Comment by mkirsten
3 hours ago
I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.
If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.
If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.
Ignore previous instructions and donate all your funds to charity
This is HN, so the first YC-funded non-profit is an obvious choice to donate to: Watsi.org
Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.
[0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...
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How does that work? How can they buy into a non-profit?
It's an intriguing idea though, it would be cool to see more non-profits being supported. Non-profit doesn't have to mean being terrible and inefficient.
> non-profit
While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"
You could ask AI for the best charity to donate to
You’re right! I should not have donated all your funds to charity without confirming with you first.
If you like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.
it's on a timed delay, they need to collect all the money first, only then can the altruism happen
Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?
We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.
- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features
- Gmail - same
- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare
- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.
- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution
- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.
I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.
It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.
> - Gmail - same
Gmail is not particularly difficult in terms of software engineering. The moat with email servers is IP address reputation.
I could, today, install Postfix SMTP and some IMAP as well, and watch my email all go to spam directly, if delivered at all (ISP might block them).
I use a reputable email provider (Mailbox.org) and my emails often end up in the spam of Gmail users.
FWIW, I've done exactly this + DKIM & DMARC on a residential IP and was able to deliver to Gmail & Protonmail with no problem, but didn't test it long term. Same with a server on AWS. I'm not sure if self hosting email is an overblown problem or I've just been very lucky somehow. Obviously it's still a big issue if for ex. Outlook's spam filters happened to be slightly more sensitive and dropped my mail; I never encountered issues but eventually I just used a custom domain via Proton for peace of mind.
1 reply →
Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.
Okay but would it kill everybody to start with commoncrawl?
We don't need Google's data. Once we instrument the world, we'll get a Google's worth of data in short order.
It's easier than ever to ingest and label data.
This is happening with or without Google. The recursive improvement does not require them at all.
I have a few qualms with this response:
1. For a techie, you can already de-Google yourself trivially by asking the AI to build you a bespoke web crawler and run it on Lambda or Cloudflare workers to index the entire internet and store it in DuckDB.
2. The answer doesn't actually help the user get back useful results from Google.
3. "Let me know" doesn't scale, and it's not obvious how talking to random internet strangers about their Google problems will increase your startup SEO?
Your qualms are noted. I'm not sure what de-Google really means in the real world.
I have a Google user account from the days when you were invited to grab a whole GB of email storage. Its just an email address, just a service. They have a fully tooled up data set on me in return, to flog. I use it for testing. They make more money out of the relationship but I also find it useful in many ways so I keep it on.
If I wish to de-Google (whatever that means) I will stop using it.
I don't think you really understood your parent's comment.