Indeed. Roddenberry seemed to think he should be like an older Kirk, a bit more dynamic and physically large on screen.

I'm glad they went with a more thoughtful and philosophical Picard. I only wish he had been given more opportunities to flex it, because when he did it tended to be brilliant.

No argument there. I'm just fed up with people pretending that the problem is with boring utilities and civilization; rather than with CEOs and their circles.

It's especially irksome when it comes from the areas of 'tech' that are frankly kind of lightweight in a technical sense. Somehow the hardware side manages to go from 800nm to 5nm without sounding off their meds about it; while dudes who manage to pay someone to pay AWS to serve some javascript to a webview on an iphone are babbling about how how disruptive their innovation is.

Remember when people here were hyping up Apple's Vision Pro as being the next big thing for professionals and on-the-go working? Unlimited massive monitors all around you on the plane, instructions overlaid over the thing you are working on, AI vision built in.

Who needs a 92 inch TV when you can put on a Vision Pro and watch a movie on the crapper?

These won't be any different. At least they don't need a front camera to relay the image to the screens just so you can see what is in front of you, but there simply aren't any good AR apps. Certainly nothing worth the cost of the glasses, the weight, and needing to charge it regularly.

Thanks, Fastmail looks decent. Non-US company as well.

Realistically email hosting is probably a safe-ish business. The required software is already more or less commodified(and the sort of people who pay extra for Proton rather than just using gmail or whatever their ISP points them to are the ones who specifically Do Not want you churning the UI all the time), just not desperately entertaining to administer; and the major challenge(even if you just ignore the amount of admin required to stay on top of security risks when internet facing and hope to get lucky) is achieving the necessary scale and stubbornness to get decent odds of delivery on the various major recipients of email who, at least initially, shoot the spammer and ask questions later or never if novel senders start popping up.

You could already DIY-mailsever in a fairly short span of time well before it became viable to ask a bot to do it; people just prefer not to because babysitting postfix just so that you can get rejected by the various services people you are tryign to reach use is not terribly rewarding.

It's not necessarily a glamorous or high margin sort of business; adequately competent hosted email isn't a wildly differentiated product; but people tend to not enjoy changing email addresses/repointing DNS/migrating mailboxes; so it's not a super cutthroat commodified market where people switch every quarter for the absolute lowest price. If you don't do anything particularly obnoxious or try to push price hikes there's a decent amount of inertia.

However, and this is what makes this guy's ranting seem so unhinged, it's precisely not the sort of business where you'd expect some sort of "AI transformation"; or a bunch of panting about whether the stack has velocity. Proton's config is a bit more fiddly than average, because it is supposed to provide better than 'just trust me bro' privacy assurances; but they do operate the fax machine of the internet age. We call it "email". And their customers are paying them for mailserver stay up; not the agentic everything app.

I'm not sure if this guy is butthurt because he didn't manage to score a nobel during his science time; or because he's not looking at an altman IPO; but the fact that he is screaming like a lunatic about “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity" when he runs something that is, as a feature, supposed to be a deeply boring utility suggests profound temperamental unsuitability.

It seems ironic, and a little telling, for the CEO of a company whose whole purpose is "mailserver stay up; securely" to be screaming at people about " Don't be the professional fax machine operator in the internet age".

Dude, you aren't some kind of randroid superman hero of industry. You run a kind of boring utility company. Which is fine; civilization runs on boring utilities quietly handled by competent people. Problem is that you don't seem to be fine with it.

Kurtzman gave us Picard. Although it had some severe problems, it did also give us some great moments with Patrick and Picard.

It's a shame it never reached the highs of Strange New Worlds or Prodigy in terms of the writing, but I'm glad we got it.

He brought credibility to a genera that had previously been lacking in it. Instead of cheesy dialogue and hammy plots, he showed that it could be a solid drama with great performances from the actors. Then he did it again for superhero movies.

His final movie, Avengers Doomsday, is going to be bitter sweet.

Thanks. Based in Germany is good. It's a shame they only do a few services. Part of the problem is that to completely de-Google you need to replace things like Google Maps and Android as well. YouTube is another big one. Nothing else offers anything like as much for sharing video, and of course everyone you want to watch is on there and isn't going to switch to a PeerTube instance for the the 3 people who use it.

If only it was as simple as "don't use it". Used to be that communities formed around mailing lists and webrings. Now if you aren't on Discord, Twitter, and YouTube, you are going to be isolated from them.

I am involved in the Japanese electronics and retro computing scene. When many people left Twitter due to Musk turning it into a Nazi bar, the drama seemed to mostly pass the Japanese users by. English speaking communities fragmented onto BlueSky, the Fediverse, and Twitch. So I lost contact with both some of the English speaking ones, and almost all of the Japanese ones. Man, I just want to read about unusual Japanese street lights, or the new project someone made for the FM Towns Marty, but it's all happening on Twitter. At least the Japanese still use blogs I guess.

They have already put far too much emphasis on AI with their phones. When Pixel phones started they had A+ cameras, the absolute best you could get on a phone, at least for still photos. Video was always a bit weak, but for photos there was nothing else close.

A few years ago they stopped really pushing the camera technology and went all in on AI instead. Their CPUs have mediocre performance, but always tout big AI chops, which rarely amount to anything. The supposedly exclusive features that they unlock always get back-ported to older devices within days of release.

Their cameras are maybe B+ now. Some considerable distance behind the leaders, especially Xiaomi and Honor with their huge sensors and optics. It's so sad.

He was cast by Robert H. Justman. Roddenberry had different ideas about who Picard was supposed to be, but in the end going with a British actor with that commanding voice, a mixture of Yorkshire and stage trained, turned out to be perfect for the role. Steward brought gravitas and subtlety to the role, in equal measure.

Crypto makes it much easier. The crypto can be laundered through mixing, and moved to countries that won't extradite.

In this case they are blaming North Korea, which if accurate means that the money will simply be traded with China and Russia.

Are there any good alternatives? Don't say self host, that's a lot of work and your emails will be blocked anyway.

Normal industry: Your factory has an expensive milling machine and a cheap stamping machine. Thankfully, customers actually seem to prefer stamped parts for most cases and you can produce those quickly; so you keep stamping out parts and rolling in cash.

Tech industry: As above but your entire c-suite believes that the milling machine with turn into mecha-jesus and end history; so you are bulldozing everything you can to build more milling machines.