I'd love to, but I eat meat, I'm an atheist, and I do own a TV (though it doesn't get all that much use...)

AI has pushed the prices of storage through the roof, so... thanks, AI! I'm betting that's what's behind this.

Oh yes, sure. I've seen users whose INBOX has held tens of thousands of messages. That is simply madness.

My brother-in-law is the extreme opposite: Hundreds of specific folders and sub-folders. IMO, that's also madness.

Plus it gives Google a reason not to kick me off their product which would honestly be catastrophic for me at this point.

One of the reasons I pro-actively de-Googled my life. I don't want to be at the mercy of some faceless corporation's AI deciding to fire me as a "customer".

I self-host. It's not free; I pay about $8/month for a cloud VM that's my MX host and mail filter. The actual IMAP server is a Raspberry Pi in my house. I'm guessing the total hardware cost was about $500 (it has two 6TB USB drives in RAID-1 as the main storage) and it uses about $0.75 worth of electricity per month. I expect the hardware to last at least 5 years, so all in it's about $17/month for as many mailboxes as I like as well as total control and (essentially) unlimited storage.

I have an archive of all of my email going back to 1992. No plans to get rid of it.

It is organized nicely into separate folders and easily searchable. Total disk space is about 10.5GB, and seeing as I self-host my email, it's taking up 0.19% of my server's disk space. Why would I care about pruning that?

If you have more subscriptions than you can remember, you have bigger problems than AI can solve.

I have exactly two monthly subscriptions: Internet access, and my newspaper subscription. I think I can manage to remember those...

"Sam Altman wet his pants thinking of how he can use your personal financial information. So did all the algorithmic pricing bros!!!!"

Every exam I took in university was supervised. And while I did graduate quite a while ago, it wasn't 133 years ago.

I think there's a big difference between calculators and AI. Calculators made doing arithmetic much easier. But arithmetic is just rote; there's no creativity involved. If you are asked for the product of 59 * 74, you're going to get 4366 if you do it correctly, whether you do it in your head, on paper, or with a calculator. And if you do without a calculator, you're still going to follow a rote algorithm.

Software development is different. Writing a piece of software requires creativity, IMO, for all but the most trivial of programs. Give three different expert programmers the same spec and you'll almost certainly get three quite different but correct programs. Outsourcing creativity is very different from outsourcing rote, deterministic algorithmic processing. Creativity is regarded as what makes us human (or it used to be, anyway) and I for one don't want to outsource that. That's why I don't use AI for anything, and why I'm happy I retired from paid software development three years ago.

I maintain a few hobby projects, one quite actively, and I do not allow AI anywhere near them. I get to express my creativity and not care about managers demanding I use AI.

I still remember how to use a slide rule (for multiplication, anyway...) even though I haven't actually used one in decades.

It's all just logarithms. Logarithms turn multiplication into addition.

I retired from software development in 2023. My mantra is:

I'm so glad I retired when I did. I'm so glad I retired when I did. I'm so glad I retired when I did....

I guess I'm lucky; I hardly ever get bitten by mosquitoes. Maybe one or two bites per year.

When I was living in Newfoundland, though, and we went out into the country for day trips or camping, the blackflies took chunks out of me on a regular basis. Blackflies are truly nasty little beasts.

The EU is not trying to parent your kids. It's trying to regulate product safety, which governments have been doing for ages.

Right... Airbus cannot possibly compete with Boeing. ARM cannot possibly compete with Intel. Siemens cannot possibly compete with... well, actually, I think Siemens dominates the industrial controls space and I can't think of a comparable US company.

And ASML? Nobody competes with ASML.

Your post is typical of Americans who somehow think the US can do everything better than anyone else. Meanwhile, the US is rapidly losing ground.

And while NL is geographically only a bit larger than New Jersey, it has about double the population and that's the metric that matters.