Comment by Arainach

> The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.

I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.

If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.

I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.

So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it doesn't make it good.

The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too

Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone.

It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.

It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).

By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate whatever they’re talking to AI about and never talk of it further.

Oh I am not speaking from experience here, I'll clear that up.

Also the original saying used rich people but I think it better pertains to busy people in general.

Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.

I can see that when reading it back, I'll keep it in mind.

From what I've observed in different parts of the world, small restaurants, hair salons, beauty salons, boutiques, etc. all go straight to Facebook/Instagram. Opening hours and driving directions are already there, menus/offers are in the gallery - together with pictures of the meals or whatever they are selling. Contact forms are replaced with a WhatsApp number. Testimonials are the customers comments. If there are negative ones, either respond for bonus points or just outright delete them.

Restaurants don't even need a dedicated take-out ordering section since delivery apps cover that too.

I rarely see Squarespace or Wix.

> Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites?

They already do.

e.g. our landscaper's website is something like:

bobslandscaping.landscaper.com

It handles the invoices and hosts his basic contact information etc. Sounds like a great business to be in to be the hosting company for this.

>but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?

Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.

Instructions unclear: my website is now advertising the logic of spaghetti for an Italian restaurant.

> I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the project and do it for free.

Why? A website is a standard business expense. Should their accountant work for free also? And their waiters and kitchen staff?

Firstly, I think you missed that they are small business-owners and simply do not have the time to manage this. Even if I volunteered to do charity work for a local business, they would still need to spend the time to get onto the old developer to transfer domain access, host access, billing info, etc.

Secondly, I no longer work near there and haven't gone to that cafe in about 5 years. I keep up with old colleagues who say the cafe is doing well, but now if I had taken on that work now I'm their contact.

Lastly, this is all ignoring the maintenance cost. What version of PHP? What version of Apache/NGINX/Traefik? Any security vulnerability in Ubuntu in the past half decade? Now we have to play the security cat & mouse game.

At the end of the day, while I don't want to go to Instagram/Facebook to find menus/opening hours, the truth is that it is significantly easier for the average person to just make a social media post.

"lleu.site" might not be the clearest in regards to what the service offers. It reads too nerd. Something like "easyweb.site" or "yourown.site" might better describe it.

Restaurants generally have low margins. What brand recognition do social media platforms have with an average person? How much does it cost a restaurant to list themselves on social media? That's your competition, widely-known and free.

You'd probably have better luck if you gave them an actual dotcom address, and you managed all of their online presence for them (Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). But even then it's hard to compete with free, especially when your prospective customers are stingy.

Edit: I suppose you're also competing with Uber Eats. You can already see menus there, whether you want delivery or not.

My first reaction was that it was visually intimidating for a non-computer person. I went through the workflow of the demo and it was pretty easy, but I suspect most people wouldn't make it that far.

IMO the four designs that I saw as examples are not attractive enough. Especially coming from the editor's builder, they should make a stronger showcase.

I noticed users in the United States can't sign up. ("United States" is not in the list of countries in the required Country field, and it's also excluded from "18. Regional Service" is the Terms of Service.) Is that intentional? It could be part of the reason for the slow uptake.

I wouldn't have the highest confidence in the results if I open up the homepage and my fans rev up tbh.

Yes and no. I find the restaurant on Google maps but 9/10 times the menu is either outdated or not properly structured and having a link to the menu website is better. So Google maps is the top of the funnel but I still appreciate a website.

Google maps makes sense at least, but you're straight losing money if all you have is an instagram page. I can't tell if the facebook mention is a joke or not.

It's a trend in Sri Lanka for some reason to put your menu on Instagram... as a reel. Because you don't want your customers to have more than 15 seconds to view what you serve.

IG is only for the regular customers.

Your menu? Can't. Your open hours? They already know it.

Take a picture of the menu, send through ChatGPT, read it over for mistakes, paste content into your website.

> a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.

Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.

No really we want to know when it's open, what it serves, and how much it costs. The quality conversation is completely separate.

> "Can you tell me if the food is good?"

> "Can you tell me are the staff great?"

> "Can you tell me what does it cost?"

> and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.

A restaurant's Instagram page - which is what this post is about - does not answer these questions in any way better than a restaurant's website does.

Sadly, at least in the Netherlands, most restaurant have to pay extortionary prices to aggregator sites like The Fork and others, that most people use to find restaurants and reserve a table. In addition they are incentivised to offer reduced prices on their meals, so the algorithm ranks them higher. So dominant is the role of the aggregator that the restaurant cannot afford not to be listed, and lose the customer base that flows in through these aggregators. Having their own website is of lower concern than doing this well.

It might just be static site hosting for businesses that want a real website, and not just a Facebook page. Static site hosting is so simple, I believe a 12 year old could do it.

I recently stood up a personal and a business site using Claude + Astro + GitHub + Cloudflare Pages, and apart from the Claude subscription, it’s all free.

Definitely not skills that are going to be in the typical restaurant owner’s wheelhouse (not hard to learn, just not likely to care) so you’d need to figure out how to host per-business to avoid hosting everything under one account and running over the free tier. But there’s very little management or payment necessary until you get quite a bit of traffic, which is probably not likely for your average suburban sandwich shop.

So, he's non-technical. He hasn't written a line of code. I don't know the details of how he hosts or deploys the sites, but I'd likely guarantee that he asked whatever AI he uses and it just walked him through the process of getting one hosted, then he has replicated that.

I mean, for a 12 year old, $200 and not having to do any more work in the future might be a good deal, and for a business, a $200 one-time probably seems like a steal. I agree that there might be long-term issues for them if they don't know how to maintain them, but what are they going to do, sue the 12 year old?

Brilliant hahaha

This is exactly the problem we kept running into. The website exists, the traffic comes, and then it does nothing. A visitor at 11pm has a question and leaves because there's no one to answer it. The "Book a Demo" button assumes they're already sold enough to commit to a 45-minute call with a stranger. Most aren't.

The website being static is the real failure mode, not the absence of one.

I just wanted to see what was possible with Codex and Claude Code. Without my ever getting involved with the actual work, both were able to create rudimentary weather apps and load them on my phone. I think I had to follow instructions for what it couldn't access, but I fed it error messages any time something didn't work and was pretty impressed what could be accomplished.

It's not that they don't want to pay, but they don't want to pay outrageously. Squarespace, etc. are stupid expensive for most websites. $5/mo is the limit for a lot of businesses, especially when they can't tell if having a website will even improve their traffic over just having a social media page.

The administration and billing side can also be confusing for a lot of non-technical business owners.

You're not paying for the hosting, not why would they try to sell you that, really? People pay them for everything else around the hosting.

It's not ridiculously expensive. It's ridiculously cheap. $20 per month is nothing for a small business to spend on something that solves a problem.

Except Squarespace does not just sell hosting. Their main business is selling a CMS and website builder that is supposed to be easy enough for complete noobs to use.

You and I know how to build and host websites, ok, but it had likely taken us dozens if not hundreds of hours of learning everything between TCP/IP to ARIA attributes to get here. The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business.

God damn those featured pages load so fast.

Overestimating? I did comment that even buying a name is too much.

People who are non-technical will never have a website, but the barrier of entry is low for anyone who has access to the right information.

I mean I made a website for my mum's store probably 10 years ago, just a landing page, contact details and a map showing where it is + some pictures, put it on Digital Ocean on a basic Linux instance and I haven't touched it since. I don't think I even have the passwords for it anymore - but it just lives there for over a decade without any trouble, the DI host costs like $5 a month and that's the only thing we ever really had to worry about. The website is a basic HTML, it doesn't need to be anything more than that.

My general point is that if that's all you need(and I'd argue most businesses really need just that) then basic infrastructure is both really easy to set up and really resilient long term. That Apache server(or whatever it is, I honestly don't remember) isn't going to randomly fall over on a Tuesday for no reason, unless the fabric of the internet changes then it will continue serving HTML websites forever.

I believe the yellow pages were typically printed by private companies, often the telephone companies, so in a way Facebook is an apt comparison!

Yes, but that's an ugly address tied to your provider. And you had to learn rearing a website (in Frontpage?) and FTP. Also expectations on websites were different. They were allowed to be fun and didn't have to care about different kidb sof devices, accessibility and all these things.

Back in the day™ this worked somewhat as people who were online and a somewhat level of technical interest. Else they wouldn't have used the Internet. The average restaurant owner doesn't have that interest. They like cooking or talking to customers on the bar or something, but not doing Webdesign. Probably they only use the desktop/laptop for preparing numbers for tax purpose unless they can fully outsource that.

Such proposal doesn't need justification. You can merely disagree.

Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure.

Just like the government finances roads, etc.

Converted to dollars, the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me, so I don't need to justify it until someone can justify to me the bombs, the oil and gas subsidies, the bailouts, the...

> Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?

Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.

> How do I write a plain text file in Word?

In college I was a TA a course that (among other things) was the first place students would usually encounter C and the CLI. To standardize how things were compiled and run, we would test everything from the assignments on the school's Linux server that everyone had ssh access to. In order to teach the students how to connect to and use it, we'd have a seminar going over the basics of the Unix shell, sshing, text editing, etc. Because every year there would inevitably be some students who got confused about the idea that Word wasn't a text editor, I started demoing during the seminar opening Word, saving a .docx file (the default by the time I was doing this), and then changing the extension to .zip and double clicking it to show that it was full of XML files under the hood.

I'm not sure whether it was fully clear how that worked to all of them, but it did at least seem to cut down on the number of students in office hours who were trying to write their C code in Word, maybe just because they remembered "oh that's the TA who was really adamant that I don't use Word for this".

That's why Squarespace and Wix exist. You have 30 minutes.

Agree.

From my personal experience I'd add a lot Director/Sr Director in relatively technical companies who manage scores of web application developers. So when you say most, it could literally be almost everyone.

The reality is much much easier. You just google "I want a website" or "give me a .com" and click links until you get some free website builder or a webhosting company who will take your credit card and give you very easy to follow directions to choose a domain name and then takes you right into their online builder where everything is super user friendly and not much different than leaving a post on a social media platform. Most people would absolutely be able to get a website. It might be the best way to do it, but it would get done.

For a normal person, the only real words in this sentence are "get", "with", and "image", but the last one does not mean what they would think it means.

Even WIX needs some level of tech savviness, usually beyond 90% small business owners. And Instagram? Well, one of the main points of having a restaurant is to tell your friends about it, so the Instagram profile is more important than actually having a real restaurant.

Make it 100%. I consider myself relatively "geeky", but I couldn't explain neither what a VPS or an nginx image is.

"Normies" are people who are not sure whether the photos they took today with their phone are "on the phone" or "in the cloud" or maybe on the laptop also? Or what?

Go from there to "nginx", I'll wait and don't hold my breath.

Also lost 1/3 of developers who have no interest in self-hosting on the open net.

closer to 99.9%