There's a vibe in at least the PNW that feels like the tech sector is sloughing jobs and avoiding creating new ones courtesy of AI. I genuinely wonder if that feeling is backed by reality and whether it's large enough to be translating into national statistics across all industries.
In Washington it is much broader than the tech sector.
Washington is being buried in indefensibly bad legislation that is extremely hostile to large companies and tech companies of every size for openly ideological reasons. It has rapidly become one of the worst business environments in the country when it used to be one of the best. Many companies have stopped or reduced hiring in Seattle and are moving operations to other States; there is a new announcement in the news every other day.
I know several longtime residents that have recently moved out of State or are no longer domiciled there as a consequence. There was an article in the news just this week that housing prices are starting to decline rapidly in Seattle.
It is looking like they couldn't help themselves and killed the golden goose.
Which policies specifically? Certainly not the income tax on million+ income, seems pretty modest. We moved from TX. Property tax rate is low, no income tax sub million in income, schools are great (and almost all new), roads are fine and transit seeing massive investment. They definitely need to fix budget, but there's _ample_ wealth here to deal with it. I think they'll figure it out.
_Oregon_ has bad policies (10% income tax on all, upwards of 14% on high income earners at 400k); schools are in a rough place, their legacy pension system is a disaster. But Washington seems fine imo. TX and such states will always be a draw while their cost of living is low, if you don't mind the heat and general lack of outdoors (relative to PNW). IMO the weather and housing prices are the main tradeoffs between WA and TX.
You can add in the increasing B&O (revenue) taxes, payroll taxes, data center taxes, and the expansion of the extremely high sales taxes to things that effectively make Washington uncompetitive. The cost of doing business has become unreasonably high and is so badly structured that it creates perverse incentives for how you organize business.
And then you have a litany of new business regulation across every sector of the local economy. My recent favorite, which fortunately did not make it out of this session due to heavy lobbying by tech, was requiring data centers to turn-off power during periods of high electricity demand. It's insane that this is even being seriously considered.
Oregon is also a mess but it has always been a mess.
Texas isn't the only alternative. Turning Washington into California with worse weather even makes California relatively attractive.
>You can add in the increasing B&O (revenue) taxes, payroll taxes, data center taxes, and the expansion of the extremely high sales taxes to things that effectively make Washington uncompetitive.
None of this matters. We have been hearing how California is doing the same shit for years and people are moving out in droves, but turns out California house prices are still high because people are staying there and its still a very good place to live and work on the average, despite way higher cost of living.
Oregon has some decent things going for it. Multnomah county is rolling out Preschool for All and it's wildly popular. I know lots of people who were going to move, but stayed in Oregon just because they got into the early lottery for it.
There’s no way preschool for all is broadly popular.
It soaks the “rich” with an income threshold that isn’t indexed to inflation and kicks in at an income level where preschool is still a major affordability challenge.
And then you pay PFA and don’t get preschool for your kid because we’re still years away from having enough seats for everyone.
So it is preschool for some (multco paying for seats in existing preschool, aka kicking your kid out of their preschool spot) paid for by the broad middle class.
Even Kotek was ragging on it.
2020’s 125k/200k thresholds should be today’s 150/250 thresholds. They are not.
This is all a temporary problem. PFA will roll out to everyone, income thresholds can be (and are) renegotiated, and as someone who has a large PFA tax burden, I'm happy to pay for it even if my kids will age out before I get the benefit. I have never met anyone outside of ranting internet commenters who is actually mad about this situation.
Establishing free universal child care as the norm that everyone agrees we have to find a way to provide is the real virtue here. Detractors like you are missing the forest for the trees.
For readers not in Washington, there is currently legislation being worked on that is essentially a millionaire's tax, (simplified as) 10% income tax on income over 1 million dollars, inflation adjusted.
There are a few very angry, emotional, and vocal opponents of this in most corners of the internet, although very few of them actually make a million dollars and there are many million+ income people supporting this.
Demographically, there are over 3 million households in WA, and only 20k of them would be affected.
The bigger news is that it would be WA's first-ever income tax, along with the tax on capital gains income they just introduced. You can look at any historical example of introducing income tax in the US to see that the rates always expand to lower brackets over time.
I lived in the Seattle area and would be affected by some of these taxes. I moved to California recently. WA lost its tax advantage, so If I’m now going to be paying the same taxes, I might as well enjoy better weather and schools for my kids.
And there is such small thing as state constitution that explicitly forbids any income tax.
Current government is using it as toilet paper, first by introducing capital gains tax, and now income tax.
I see in another comments though that you argue in bad faith by dismissing opponent arguments as “small amount”, “talking points”. If you don’t have anything real to say, don’t bother to answer.
Maybe the opponents consider it a foot in the door; a wedge that can be expanded gradually to include lower tiers at lower percentages AKA the beginning of a WA State Income Tax. There are not few 400k households in Seattle.
The majority of states have one so it's not that big a deal, but it'll be less often said "I'm going to turn down this higher SF offer for Seattle b/c of lower COL...".
I'm not sure where the next refuge will be. Austin? Memphis?
There has been zero accountability for that massive budget shortfall. Revenue has increased 2x over the last decade with nothing to show for it. People are rightly skeptical of giving them even more money. And they have gone about trying to increase revenue even more in just about the most toxic ways possible, which will almost certainly erode the tax base.
That state desperately needs to restructure its finances but the legislature is almost complete captured by clueless ideologues. Washington isn't California. Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.
I've lived a large fraction of my life in Washington and I'm watching the State commit suicide in real-time.
“ Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.”
How old are you? What propaganda told you this? In my generation (young millennial/genz) the attraction of living in Seattle, which pulled me and almost a dozen professional friends at this point has been:
- high quality urban living in a temperate environment. Including access to great parks, waterfront, bikeability in the city
- access to great outdoors and regional amenities like skiing, ocean fishing, hiking, wine country
- liberal policies and general friendly society (it’s friendlier here than the east coast)
- no state income tax (we’re all very high tax bracket)
- a high enough income population that you can find a plethora of high-end products and services that cluster around high income earners (only a few us cities have this stronger than Seattle I feel)
Oregon ticks most of those boxes except the difference is that Oregon has very few jobs. People flock to WA because of jobs created by long-standing business friendly policies.
That doesn't explain everything, obviously, but I think you need to take it into consideration. For decades I've heard this in some form from people: "Oregon is amazing, but I had to leave when I couldn't get a job." Meanwhile the Sea-Tac region has had amazing growth, packed wall-to-wall with a range of companies.
I agree, difference between explosive growth and “consistent draw” is large employers setting up in the region.
Another interesting anecdote is that I know many people who work remote for companies all over the world who moved to the Seattle area once they had a remote job. I am one of these people who moved once I got a remote job. Im not sure what kind of impact this has long run. I think the flywheel drawing high skill people to Seattle is still very strong.
For my demographic (Early genz), there are only 3 reasons to be here:
A. Their job is only available here
B. No state income tax
(C?). They REALLY love skiing/hiking
People have always regularly left for NYC/Bay Area, but I predict it will start to happen in droves over the next few years as A rapidly fades and legislation begins to threaten B.
Have you read about _where_ the budget is going? You are complaining about accountability without offering a diagnosis or showing any understanding for what is actually happening.
The budget expansion is almost entirely by medicaide.
Looking at 2019-2023
* Human Services: +~50% nominal → ~+22% real — biggest absolute dollar growth, driven almost entirely by Medicaid expansion and COVID enrollment
* K-12: +23% nominal → ~0% real — flat in purchasing power
* Higher Education: +~20% nominal → ~-2% real — slight real decline
* Government Operations: +~30% nominal → ~+6% real — modest real growth, headcount/compensation driven
The tech companies killed the golden goose that was handed to them. They got too greedy. Amazon basically got carte blanche to build in Seattle, and plenty of tax credits to do so.
Amazon and their founder then told WA gov that they were going to relocate to Florida. WA gov said "well, we paid billions for your infrastructure, so if you're going to leave, please partially refund us" and Bezos whined and whined and whined. Imagine, a guy worth (at the time) nearly half a trillion dollars being told that he should have to pay a few hundred million dollars for his broken promises.
Imagine being given incredibly generous tax incentives for decades that allowed you to build a multi trillion dollar company, and then whining when the giver of those incentives asks for a tiny portion of that to be paid back when you tell them you're leaving.
I don't know either. I do wonder if AI is just and excuse since saying "we have to let people go because the economy is bad and our costs are up." spooks investors while "We adopted magic AI and don't need people anymore" sounds like these companies are being proactive so investors don't dump their stocks.
They also want to get as close to a skeleton crew as possible. They believe developers can do everything while simultaneously driving down the cost of developers.
They've been boiling the frog with increasing job requirements since at least one or two decades ago, and AI is conveniently aligned towards this goal.
Considering the first companies to claim AI has made many redundant are the same companies that overhired during Covid, I think it's pretty clear how the wind is blowing.
Companies move in a group, if you're the only company doing layoffs you look weak and predators will pounce and the board will ask uncomfortable questions, but if everyone is doing it, they'll ask why you are NOT.
The idea doesn't really make sense to me. We know LLMs increase productivity, especially for coding, but increasing productivity shouldn't make you fire people unless your business has already exhausted any potential for growth. Instead we would expect the increased productivity to grow businesses further and increase hiring for all other tasks that LLMs are still not good at.
In a shrinking economy there isn't much growth. They can take the productivity gains to shrink their payrolls and get the same output with fewer people
That said I don't think there is a ton of productivity growth yet with LLMs that would show up in the numbers that are getting thrown around. Companies are just finally seeing that they have a bunch of people not doing much at all and cleaning house
Yep, no disagreements from me there. Ultimately, economic stagnation is what's driving job losses, not increased productivity (such that it is) from AI.
I personally feel that people are coming to realize that whatever they build can be copied in a short amount of time so its value is much lower than it would have been in the past. So what's worth building?
AI is killing the notion that SW companies are infinite money printing machines. The idea is that someday soon(in the next 5-10 years as markets are forward looking), someone will vibe-code a replacement for Photoshop/TurboTax/Office and if nothing else that will kill the profit margins. This changes the entire economics of SW and affects current hiring and spending.
Quite the opposite. I just spent the past month "vibe coding" a pretty serious program in C. The tldr is yea I can build faster but I'm still sitting there testing, debugging, and focusing on specific features as I go and that's still a human limitation. The AI productivity is pivoted directly into higher complexity of features. It's not a magic wand that immediately builds a program that works perfectly out of the box. The zeitgeist just hasn't caught up to the reality of that.
And that's cool but your experience is not what the market is trading. The vibe is that vibe-coding will come together in the next few years and SW margins will be hit. That doesn't mean it's the reality, just that it is what the market is thinking.
There were definitely some companies that clearly overhired during Covid that are now "resetting" and blaming/crediting AI is certainly an excuse they can use.
I'm not sure how much of it is actually AI vs just like, the bags of VC money have dried up and most tech companies can't anywhere near justify their personnel or often even existence without it.
Like companies have been doing the RTO "stealth" layoffs for years now, it's not even news anymore, this was already well underway.
There is also the obvious priapism of owners and investors to finally do to the remaining white collar workers what they have already done to everyone else. Whether or not AI actually can replace all these workers is nearly moot, they have fantasized about business without labor for so long they can't tell the difference from reality anymore.
Where is the money that was going to VC investments going now? With increasing inequality, I figure rich people have more money than ever that they need to figure out where to invest.
Interest on debt; shoring up the financial vehicles and insurance through which they diffused the catastrophic losses of their bad bets from the past few decades; stockpiled for the inevitable economic collapse and the feeding frenzy that will follow; land.
I just want everyone to understand that part of why everything is so expensive today is because our elite funneled the surpluses from the electronic revolution into boondoggles that not only didn't make back what they cost, but that demand even more labor, to this day, to cover maintenance and interest.
>Yeah, screw DEI!
lmao I'm talking about wars; sprawl; advertising and consumerism; wasteful or gatekept luxuries; feet-dragging on any number of technologies and policies that could have mitigated the damage, just to please incumbents.
We temporarily made life spectacularly better for like 5-10% of the population, and doomed everyone to either generations of toil, or a hard reset in the form of a "burn it all down" revolution.
For a long time interest rates were incredibly low which led a ton of investors to put money into VC funds, despite their very high risk.
When interest rates go up, money floods out of higher risk higher return areas like company formation, and floods back into buying bonds, so investors can collect the low-risk interest that didn't exist before.
The big money is going to the OpenAI/Anthropic types producing foundation models that have to raise billions on a regular basis. This is money that would normal be spread across the startup ecosystem instead of concentrated in a handful of massive companies. When it finally hits IPO, I'd bet that you see it start to get freed up for new investments
Just to drive the point home, in 2019 the total VC market was ~$300 billion. To date, roughly $235 billion is tied up in just OpenAI ($168b) and Anthropic ($67b)
I can only speak from anecdotal experience in that I just witnessed this week, dev team leads and architects “replaced” by Claude code, they kept the offshore junior-mid coders and are giving them $20/mo pro accounts… (doesn’t that seem a little backwards?)
I mean Dorsey literally just said publicly that he’s laying off people in order to utilize AI
like what more clear point do you want?
Whether or not you believe that this is a good or bad move, correct or lying move, whether AI is capable or not,
“AI” is the reason that CEOs are utilizing to cut roles
The timing of this is based on the fact that Capital is striking from deploying money to anything else outside of the largest deals that include AI as promise of higher profits
But ultimately it comes down to the fact that the people in control with all the money believe that the future is gonna need less human workers and is prioritizing giving money to organisms that will shed their workforces in order to run an experiment in AI capturing value on behalf of investors without having the additional overhead of personnel
Dorsey is in a huge bind with runway and lack of revenue. Blaming AI for a massive cut needed just to get by lets investors trick themselves into believing that he has a plan that makes the company grow to reach the level of profitability that the stock prices suggests will happen.
And perhaps Dorsey has a long enough of a runway for something to come along to save the company from eventual collapse. Maybe not, since firing 40% of a company tends to put a damper on innovative efforts that would massively grow revenues.
I think the point is that these tech leaders can be saying "AI" to appeal to their board/shareholders, but the truth is more mundane typical reasons for layoffs (bad economy, overhiring, offshoring, bad debt, etc).
If Block is really so much more efficient, while doing well, they should invest that talent into expanded products and services. But that’s not what we’re seeing.
Some things:
- They acquired AfterPay for $29bn. Their market cap today, after the big AI bump, is $40bn. BNPL did not pay off the way payments companies thought it would.
- They have a weird internal combination of Cash and Square and AfterPay internally. They’re not as unified as they ought to be.
This feels more like Jack coming to terms with a company that’s hugely inefficient organizationally. It’s easier to clear out thousands of people and rebuild.
I think COVID ruined people's ability to critically think. The amount of people in both journalism and across the economy, people are just taking the words of others (often those with malicious intents) with zero critical thought being applied.
For Block's case they have had multiple layoffs over the last 5 years, hardly the sign of an AI apocalypse and more of a sign of a business leader that only survived because of free money.
Remember how the tab-next-action model from Cursor was all the rage ~2 years ago when they launched it? That was a fine-tune of a ~70b model (they kinda alluded to this in a podcast).
That's like saying "somewhere between Eliza and Haiku 4.5". Haiku is not even a so-called 'reasoning model'.¹
¹ To preempt the easily-offended, this is what the latest Opus 4.6 in today's Claude Code update says: "Claude Haiku 4.5 is not a reasoning model — it's optimized for speed and cost efficiency. It's the fastest model in the Claude family, good for quick, straightforward tasks, but it doesn't have extended thinking/reasoning capabilities."
> Claude Haiku 4.5, a new hybrid reasoning large language model from Anthropic in our small, fast model class.
> As with each model released by Anthropic beginning with Claude Sonnet 3.7, Claude Haiku 4.5 is a hybrid reasoning model. This means that by default the model will answer a query rapidly, but users have the option to toggle on “extended thinking mode”, where the model will spend more time considering its response before it answers. Note that our previous model in the Haiku small-model class, Claude Haiku 3.5, did not have an extended thinking mode.
Not sure what this means, but as a marketing person myself, here's what happened: One day, an Anthropican involved in the Haiku 4.5 launch shrugged, weighed the odds of getting spanked for equating "extended thinking" with "reasoning", and then used Claude to generate copy declaring that. It's not rocket surgery!
It's mainly that people on here, regardless of profession, speak incorrectly but confidentally about things that could be easily verified with a Google search or basic familiarity with the thing in question.
Haiku 4.5 is a reasoning model, regardless of whatever hallucination you read. Being a hybrid reasoning model means that, depending on the complexity of the question and whether you explicitly enable reasoning (this is "extended thinking" in the API and other interfaces) when making a request to the LLM, it will emit reasoning tokens separately prior to the tokens used in the main response.
I love your theory that there was some mix up on their side because they were lazy and it was just some marketing dude being quirky with the technical language.
> It's mainly that people on here, regardless of profession, speak incorrectly but confidentally about things that could be easily verified with a Google search or basic familiarity with the thing in question.
Yep. And if your heart wants to call Haiku a "reasoning model", obviously you must listen. It doesn't meet that bar for me for a couple reasons: (1) It lacks both "adaptive thinking" and "interleaved thinking" (per Anthropic, both critical for reasoning models), and (2) it also performed unacceptably with a real-world collection of very basic reasoning tasks that I tried using it for.¹ I'm glad you're having better luck with it.
That said, it's a great and affordable little model for what it was designed for!
¹ I once made the mistake of converting a bunch of skills (which require basic reasoning) to use Haiku for Axiom (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/). It failed miserably, and wow, did users let me have it. On the bright side, as a result I'm now far better at testing models' ability to reason.
We are all reasonable people here, and while you are (mostly) correct, I think we can all agree that Anthropic documentation sucks. If I have to infer from the doc:
* Haiku 4.5 by default doesn't think, i.e. it has a default thinking budget of 0.
* By setting a non-zero thinking budget, Haiku 4.5 can think. My guess is that Claude Code may set this differently for different tasks, e.g. thinking for Explore, no thinking for Compact.
* This hybrid thinking is different from the adaptive thinking introduced in Opus 4.6, which when enabled, can automatically adjust the thinking level based on task difficulty.
Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email. I use Fastmail, but there are many other options.
Set up forwarding in Gmail to your new address.
Then, whenever you log in to a website or app with your Gmail, take a moment to change it to your new address. In a few weeks, most of your important accounts will be covered. In a few months, almost everything you still actively use will be done.
I did this ~5 years ago and the only thing that still arrives at my Gmail is spam.
You can mitigate/speed the process using your password manager too.
I still use a filter in my email so that if something comes in under my Gmail, it gets a special tag that I can filter on and treat those as a todo list. Rarely happens beyond the occasional Google Meet connection.
> Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email.
Note you don't need to pay. just use zoho mail or any other free email that lets you bring your own domain. Switch email providers as needed without changing your domain
The trouble with paying is that if you forget to pay, you may lose email. (arguably this is also a problem with domains, generally you should pay some years in advance)
You can buy a domain name for like $10 per year; I recommend getting it from porkbun.com.
Cloudflare.com is good too, EXCEPT if you buy your domain from them, you'll be required to use their nameservers until and unless you transfer your domain elsewhere (which you won't be able to do for a while). Though to be fair, their free DNS is good and lots of people use it anyway. It makes email setup slightly more complicated, but it's still doable.
Spaceship.com also has a pretty good reputation, but I think their customer service isn't as good, they're quite new, and they're owned by Namecheap (a bigger domain registrar with a much worse reputation).
Whatever you do, DO NOT buy from GoDaddy. Do not even search for the domain you're considering on GoDaddy. Literally any option is better than GoDaddy.
By far the most reliable TLD options are .com, .net, and .org. These will look relatively trustworthy for email, and the price stays very very stable from year to year. If you don't want to think about it, just get one of these. You can even still find single dictionary word domains for .org or .net relatively easily.
Do not buy any domain marked "premium". This means the owner of the TLD can change the price at renewal as dramatically as they want, for any reason (e.g. if you have a website hosted at that domain that becomes popular). Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
Non-premium nTLD's (.club, .horse, .rocks, .theater, etc) can increase quite dramatically in price, BUT the price is required to be set the same for all domains using that nTLD, so they can't target any individual person for having a successful website or whatever. Also, you can pre-buy up to 10 years, which locks in your price for those 10 years. I'd still not recommend them for a primary email, but it's better than buying a "premium" domain. Just be aware that the yearly price might unexpectedly increase in the future.
Some country code TLD's are also good, but for email, probably stay away from the ones that spammers like to use.
___
Anyway, what I actually originally meant to comment about is: if you set up forwarding from gmail and don't check that account regularly anymore, I recommend setting up a gmail filter rule that forwards all your gmail spam to you (their regular forwarding setting leaves it out and just sends it to the gmail spam folder). It's a little annoying to have to re-flag some of the spam as spam in your new email, but gmail has a habit of marking non-spam as spam for me, and if you're not regularly checking that spam folder you can easily miss important email.
Porkbun have started demanding ID verification for registrations, which depending how you feel about current events might make you reconsider having them on your list
> Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
For quite some time (approx 8 years) I've used an email forwarding (Blur, but any works) to avoid spam.
This looks like perfect case for change of email, since lot of these accounts can be moved out from Gmail by changing the address that email is forwarded too.
Looks like all this hassle with generating a new email for each service pays for the second time (by ease of changing the main mail), in addition to spam and privacy protection.
I switched to a password manager (bitwarden) about 7 years ago. I have over 200 accounts (not all of them use my @gmail). it would take me weeks to convert those accounts to a new domain, if the application could even support it.
I will admit, many of the accounts are not needed any more. but the process will still be emotionally boring to filter through that.
> ... it would take me weeks to convert those accounts to a new domain ...
I did the same with about the same amount of accounts and it took me the better part of a Saturday. Even if you were really slow and needed five minutes per account, 200 accounts would still only take about 17 hours.
I don't think that's a lot of effort. You could easily spend that time fixing something around the house or garden, which often might not have nearly as big of an impact on personal agency.
I did this but don't forward. Instead, every new email in Gmail I got would prompt me to go update that service's contact info for me.
It probably doesn't matter, but it made me feel a little better because that way Google wouldn't have direct info on to which email/domain I transfered (ignoring other Gmail contacts that start emailing me at my new address(es) ).
Do you use single email address on your domain or multiple for different purposes? Or do you have one main address and throwaway aliases for the one-time registration purposes? I see that the Fastmail provides a single inbox that can handle multiple addresses and wonder how does it work.
I just sold a domain I had for 25 years and used for everything including API endpoints, email, authentication, etc. It took a couple weeks to transition myself and my family/friends.
Pretty sure just moving emails would have take a lot less effort. I had the advantage of keeping the domain until I was ready to move, now imagine Google just turned it off one day and what your workload would be. I shudder to think about having to deal with that.
Register your own domain, use a third-party provider to handle actual sending and receiving (I use proton, which makes the setup very easy), forward your Gmail to your personal domain address and as renewals and reminders come in switch your email on services to your personal domain.
After a year or two losing Gmail becomes an inconvenience; after a few more years it is nothing. As everything is now on your own domain name you can switch providers without affecting anything.
That's what I did about 5 years ago and my only regret is not doing it earlier.
I just migrated to Fastmail (on my domain), it’s fantastic. It works just like Gmail in every way I need, haven’t missed Gmail or Google Calendar one bit. It’s clearly made by people who know Gmail well and understand why it works the way it does. I thought it’d be a huge migration but it was actually boring. Search works, 20 years of emails just magically migrated over. Spam detection is better. Couldn’t be happier!
Accidentally typed gmail.com the other day, it took 4 seconds to load (Fastmail is instant) and when it finished loading there was an ad to try some paid Google service. Felt like a flashback to an abusive ex.
I moved away from a gmail address that was that old, dating back to the invitation-only days. It had become more spam than not, mostly other people who share my initials not knowing their own email addresses. But the possible devastation you mention was more worrying. It had become too much of a risk for my banking and identity generally to not own my email address.
I got a custom domain. I still host it on google, because I know how impossible it is for small companies to have a reasonable program to deal with insider threats. Because of that, I think only one of the giant companies can realistically provide secure email. And the google app suite is great. Now that I pay for google workspace, there's support and appeals available, and if they ban me anyway, I still control the domain and can regain access to everything.
I have not been able to delete the old address, even after 3 years. There are some things like Google Fi that can only use a non-workplace google account. Very, very rarely, I still get an email that matters on it. But I got to the point where I could stop checking it in about 2 months, and now I look at it about once a week quickly, more out of habit than anything else.
The switch was annoying, but not "hard". It was worth it.
I had my Gmail for almost 20 years and made the transition. It's annoying and time consuming but I think well worth it. I bought a domain and host it on iCloud. It's like $3/month for 6 email addresses (you can use it with the family). That includes a little cloud data and other services like hidden email addresses. DNS is handled by Cloudflare for free. Then start moving each service/login to the new email address. Every time you log into something, change the email address. I took the opportunity to update passwords and passkeys too, using Vaultwarden. I was lazy and had used similar passwords for a lot of services. Passwords are all long and unique now.
Now, even if Apple bans me, I can move my host within minutes. I never lose access to my email domain. It's much more professional and I can do catch-all. E.g. netflix@[domain.com]. This way I can see who sells my email address to spammers and block it.
Get your own domain so you can easily change providers in the future. Start with your password manager and change the address on all the accounts you have in there.
After a few years you'll notice you stop bothering to check your Gmail and you can delete it to close the address.
If you need motivation, skim the /r/GMail subreddit and see how many people are getting locked out daily.
Do you have a recommendation for a major email provider as a fallback if you have to pick one?
I vaguely recall encountering a service that only accepted addresses from a whitelist of big providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.), even @icloud did not qualify.
That's a service that doesn't want your business. If you care, message them about it
I've never once run into a service with such a restriction, but I can imagine someone being that short-sighted. I have seen services that only support "log in with Google or Facebook", which is comparably terrible.
Discogs will not let me login with my own domain (of 30 years) and required one of the big providers. It kept complaining about "risky domain". But that is the only incident I can think of.
It is a top 1000 web site according to Alexa rankings. It would take you about 5 seconds to Google about it. Probably less time than it took you to write your post.
I have heard of that, yeah. It's still busted, but marginally more understandable if they're dealing with a lot of scams. For instance, `.xyz` and some others have bad reputations. I've never seen something that'll reject an arbitrary self-owned `.org`, by way of example.
Sign up at fastmail.com, set up forwarding, change your "reply-to" address. A year later, you'll have nothing arriving in gmail except marketing cruft.
I switched to my own domain ages ago; it only took 2-3 years to stop getting relevant mail to the old one (I put a forwarding rule in place and just used the new one for everything).
Imported all my past mail on day one, forwarding meant I had one inbox only, and I only sent mail from the new domain. A few gentle “please stop using my old address” conversations with family.
It's really not that hard. I switched about 10 years ago. Just every time you log in with your old email, replace it with your new one. Every time you email someone, email them from your new one with a note: "this is my new email". In a few months I had migrated everything to the new email.
make another mailbox (another provider - migadu, fastmail, proton, whoever) that has IMAP as well. (selfhosting.. is PITA. only if u really need it).
install some standalone mail-client - thunderbird, clawsmail, applemail, or k9 , aqua on android, whatever. Attach both mailboxes into that. Find out how to copy an e-mail from one folder into another.
Folder by folder, select all mails, copy from one mailbox into the other. Will take time.
(Beware, some clients (apple) will fuckup the mail-date, anything older than 5 years becomes 5 years old. or it shows like that. YMMV.)
i have made this multiple times, for 20+ years of mails...
Although I am increasingly concerned with its longevity since there's a non-zero risk that Proton might shut down SimpleLogin since Proton Pass has its own alias feature.
I really really want to see how these images are starting to form into videos. The stills are clearly getting better and better, but what about when you need the stills to organically conform to a keyed script?
I'm seeing more and more AI video memes and they are getting really good. Still just bunch of short clips, long shots are not working well enough, but typical Hollywood movies have few second cuts anyway so this is almost good enough to make a marvel fanfic.
the workflow right now would be to take this images, make a sequence of them for key "shots" and send them to an I2V model. LTX-2 is the model the r/stablediffusion folks are playing with right now, but there are a fair few.
The public can absolutely participate in this by way of syndication deals. Those syndicates are what's covering up the true extent of ownership and they're essentially charging for access with their fees. It's oddly shady, poorly regulated, and more expensive than just being public, but everyone can ride this ride.
The general public absolutely cannot. You have to be an accredited investor or qualified purchaser; you need to have access; you have to pay carry & fees (maybe multiple, stacked middlemen).
The path to declaring yourself accredited is uniquely easy. Just say it. The whole space is deeply unregulated and unaudited. What makes it insane is that those middleman are making a small fortune exploiting this loophole protecting large companies from being forced to go public. The number is 2000 private investors. Rest assured, more than 2000 individuals have money in Stripe today. It's a total scam.
“Rights”. If you’re lying about accredited investor status, you definitely don’t have the resources to pursue your adversaries in civil litigation, much less actually collect on any judgment.
But they had the option of buying VOO or whatever broad market index the entire time, so I don’t see the need to protect people who feel the need to gamble.
No, that's not how the US legal system works. I don't endorse fraud (or dishonesty in general) but your claim that lying about being an accredited investor extinguishes all legal rights in a dispute is simply false and has no basis in law. Most rights would still be retained.
Not really. You still have to be an accredited investor AND financially savvy enough to have the awareness of what syndicate deals are and how to find them and participate.
Thank you for sharing this, I was unaware! It launches tomorrow.
This is the footnote regarding Stripe: "New deal incoming: RVI has entered a binding agreement to invest in Stripe, Inc. This investment is expected to close after RVI’s IPO, subject to meeting customary closing conditions. Note: This deal isn’t guaranteed to close."
That's a bit confusing. Do you believe LLMs coming out of non-chinese labs are censoring information about Israel and/or Palestine? Can you provide examples?
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