Even Google gets less cash, because users who get their answer immediately from AI won't read multiple pages of irrelevant results and ads disguised as answers. This is actually one of the reasons for Google's current stock meltdown.

Personally I find that the AI digest is good enough for my less serious searches - which are probably the majority. For important things, I don't stop at the AI response - I dig deeper and read multiple sources (and even there, AI sometimes recommends relevant links that aren't as easy to find with regular search).

I am against government involvement in any construction or any planning of infrastructure whatsoever. I am against government as a general principle. People taking care of themselves is the basis for all humam civilization in the first place.

If it's free, how are you going to stop people from using it to make money off you, in both honest and dishonest ways?

it will now be completely impossible to research any purchase, awesome

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.

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.

why is there no law that somebody who sucks has to go before we get another one of these

BRING BACK USENET!

Wait, you believe that government builds sewer pipes, gas systems, plumbing, roads? All of these things were and are built by private companies and should be built by private companies, not governments. Nothing should be done or built by governments, there shouldn't be any government employees, all government employees should be fired, all government regulation need to be abolished. People will rebuild everything, there shouldn't be even such things as government enforced zoning laws.

i2p and TahoeLAFS mean that anyone with five old ThinkCentres can have censorship-resistant hosting and their own experience curation. The internet never had to be beholden to payment processors, which are the parties responsible for the vast majority of the problems on it. But touching computers is boring and icky, and the people who do it refuse to front-end shit like that, so here we are.

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.

Nobody should be working for any government, givernment jobs should be stigmatized, people working for government should be stigmatized, gobernments shouldn't have employees. People working for governments should be scared that other normal people will find out.

I can say with high confidence that more than half of the population doesn't.

All they have is what looks like some AI slop video vaguely connecting the concept of this possible truck to whatever you think the American Dream might be.

I predict it will be delayed until 2030, will cost $70k, and will have less cargo capacity and range than some e-bikes.