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.

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

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.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

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.

It seems likely that the answer to this question is 'yes'; but it seems like a mistake to be distracted by it when we are talking about people who are, busily and intentionally, building 'AI' products against the public.

It's mildly comical when they attempt to emulate humanity; but the important bit isn't the cluelessness; it's the malice.

I suspect that this would be more tedious(and potentially less flattering); but you'd think that the metric you'd really care about for the juche-computer would be component availability.

Going by cost is interesting if you are trying to get the attention of balance-of-trade types and tariffs and dumping hawks; but it's an almost perfectly wrong measure if you are trying to catch any "oops, turns out that only the Chinese vendors so hungry they are considering offshoring to Vietnam still make a random passive or unexciting tolerances switching IC because it's a zero-margin part with no real room for differentiation that everyone who could got out of years ago" type situations.

If it's a real, drop-dead, 'national security' problem some of those are probably less serious, if there's a much fancier TI part that is overkill for the job but could be subbed in for only 3-4 factors of ten more; but if you want to keep economically viable civilian production open or it doesn't have a direct upmarket analog that could get really awkward; even if you've ensured that all the fancy logic ICs, copper, and gold are geopolitically friendly.

That's basically the Nexperia story, slightly simplified. Philips decided to private equity semiconductors generally; NXP decided to shove a bunch of the boring parts out to WingTech; then 'oops' European manufacturers who need diodes and ESD protection parts they thought were cheap jellybean stuff have cars piling up on the line because they can't get them.

Obviously losing a really cutting edge capability isn't preferred; but it's also the sort of thing that people notice because those tend to be pretty valuable; while low and middling capabilities, including ones that are sophisticated enough that you can't just throw money at restoring them fast, are things that are voluntarily surrendered because getting rid of low margin products makes line go up.

This seems like a great pick if you want to be absolutely sure that your computing stays between you, the techbros, republican loyalists in 'national security'; and possibly an Israeli software partner or two.

At least no chicom lithium stealing your thoughts.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

"with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes." sounds like they got the replacement they were looking for to me.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

I didn't mean to imply that it is a single monolithic application, it does consist of several, but the relations must be pretty tight for there to be an article not even about language-independence; but about support for a single additional language, one often targeted by "C but cleaned up" efforts,

I was honestly surprised to see this myself. Regardless of its reputation for being more monolithic than classic init systems it still is, and has to be, capable of interacting with basically any flavor of service you'd want a service manager to manage; and I would assume that it doesn't include a d-bus implementation in order to not be capable of abstracted inter-process communication.

No doubt there are considerations at work here that I'm not smart enough to grasp; if you aren't having a bad time handling x.509 certificates you probably aren't doing it carefully enough; but I would not have expected it to be remarkable at all for a certificate-wrangling component to be implemented in a different language than some of the other components.