missions. The 'fix as you go' approach can be stretched only so far in any development, much less for a space launcher.

The lunar launch plan for Starship is frankly quite ridiculous, given how many Starships have to be launched for just one mission - the fuel depot, dozens of refueling flights and finally the lander! How did the nation that landed humans on the moon forget to ask fundamental engineering questions like payload capacity and cryogenic boil off rates in space? And that isn't even the hard part. They're talking about in-space refueling as if it's like going to a gas station. Even the cryo liquids floating around under micro-g inside the tank pose its own challenges. And on top of that, you have to worry about purging, chilling and sealing the transfer lines. Meanwhile even after seeing how the Apollo and Artemis missions work, how did anybody think that it's a great idea to propel the entire second stage of a two stage rocket into the moon's orbit?

I think everybody is reluctant to ask such questions fearing the ridicule "What do you know more than the smart guys at SpaceX?" But history keeps proving that convincing explanations matter more than credentials or authority. So far, that silence has enabled the transfer of public funds into private coffers. But now it threatens to disrupt the peace and stability of the world, as they try to repurpose an underperforming project to do what they like the most - bomb innocent civilians. Are we not ready to draw a line for what these oligarchs are allowed to do to pocket public money?

The working and poor population of the world are under enormous stress of unaffordability of every necessity including food and energy. Children are dying like flies due to famines and wars. And WSJ goes promoting war hawks who are scouting the world for the next country to bomb, invade and massacre. This is extremely disgraceful in my opinion. At some stage, we're going to have to define hard limits on this oligarchic greed.

The writing was on the wall when they tried to implement invasive telemetry on users, following an investment offer. They did walk back on it due to community backlash and boycott. But if history has shown us anything, corporate retreat happens only on account of loss of good will and brand value. Once the intent is established, they'll keep looking for other ways to satisfy it. The only difference between that incident and Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub is that the latter was a much louder signal about what was to follow.

Are you not aware of the techno-authoritarian ambitions of the silicon valley tech bros? It isn't much of a secret these days, after they published a few books detailing their aspirations, a bit like Project 2025. There are even public videos where they express their disdain for competition and democracy. A few prominent individuals in this cabal are publicly known. Mr. Lawn Mower here is at the forefront of it and it also includes the owners of many AI and surveillance companies. And they're all actively associated with extreme right wing governments.

Look at the known uses of AI by governments these days. Targeting of immigrants in Minnesota and selection of targets in Gaza and Iran to blow up. And look at the companies contributing to them. Some of the usual suspects are all present and contributing models, data centers and intel inputs.

Is it possible that some of the richest people are collaborating to subdue the rest of the population for their benefit? Does this sound like a conspiracy theory to you? Good! This sounds too fantastic and alarmist even to me. Skepticism is warranted. But the evidences are not mere speculations or leaps of faith. Many are well known facts reported by mainstream media. Besides, this isn't the first time that the greedy and egomaniacal individuals have banded together to consolidate wealth. You already know what they mean when they talk about 'absolute free speech', 'free market capitalism', etc. You've also seen their birth defect of missing empathy in action. And it doesn't help that many of them have an unhealthy obsession with apocalyptic prophecies of several religions (meanwhile, they never seem to notice the nice parts - ever). So a nightmare scenario isn't entirely inconceivable.

Why hasn't the AI bubble burst yet? Why do high profile men engage in cringy public bromance, followed by a messy divorce and then get back together again discretely? What are all their Mein Kampf style fantasy books and outrageous opinions about? Why did doge vacuum up highly sensitive demographic data that seems irrelevant to them? What's with all those shady and convoluted business deals and money transactions that look as if they're scheming a coup? And why the hell are all of them so obsessed with building fortified bunkers under their backyards?

Forget all that. Trump publicly announced yesterday that the military is building a 'massive complex' under that gaudy monstrosity that he calls the ballroom. Apparently, that hideous structure is only a lid for what's underneath. But I wasn't surprised a bit! The reason? A very smart lady had argued the exact same assertion two months ago! She took the details of the 'private donors' of the ballroom, the construction partners and their spending and purchase manifests, to convincingly argue that they're building a massive AI datacenter underground for the military. The costs were too high for the ballroom and many purchases were unconventional, to say the least. She said the exact same thing back then - that the ballroom is just a lid for an underground facility! I mean, if you are a military with a lethal strategic AI, you certainly wouldn't expose it like a traditional datacenter.

I feel like I'm paranoid just saying all these. But the world we live in today was unthinkable more than a decade ago. I don't want to spread confusion and paranoia. But it's also getting too late to ignore the developments. Just keep an eye for what's happening in this area. It's safer to be an unpopular prepper in this political climate, than be caught by surprise if it comes down to that.

throw in the san fran technobabble of "permanent underclass" and you have a lot of people pushing to overthrow the slow, boring democracy

As much as I dislike gatekeeping measures like UK's age verification, you can't deny the genuine problem that exists in this case. But it isn't 'machine bad'. There is no good technology or bad technology. It's the intention of those who wield it, that is good or bad. In other words, it's good people vs bad people with technology.

The issue in this particular case is that those content and their web servers are set up for human traffic. In the worst case, a human consumes a few megabytes of data from the server and then leaves. A few of those visits will convert into a job or business opportunity - a fair bargain. LLM scrapers are not like that. They're greedy resource hogs. They not only want everything you have, a whole bunch of them do it repeatedly and endlessly to your server. There's no possible way to justify the cost of such massive bandwidth consumption for a bunch of parasites that never give anything in return. And what do we get? A crappy user experience from all those sites putting up protection measures. This is the tragedy of the commons.

So who is the culprit? The greedy bunch who created the technology that behaves like this and then benefits immensely from it. Are those bad people? Absolutely! Naturally, we need them and their ill intentioned creations off our shared spaces. This isn't anything new. This game has been playing out in different forms since eternity.