dangus

The advantages Gmail had when it arrived on the scene just don’t exist anymore.

We have to remember that when Gmail was released, email providers were stingy on storage and decent web mail was unheard of.

Now, if you run over to a paid alternative like FastMail you’ll actually have a faster/better webmail experience.

I also think everyone should use email on their own domain so that it’s easy to kick your provider to the curb if they go downhill. As long as you own the domain you can do whatever you want.

Here’s one, and my understanding is that Wooting is well-regarded:

https://wooting.io/wooting-two-he

I’m not sure why you think protectionism (by the local government) can’t kill an industry. It happened to American steel as well: the American steel industry was “protected” while foreign steel companies innovated their production processes.

The timeline goes like this:

1. Government gets pressured by industry to protect domestic industry from outside competition

2. Domestic industry stagnates as it has no reason to make competitive products

3. Time passes, quality/value gulf becomes so large that it becomes impossible to catch up to competition. It becomes impossible to export your goods and even domestic customers look elsewhere.

If the USA dropped tariffs and bans against Chinese car companies, American car companies would need to improve rapidly to survive. Instead, they’re selling us $50,000 decade old dinosaur designs like the Chrysler Pacifica.

This literally already happened to them with Japanese cars. And let me tell you, you don’t want to drive a Chevrolet from before Honda and Toyota sold cars in the United States.

Not protectionism related, but look at the MacBook Neo competitors shown off by Dell and HP at Computex. Competition drives innovation and cost reduction for consumers. Apple forced HP and Dell to make an affordable aluminum chassis computer for the masses and consumers are the winner in the situation.

But that’s what I’m saying: don’t equate ads and other BS with the architectural basis of the OS. The ads and the junk can be removed and I’m hoping Microsoft decides to clean those types of elements up as they face pressure from competitors.

Buggy and filled with performance bottlenecks? I don’t really agree with that. I would challenge a user in a blind test running full screen apps to tell the difference between the three major operating systems.

TPM isn’t something to get hung up on. I use it with Linux. Having some way to ensure system integrity is a feature of all major modern operating systems. The vast majority of people would never install an OS on their own, so this is an issue that doesn’t affect anyone relatively speaking. The average person only upgrades their Windows OS when they buy a new computer.

I want to buy a Chinese car and I am annoyed that my protectionist government won’t let me. Lowering transportation cost would be the most impactful thing to my budget.

All that serves to do is ensure the American car industry falls far behind by being coddled into a lack of competition.

Toyota showed the world the Toyota Production System. What Tesla, Kia/Hyundai, and Chinese EVs have shown American automakers is how much vertical integration can be an asset, especially with the lower part counts of electric vehicles.

The model where every part is contracted out to parts manufacturers is proving to be antiquated.

Corporations across the board are experiencing record profitability. That's the reason behind the high valuations.

This isn't true of AI companies...yet. But these are companies entering the market with pre-IPO userbase (including lots of B2B) numbers that Meta and YouTube would have dreamed of before their acquisition/IPO.

I think this whole situation is very sleazy and corrupt, but ultimately my prediction is that nothing serious will come of it. Even the exposure of index and passive investing is overstated.

I'm not sure how long we can continue being negative about these AI companies. This idea that there will be a crash has often burned the bears in a way that has become an Internet meme.

In reality, corporations as a whole are seeing record profits continuing through 2026. Whether or not the average person is doing well is pretty irrelevant to the stock market: if companies are increasingly profitable, stocks go up.

Everything I hear about Anthropic points to a company that is actually closer to profitability and possibly already profitable, unlike many of its other peers.

We don't really look at YouTube as a failure and that product was unprofitable for many years. Nobody thinks the Uber bubble is going to burst even though it has never made back its investment money.

I think OpenAI is undisciplined and poorly run hence the insane burning of cash. Sam Altman is a terrible CEO and a conman. Anthropic is run by legit people.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta face essentially no negative consequence for burning cash. They have no urgent need to be efficient about their AI investments, even if they could be.

SpaceX is of course not profitable and has a lot of baggage but they still have a major asset, which is that Starlink prints utility company levels of money and is expanding both customer base and profit margins rapidly. Are they overvalued? Yeah, of course.

At this point you might as well jump fully on the e-ink phone train and not even really bother with a full blown smartphone.

I really hope for competition’s sake that Microsoft makes some reforms and cleans up Windows.

Because us nerds like to say “the software is awful,” but really, the bones of Windows are not awful at all. It generally works well, it just takes a lot of work to get all of the BS out of your way.

If you’re looking for open source friendly, just buy a Framework 13 Pro and be done with it.

By the way, the other news from Computex is Dell and HP’s Macbook Neo competition, and they really look legit. So, Apple is waking up the PC industry a bit, showing them that they are endangered. Hopefully Microsoft gets the memo.

Just a side comment to this: since Trump term 2, companies have been spending their time, energy, and money trying to cozy up to government leaders when they should have been cozying up to their customers and employees.

Now, AI, data centers, and tech in general are so unpopular that going against them even in a symbolic way is an easy political win on either side of the aisle.

This is the industry that used to have people hyped about iPod and iPhone launch keynotes, lining up at retail stores days ahead of time to experience new technology.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/06/ai-concerns-americans-ad...

Imagine if more than half of Americans thought the iPod mini was bad for society.

I remember when it was 1998 and people in khaki pants were telling us that the information superhighway was going to transport us to a scholastic utopia.

Or because I don’t want my homelab to spike my electricity bill and give me a loud hot closet.

The Xeon processor in use by the OP of this article claims to have 20MB of Intel “Smart Cache.”

An Apple M4 chip in a Mac mini has 16MB on the P-cores and 4MB on the E-cores.

Depending on use case, AMD 3D V-cache at almost 100MB could also work out quite well.

So really, if you wait long enough, consumer chips end up with a pretty similar amount of cache.

You can call it whatever you want, money is money, and money spent on energy is footprint.

I don’t know why you’d assume that an older system is lower footprint.

If you’ve got something consuming 100 watts average over your 24 hour period, and your electricity costs 20 cents per kWh, you’re already spending almost as much as a Claude subscription.

Just on electricity, this assumes your hardware never fails and you never incur any additional costs.

There’s a big reason why newer more efficient hardware is in demand. Something that’s 10+ years old has drastically worse performance per watt.

Obviously I am not saying to throw away your old hardware as a rule but there is a point where some of this old stuff just isn’t even worth running.

In the gaming sphere these kinds of loud-ass mechanical keyboards are absolutely not in vogue anymore.

Many gamers are even migrating over to hall effect sensors over mechanical switches, since you have a full analog customizable setup for key actuation.

I have used similar retro keyboards to this. I think it was that company that got the machinery from IBM.

This stuff has cool factor but it’s pretty terrible compared to the incredibly varied and fully customizable modern mechanical keyboard market.

It was a nice novelty for me to have an “IBM keyboard” but outside the novelty it wasn’t anywhere close to being a competitive keyboard.

Someone interested in this should just buy real vintage equipment as the novelty factor on that is way higher.

Maybe you don’t do anything with your computer but for me the difference between my sudo+password/fingerprint and sudoless access to my linux user is huge.

For one thing, 1Password unlocks with system authentication unless it’s been inactive for a certain amount of time or if the system has been restarted.

Without sudo you can’t modify my firewall rules, can’t modify my kernel, boot partition, install/run privileged software, and the list goes on and on.

Sure, having my local account compromised would be really bad, but security is done in layers. I’m not going to give my local user permanent root access via docker just because I didn’t feel like typing “sudo.” That’s not enough of a benefit to leave that door wide open.

Think about it this way: there could be an exploit where you could run something as my user without knowing my password. Maybe some program my user is running has an exploit, let’s say yet another npm package gets compromised and I unwittingly run it. If you can now run anything in docker as root with that blast radius just got way worse.

HP EliteBook 840 G10

13th Gen Intel, 14” screen, 16GB/512GB at about $350.

Lenovo and Dell both make similar business laptop models at around the same age and price point.

Businesses sell off perfectly functional laptops in bulk because they are on regular refresh cycles for employees, not because there’s anything wrong with them.

On the Mac side, MacBook Air M1.

Right, why is their login user in the docker group? Mine sure isn’t.

AI isn’t an addictive thing at the level of sugar, nicotine, or alcohol.

We can’t blame bicycles or dumbbells for exercise addiction.

You started those projects because you felt like starting those projects.

Ironically [1], a lot of ycombinator founders would set themselves up for a lot more financial independence, work life balance, and personal freedom if they skipped the low success rate founder’s grind and just joined stable large companies with good stock award plans and focused on FIRE.

[1] or maybe that’s not the right term

This whole subject is very annoying coming from a wealthy capitalist of this type.

If PG thinks we weren’t meant to live this way, I’d like to see him out there fighting for universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education including no-tuition college, higher tax rates for billionaires and upcoming trillionaires, abolishing excessive wealth (e.g., we should tax all wealth and assets over $999 million 100% and/or force employee/community ownership of company shares of excessively wealthy individuals), abolishing for-profit prison labor, etc.

If you think this is extreme I would like you to explain how one person being a millionaire 300 times like Paul Graham is isn’t extreme. And then you realize that Elon Musk is as wealthy as 1000+ Paul Grahams.

I don't need to hear another VC giving a management seminar about how unnatural modern work is. I’d like to see them start changing people’s lives for the better, maybe they could start by advocating for the basic needs of the poorest people in our society or something like that.

That must be really low end then. I’ve never seen it complete in a timeframe that was slower than “I can’t even read the page before it redirects”

Did I sign anything? EULAs aren’t necessarily 100% enforceable.

What would a reasonable person expect out of the transaction?

Which promises and verbiage in the marketing material contradict the EULA?

Another option is to actually take them to arbitration. There are starting to be law firms that specialize in mass-filing multiple arbitration suits instead of class actions and they are pretty interesting because some companies are finding it more difficult to deal with than class action lawsuits.

That said, EULAs are also often written in ways that are unenforceable. Just because a company says they get something doesn’t mean the law agrees.

Does the judge in my small claims case give a shit about the EULA if the defendant fails to show up?

I think this blames the technology way too much.

> Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it.

So don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm.

Nobody told the author to sit down and write a bunch of random useless stuff.

This is like blaming your bicycle for enabling you to stop at too many shops that you didn’t mean to go to when you originally meant to ride straight to the grocery store.

You’re right, I’m sure nobody’s made any kind of mass activation scripts that you could find online and get a better experience than paying customers.

I would encourage affected customers to go to small claims court. You’ll probably get a default judgment. Small claims court was created for just this type of issue.

I’m pretty sure MAGA has already floated the idea of indiscriminately putting Democrats in prison, as well as making criticism of Dear Leader a crime.

Ironically, the wording on this site does a good job of explaining how “aliens” live among us and we didn’t even notice any negative impact or harm from that happening.

But MAGA brownshirts will never pick up on that level of nuance.

I also think the intended audience of this website doesn’t have the patience or reading ability to wait through that endless scroll of text.