Unlurker|Replay|About
An AI couldn't beat humans at StarCraft, so it decided to cheat (theverge.com)
I didn't read the article but the title itself gave me the insight: if AI is ever gonna end humanity, then this is how they're gonna do it, by using humans against humans.
•
It'll be a mix of artificial intelligence and natural idiocy... The US military almost attacked a Chinese ship because AI said it had nuclear components for Iran on board: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-chinese-ship-over-hallucinated-ai-arms-report/ I'm surprised supreme moron Hegseth hasn't doomed us yet..
•
Humans have been using humans against other human throughout time, is it really any different?
•
Yes, it's different. We already had projectiles when guns were invented, and guns were different too. Further shifting the balance of power to those with thousands of GPUs is different.
Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back (github.com/omlahore)
•
What does it actually do ?
•
Ah yes, more enshitification. The other day Visual Studio 2026 brought in a mandatory update, lots of CoPilot stuff I didnt ask for, but they broke code search so finding who uses a structure is now harder to find. No way to revert to older version of VS2026.
•
I remember 15+ years ago having to remove gigabytes of printer drivers from OSX. This was at a time where “drivers” were a whole, horribly frustrating thing and Apple wanted stuff to “just work.” Lots of opinions for sure, but I’m curious how Apple actually tries to decide the cost-benefit of these kinds of things. Obviously they know they need added disk usage and some people will be upset. Do they have a model to estimate or do they just A/B test and see how it goes?
•
Does anything like this exist for iOS, if you wanna nuke some AI crap you have no desire for and get some space back? My notebook is fine but my phone is painfully tight on storage.
I don't understand why you would want to remove well-balanced and relatively small local-inference models that ship with every mac. Sure, not frontier levels but fine for basic tasks and they are off-the-cloud.
•
I don't want AI, at all, and especially not on my operating system. I am leaving my Macbook Pro at version 26 and will not update to 27 until there is some kind of master off switch. If that is not provided by Apple by the time I am ready to replace my computer than I will be going the open source route. I am personally tired of Apple and Microsoft fattening up operating systems.
•
That's why: https://imgur.com/a/1vaUMi5 Let me juggle juggle with the small space I have the way I want.
We have arrived at the Windows Vista era for Mac OS.
•
Vista had an undeserved bad rep IMO, it was an important 1.0 milestone for many new technologies and improvements especially in the security model. It effectively was a beta of Windows 7, with 7 being Microsoft's "Snow Leopard". Windows 11 still ships with the installer from Vista.
Not gonna lie, I would like a "Black Edition" of macOS. There is a decent OS buried under tons of rubble.
•
Or a server version. I have an M1 Mac mini as my home server and it really feels like I'm fighting the fact that it's a desktop OS with a GUI and full of components that really, really, really can't deal with being run on a headless system. Not much fun when your super efficient ARM processor suddenly uses 100% CPU for 6 days straight because WindowServer and CoreAudio are having a panic attack due to being unable to find any outputs. And so much useless crap you can't turn off without disabling SIP, which it doesn't feel like you're meant to, because who knows what daemon will bring down the entire system when another it expects to be there isn't…
•
Recently switched to KDE on a linux laptop (600 USD lenovo) and stopped using my macbook (m1 16" pro). Speakers, touchpad and battery life are inferior. Speakers are OK after installing EasyEffects and I don't use the touchpad while programming. And battery life is close enough Cachyos with KDE is 10x better than MacOS. So it doesn't make sense to use macbooks for programming anymore IMO. You can't even see the update download speed or progress percentage on MacOS, and have to approve 3 times to run a downloaded program, brew is terrible in terms of performance etc. etc. etc.
That doesn’t work unless you’re actually able to offload stuff from disk, which is only the case when you store stuff in your iCloud Drive / photos / etc. Case in point: the AI models can’t be offloaded to iCloud.
•
Maybe someone can explain why their SSDs, when not soldered down, are a proprietary form factor and can't be replaced with a standard M.2 device?
•
I believe they have a special kind of SSD, where the controller is locked into the motherboard. This is serial locked in some form. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is how I understand it)
•
To gain the same effect as one that is soldered down, while giving themselves a simpler portfolio of assemblies and a cheaper FRU to swap in the event of failure.
“Some people” arguments always hold true. Old classmates back in the day used to hate the 128 × 128 px icons macOS shipped. A waste of space for eye candy. 12 GB is at most 4.68% of your Mac. Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value, as is consumerizing local-first AI. We’re not talking adware here.
•
> Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value Not if you didn't use apple intelligence in the first place (and/or aren't interested in using it going forward). > as is consumerizing local-first AI If and only if there is actual demand for it. If most users do not want this, it's a bad feature.
I’m not making any judgement on whether you should or should not like the feature. I’m stating that the Windows problem was very different. Your machine would be loaded up with software for various vendors that the manufacturer did deals with to lower the price of the machine. They were all trials.
•
> I’m stating that the Windows problem was very different. [...] They were all trials. Except it isn't and they weren't. MS Windows never came with trials, it came with shortcuts. OEMs bundled with their Windows image more of their (crap) full software than trials. And to this day debloating tools are tasked with removing full MS bundled (or auto installed) software like Teams, Outlook, DevHome, Copilot, M365, Recall, etc. So exactly the same problem as Apple Intelligence. Whether you consider it useful is up to you. Whether it's bundled is up to Apple.
True that, win11debloat is 'mandatory' nowadays. The time that OS makers competed with each other with features users actually wanted is long gone, alas.. This is why Linux is now making more serious momentum. Even a long term 'Microsoftie' like myself is now standing on the brink of making the leap. Just a bit more Steam compatibility first please...
•
Mandatory for what? I run stock Win11 for the most part, haven’t have had any real issues with it. I think I disabled/modified a few mouse hotspots and key combos, and that’s been about it. Sure during major updates there’s the “buy our shit” rigmarole, but at this point I just click through and then forget about it for another month or two. Annoying yes, but compared to actual annoyances in my life…I just can’t be bothered to care or get mad, to be honest.
The existing search on macOS was almost completely useless to be fair
•
Spotlight search has sucked from Day 1 of OSX. You need to use Find Any File [0] or some equivalent tool if you want to search the actual file system without being limited by Spotlight's never-properly-updated "index." The functionality of Find Any File was built in to Mac OS 9 and earlier. It was rock-solid reliable. So of course Apple removed it and now to get reliable search you have to use a third-party tool. Or 'find' in the Terminal. [0] https://findanyfile.app/
Unless you're not running a M-series chip, then it's not really improving anything
•
If you're not running an Apple Silicon chip, you can't run macOS 27 at all.
The alternative is maintaining backwards compatibility forever and then everyone will complain about some weird behaviour that still happens to retain that compatibility. Keep in mind this is the second time they have switched arches and the second round of complaints of Rosetta removal.
•
Exactly, I remember getting similar replies - though probably on /. then - when the PPC emulator was removed, there are always some people eager to ridicule the idea and portray it as not being feasible. But it is. It is perfectly doable for a company like Apple with a net worth around $4.87 trillion and would probably take less disk space then the AI models their customers now try to remove because they don't need them. As ridiculous as this may sound to the naysayers, I desire very much for an operating system to keep backwards compatibility forever, it can be done and would be very useful for many people. I didn't want the PPC emulator removed and I don't want the x86 emulator to be removed either. If that makes me a weirdo, so be it.
Something horrible must have happened, if macOS users are curling shell scripts from the internet to make their desktops more like Linux.
•
Their world view that "Apple can do no wrong" is slowly shattering, it seems
Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage (1011now.com)
•
We're gonna need a comparison chart in number of almond milk lattes and/or golf courses. Otherwise what are we even talking about?
•
People shouldn't be latching onto side effect costs of AI data centers like water or energy use, it seems like an abstraction layer above the core complaint. If we don't want AI, or LLMs, or data centers that should be the complaint. Once it is abstracted to water use or similar it opens the door for data to show the actual water use is comparatively small. Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
This article seems to focus on one of the less interesting in terms of water usage data centers (for most of us non-locals) because the paper is from Lincoln and that data center is in Lincoln. The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon. Seemingly much better article (pictures, better comparisons): https://flatwaterfreepress.org/data-centers-can-guzzle-serious-water-as-some-nebraskans-worry-tech-giants-seek-solutions/ Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one. Update: in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient. That would be a nice thing for some journalist to research... Update 2: it seems that Google uses water-evaporation cooling in regions that they don't consider water-stressed. Here's a not-so-great reference (scroll down if the text-fragment link doesn't work): https://www.axios.com/2026/06/03/google-pushes-water-standards-data-center-backlash#:~:text=The%20company%20argues%20evaporative%20cooling%20can%20be%20the%20better%20environmental%20choice%20in%20places%20where%20water%20supplies%20aren%27t%20under%20stress%20because%20it%20reduces%20electricity%20demand
•
So the big one uses the same amount of water per year that Lincoln city uses in 10 days?
I dont like the olympic swimming pool comparisons so I converted to immigrant population comparisons. How many people's worth of electricity and water are the data centers consuming , of course all the analysis was done on gemini since we are talking about google data centers :) here's the output > Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska. > Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
•
Why do you say “immigrant population”?
Ok but if you are permitted for some obscene number you could at any point draw that down no?
•
Why, to flush money down the drain? It would be crazy to go near your limit except in the hottest part of summer.
20-25% of the water consumed for evaporative cooling becomes contaminated waste water. It is used to clean out the residue left behind by the 75-80% of the consumed water that is evaporated. The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
•
How much additive gets in there? Is it more or less contaminated than normal sewage? A reasonable amount of treatment is part of the water bill. The excess minerals don't worry me much.
I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient. The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
•
It’s not the water. It’s the electricity usage, air and noise pollution from sanctioned (and often unsanctioned) diesel generators. The concern is real and very much deserves the opprobrium voters are showing.
•
> The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale. At a large enough scale, it doesn't matter how efficient you are - you're still causing a more damage than the region or the world can take.
•
Except that's not what you see people be up in arms about, or news reporting. Just like with a lot of other topics. There being a grain of truth or a valid angle doesn't wash bullshit from being bullshit.
•
My biggest problem with the data centers getting built around me are that they are building new natural gas power plants to power them, that will be greenhouse gases and decrease local air quality. I would be a lot more ok with it if they were using wind or solar. And maybe built it somewhere that didn't have a water shortage.
The current hysteria has little to do with datacenters and a lot to do with societal unrest about AI.
•
The noise issues seem real, but don’t impact whole cities
•
That can't be true. People obviously believe DCs have big local impact and it really does affect their power bills at least. The global impact of AI doesn't change when you force DCs to build in another area.
•
[delayed]
I live in northern va and I can tell you that histeria is about ballooning electric and other bills. vast majority of population is unfortunately “not there” in regards to any unrest about AI
•
Yup. From Fairfax. Very much what you said.
[dead]
•
People dislike secretive bureaucrats more than they dislike slow or overstaffed ones. Good luck with this attitude homie!
•
The thinking on display in this thread is something like, "I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."
•
I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say.
Google considers pretty much everything in hwops to be a trade secret. The point is to keep the specifics unknown as much as possible from competitors; the public at large's knowledge is just collateral damage in that fight.
•
And this one in particular is a high-ticket trade secret; it has been for decades, long before the AI push. Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything." ... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
•
What benefit could competitors get from that information?
•
[delayed]
•
The ability to improve their data centers, of course. Google is the company that launched data centers with commodity components.
Right, they're so power efficient they don't want to tell the people around them how little water they consume or "not consume"? People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say "No, actually we're not, here is the numbers", because Google doesn't want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I'm sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was "obvious" they couldn't divulge how little/much water the place uses.
•
I worked at google as well. They published a lot of less specific info (PUE numbers, water efficiency, etc) They were very sensitive about any site specific numbers.
Along those lines just a reminder folks, China is installing about 1GW equivalent of Solar power per day [1]. Lot of Australians can simply stop paying for power now due to free power on offer and batteries [2]. These are not zero-regulation, socialist wastelands. All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead? [1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-100-solar-panels-a-second-as-total-pv-capacity-tops-1-terawatt/ [2]: https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
•
China are also building tons of coal plants.
Funny how nobody asks the folks who build golf courses "what about water usage?" hint: An individual 18-hole course uses between 300,000 to 1 million gallons per day
•
I think people actually do though? They are even sabotaged at times (has happened in Europe at least), to protest against their water usage.
•
I’ve seen it brought up many times
Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again. You understand, the water isn't used up? It's not even used up in agriculture. Even when you drink a glass of water, the water doesn't actually disappear, soon someone else will be drinking it. The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today. No need to panic about someone using water. The only reason to be concerned is if someone is mixing the water with other chemicals at a rate faster than the natural filtration and then not paying for the treatment to purify the water again. But that is not an issue with data centers. Merely using water is a concern only for people who don't understand how matter is preserved, but a school physics book should dispel those concerns.
•
Sure the water is still somewhere, but its location is important for future use. US water reservoirs are at problematically low levels already. > Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again. The linked article talks about >500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It's nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it's such a common thing to do then why isn't it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?
Did your datacenter consume 9GW? I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW. The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
•
There were certainly 1GW DCs in the US 10+ years ago.
> I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW. The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1] Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter. But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US. 1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-gw-utah-data-center-campus-approved
•
> But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use Not even close to a true statement. EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1]. According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting. For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. [1] https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/sep_sum/html/rank_es_capita.html [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
•
Fine, an exaggeration but not off by much. If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh). It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.
Surely the people who have worked in tech, with datacenters or even in them for decades are wrong, and the people who learned the word "datacenter" 6 months ago are right.
•
Facts and experience mean nothing when everyone knows you are a liar.
Evaporated water stays in the water cycle though. It comes back down as rain, and returns to the water sources that were depleted (assuming these data centers are generally not using underground aquifers, which I think is true).
•
You can't control the water cycle over a datacenter and its water source, it is a global system.
And who exactly would they be astroturfing for?
•
ignorance
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
•
Perhaps not a meaningful amount at a national/worldwide scale. However, an individual datacentre consuming that amount at a local/regional scale could be more impactful.
Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?
•
They are, and people just accuse them of lying! Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.
•
Because the marketing teams don't do numbers and it's a high risk strategy
Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.
•
Real estate is almost always "hidden" behind an LLC or REIT, as recommended as common practice by CPAs and attorneys. It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.
Do I understand the logic here to be "if there's an LLC with an obscure name involved, it must be using too much water"?
•
To me, the logic is companies don’t put their brand on activities that contribute to tragedies of the commons. Alphabet could have named the company “google data center 083941, llc.” But Alphabet deliberately obfuscated its control of the facility.
Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365. The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
•
So a system to recirculate the same 24 gallons per minute would be more expensive than $100k per year for water?
Remind me median income?
•
$87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill. Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half. Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
•
Yeah I’m sure someone on median income feels the same
•
Probably, yeah. Do you think people look at big facilities and calculate that they're spending whatever times the medium wage on a crucial service and get mad about it? Converting things into median wages is a way to put them into scale. They spent this many wages for construction, they spend this many on supplies, they sell this many in product, they hire this many people to work there. If anyone thinks its bad for anything a company buys to exceed a median wage, that's a very silly expectation and I wonder where they got it.
Remind me who leaves 8 bath tub faucets running 24/7/365?
•
Me?
I live in a country of 5 million people and we lose 40 times that a year to leaks.
•
So a single datacentre introduces a water consumption cost that is within an order-of-magnitude of a near-median-population nation.
It doesn't seem insignificant. It is in fact insignificant. And it supports one of the most popular and widely used consumer products of the last 100 years, so it seems like a pretty incredible bargain.
•
Tech companies are bundling AI into their base subscriptions and force feeding it to consumers, so I doubt the metrics they are reporting to their shareholders represent real demand or value.
Even that 765 is like 0.04% of the water needed to irrigate Nebraska's ethanol corn crop alone. And ethanol is basically an agricultural proof-of-work function.
•
Also even in the totally fake scenario where that water completely evaporates, it's just gonna rain on Iowa a bit more.
A browser-native classic Visual Basic VB6 IDE (wieslawsoltes.github.io)
•
The speed with which this thing launches in a browser should put shame on the faces of current IDE developers. While VB itself was nothing to write home about there certainly was something lost when hardware became more powerful. Imagine what current and 'recent' hardware were capable of if only efficiency was taken seriously again. Maybe generative AI can provide a boost where human developers would rather spend their time on chasing the latest fads, adding yet another feature or inversely removing even more functionality in an attempt to create the 'perfect' sparse application? Let the humans think up the features and write the initial implementation, then loosen the bots on the code to make it run as efficiently as possible on hardware which used to be current a few generations back.
•
Intellisense? Was that there?
•
What do you mean? Does the site have intellisense? Yes Did VB6 have intellisense? Also yes
All I wanted was a custom domain email (jacobg.co)
•
With Google sunsetting support for custom domain in Gmail (scheduled for Jan 2027) I am looking for solutions to sending email from custom domains. Amazon SES works well and is cheap for SMTP. I want to continue to use Gmail for email storage--mainly because of the awesome search function, but also for longevity--while using a third-party app for pulling specific emails from Gmail and replying to them through my custom domain(s). The solutions mentioned in this blog aren't that--they have their own storage.
•
Possibly the only free soltuion: setup email forwarding in gmail using https://improvmx.com/about/ . Can even send email, although recipient sees that it has been forwarded.
•
I’d suggest cloudflare + resend + https://workspace.google.com/essentials/ (which is $0) + forwarding and alias to personal google account for gmail ui. Big benefit of this combination is that you get "login with google", docs, drive, hangouts
•
I've been very happy with MXRoute
•
iCloud+ mail was definitely a better choice. I'll send my feedback through email.
•
I like Fastmail a lot
•
I just dealt with this due to the impending termination of .name email. I use a combination of gmail as my mail agent, CloudFlare for the domain, and SMTP2Go for low volume outbound with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. I don't have any Apple usage or requirements. Oh, I just remembered that I send mail received by my CloudFlare domain to both gmail and zohomail, and use Thunderbird as the mail agent for the latter.
•
I use Migadu(migadu.com), but Apple's iCloud email hosting is basically tailor fit to your expectations, so I don't have any idea why you don't use it. But you can host your own email too. It's not the easiest option, but it can be done, and there has been some newer email server software written that tries to make it easier.
> There was one annoying limitation. I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this sounds absolutely wild. What?
•
The founder of foundermail actually left a comment here talking about this. I will likely update the article that it took less than 7 hours to be approved.
Interesting that self-hosting isn't on his list. It hits every one of his checkboxes and only costs you an old Linux server collecting dust at home (or at most, a $5/mo VPS), which you can also use to host other things. It's never been easier to self-host, but it feels like, in general, when faced with "I want to do X with a computer," people are more and more reaching for paid, hosted services rather than DIY anymore.
•
The problem with self hosting is getting through google, microsoft, etc spam filters.
•
it's only difficult because google, microsoft, etc have conivenced the community that self-hosting e-mail is not possible and for some reason, further propetuated by IT influencers that have drank that koolaid. all complete bullshit. e-mail is he most rewarding self-hosting capability. like anything, there is a learning curve but at the end of the day: it's easy, stable, a pleasure to host. there are solutions that ease the learning curve. i'm so happy that my communications are not indexed by these hyperscalers.
•
It depends a lot on whether you need the account for reading email, sending email to your own accounts, or sending email to other people. The first two are very easy to self-host. But agreed that mass-mailing (even account registration style emails) seems a lot less reliable because of those spam filters.
Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years and I really like having my email via gmail. SSO and spam filtering and Google Docs. I thought about switching to Amazon Workmail but the price I pay for Workspace is worth it.
•
> Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years ... Not that unpopular. I've used it since way before it was called "Google Workspace" and it Just Works [TM]. Also once you pay for it, suddenly they pick up the phone if you ever need support. A shitload of SMEs are using Google Workspace to get their own domain and all the Google suite. I know it's cool to hate on Google on HN but for my part I'll forever be hating on Microsoft and Meta. I tolerate Google.
“Integration with Apple Mail” shy not just use iCloud with a custom domain?
•
iCloud Mail silently filters emails (more info in my comment linked). The sender isn’t told, receiver can’t ever see the message. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958660
•
AFAIK it doesn’t allow you to have a direct IMAP/SMTP login for your own domain.
Feels weird to ignore the largest players, e.g. Fastmail or Protonmail
•
Protonmail doesn't have unlimited addresses for sending, which is one of his requirements. It has catch-all , which means you can receive from an arbitary number, so it's okay for one -email-per-vendor, but if you ever need to send via one of those addresses then you have to use up one of your 10 or 20 allowed addresses. This is because like most other vendors, they do price discrimination based on number of users. Which is no doubt why the other large vendors were also ruled out. One vendor who doesn't do this is Migadu. I don't use them as they lack 2FA support, but they are one of a small number of businesses who make their proposition easy to evaluate quickly, as opposed to making you swipe through a pitch before you get to the facts. This is so unusual that I remember them despite evaluating them multiple years ago.
Why not using iCloud custom domains? Is the simplest option if you want apple mail compatibility
•
iCloud Mail will silently filter emails with certain words (including in attachments). You aren’t told something has been filtered and it doesn’t go to spam. It’s just deleted with zero recourse. The sender isn’t notified either. https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/icloud-mail-what-to-do-when-apple-silently-filters-your-mail/27242 I had this happen as recently as June 2026 when my current provider was up. It happens on @mac.com @me.com @icloud.com and custom domains.
Hi Jacob, Ado here, from FounderMail. I'm really glad you ended up on-boarding with us, and I wanted to reach out to thank you for the review and feedback. The manual approve to outbound sending helped a lot to keep spammers out of the platform. We ensure that domain exists and you're the owner, the website is legit, etc, making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel. And is working, almost 4 weeks in, no complaints, less than 0.1 bounce rate. You know, having an high reputation is vital to ensure the emails we send on behalf of our customers are reaching the inbox not the spam folder. Said that, you continue to be right: it's annoying. We're working to reduce the pain autoapproving it for cases like your. Thank you again (I hope you'll never find a reason to leave us! :)
•
I went to your site to check this out, and I found the bright orange from the first slide was killing my eyes, and my coworkers. The other landing page slides were great, the first one made me want to leave. Overall looks like a great tool that I'll look into for my next projects.
•
Is it actually free to use? i cant find the pricing page
•
> making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel. Somewhat ironic, given your entire website is AI generated.
•
You're saying that building their own website using AI is equivalent to sending spam emails?
•
Building a website with Claude is literally "a bot operating on their channels". Whether these are morally equivalent is an unrelated axis - it's the literal claim that's being disputed
•
Thank you for creating such a great service! It’s always great using a product and getting to thank the developer directly. Your platform seems perfect so far and it was extremely quick to get approved for outbound sending (definitely less than 12 hours). Seems to be working perfectly so far, and I don’t think i’ll be switching anytime soon.
Blindsight (Watts Novel) (en.wikipedia.org)
Blindsight is fantastic. The sequel, Echopraxia, is also excellent; it is very different, and I expect many people were disappointed that it wasn't just more of the same. Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel. There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.
•
Leaving aside "which book is better" (which is hard to answer), I'll say that The Freeze Frame Revolution is much more approachable for most folks. It's the one I'd recommend to my friends first, then I might recommend Blindsight if they liked it - along with other difficult to articulate factors. Perhaps the "recommend/don't recommend" choice is arrived at by non-conscious mechanisms ;)
Heh. You picked the absolutely wrong author to say that. His making the book a free download tripled his sales in the first week. Quoting from: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_fiction_author_named_peter_watts_i/ So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis. The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.
•
Yes, I know that technique. I also know people who go for free books exclusively on Kindle. They don't want to pay for anything. That isn't helpful to people who are selling books in order to help support themselves and undermines the market for new book sales. I know writers who tried giving their book away for free, and got almost no sales or good reviews afterwards. They weren't always the worst of books. Would you seriously ask a taxi driver to give you free rides before they got paid? Or would you ask a teacher to work for six months unpaid in order to get a couple of years work later on? I know this mentality is encouraged in some places with interns, but it is a luxury of people who can already support themselves.
Do you tell your plumber or your electrician that they are self-centred when they come around asking to be paid? You might laugh, but that happens. I knew a builder a few years ago who only had half his bill paid, with the result he lost thousands on materials he had bought. It would have cost him a pretty penny going down the legal route. Rich people are often the worst for paying up. Novelists are not paid by the hour and many have to take on other jobs in order to support themselves. Donna Tartt takes about ten years to write a novel. Some writers take a month or two. It is not an easy task, and very few people can pull it off, let alone in a short time. The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut, and professional work is being converted into a hobby. The tax authorities, electricity companies, and supermarkets are not interested in whether you are self-centred or not as you put it. They want to be paid. (If you are on unemployment benefit while writing the book, they will demand that you look for other work during that time... Or claim you are able to work.)
•
> Do you tell your plumber or your electrician that they are self-centred when they come around asking to be paid? They are free to do with their labour as they please. That includes charging for it. It also includes doing it pro-bono if they feel like it. The self-centered part is the idea that they would never want to do it pro-bono. Electricians, plumbers do sometimes do work pro-bono if they feel it is a worthy cause. That is what freedom is: the ability to choose for yourself. > The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?
The book makes pains to draw a line between consciousness (or meta consciousness) and intelligence. I don't think he really argued that intelligence is maladaptive, but does argue that meta consciousness might be.
•
Apologies, you're right. I mixed the two up.
 Top