I think the low cost reasonable option right now is to self-host a receiving address and then pick the email provider that looks the least trash and forward your stuff to them to actually handle sending/browsing. It gives you the option to go full self-hosted in the future if your mind changes with minimal headaches but costs practically no effort for the short term.
This is what I do. OpenSMTPD to receive mail, Dovecot to handle IMAP and spamassassin for full spam rules control.
I still configure my clients (Thunderbird, K-9, etc.) to send to my mail server, but that just forwards on to the actual email sender (if authenticated). This way I can change email senders without needing to change all my clients. There are still risks though because if you choose the cheaper plan (as I do), then you get grouped onto a sending pool that spammers might use and then you might get periodically affected if that set of IPs take a reputation hit.
My config for sending: With OpenSMTPD, process it with DKIM:
action "process_dkim" relay host smtp://127.0.0.1:10027
match from auth for any action "process_dkim"
A local DKIM process then processes and sends back to OpenSMTPD:
Then back to OpenSMTPD to forward to the final email sender:
listen on lo port 10028 tag DKIM
action "process_outbound" relay host smtp+tls://label@... auth <secrets>
match tag DKIM for any action "process_outbound"
I'm not sure if I even need to sign with DKIM as my email sender does the final DKIM signing, but it seems that in the email world, it's always best to do things as "properly" as possible whenever you can.
I've been doing this for years, and spam and deliverability issues have been minimal and I've dealt with some big names.
But it isn't - not for doing stuff like self-hosting files? It's actually incredibly cheap, most people probably have a commodity PC lying around and can shove a few cheap HDDs into it and RAID stripe it if they're ambitious... or just full mirror their files if they aren't. And if you're really scared of loss find some host provider and rent a cheapo instance somewhere geographically far from you to park a mirror of the data.
Well, either it's going to fail or the trillions going into finding breakthroughs are going to find breakthroughs. How much gasoline do you want to give arsonists, even if at the moment they're only pouring it onto concrete?
I would like to take away the gasoline before they figure out that wood burns better.
From the producer's side, sure, we[1]'re all pretty sympathetic to the fact that if you publish a library a bunch of random people will build bridging libraries for languages that you have no control over.
But from the consumer's side it is very much an expectation and if you find yourself in the situation above it's on you to make it very clear that such extensions and third party tools are unofficial.
In this particular case I think it's fair to say that Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool.
1. We specifically being library and tool producers that are noticeably overrepresented on this forum.
> Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool
Had the tool been up longer than the 11 hours the malware was live? If not, then why would Anthropic try to get it marked as unofficial, as opposed to take it down?
Or are you saying that every author and publisher should request Cursor to mark their extensions on the Cursor vsx pass-through as unofficial?
> like “make a cure for <disease>” that will yield billions of dollars of value
I think it's important to qualify that while I will very much appreciate such an innovation and I think it'll provide significant value to society... I remain doubtful of the ability for any company to actually capture such an astronomical yield. Either there's enough of an investment required by the company to help get that to market that the yield will be significantly lower or everyone and their brother will just launch competing products two days later. And, as a society, I don't think it's logical for someone writing "Hey Alex, cure cancer" with billions of dollars so I doubt there's going to be much appetite for creating such a moat via legislation.
This gets to the same point of "If ChatGPT can make you a successful million dollar business in a few prompts why is OpenAI sharing it" paradox. It very well may be that AI tools can accomplish the labor that used to be required to create such a business, and I'm sure a few people will land a jackpot and get rich in the transitional phase but if it's so cheap to build it why would someone pay you money for yours instead of just running the same prompting themselves? For most people that's because they lack the knowledge that they can but you'll still have a significant number of instant impersonators.
> This gets to the same point of "If ChatGPT can make you a successful million dollar business in a few prompts why is OpenAI sharing it" paradox
I agree fully, to be clear o was using that prompt as a shorthand, I don’t think _you_ can type that prompt and get $1B back.
It can’t do this now, obviously. You need a lot of scaffolding and domain expertise to get the most out of these models. (Eg Harvey.)
But eventually, the labs can just run the business themselves.
I’ve long held that as we see models become more capable, they will be less available to the public. It seems pretty obvious that vertical integration on private models (perhaps a per-industry fine-tune, eg a legal model) licensed to subsidiaries will let the labs capture more value.
Why would you publish your model, enable competitors, and enable distillation of your hard-won intelligence? Only antitrust law can prevent this outcome IMO, the business pressure is extremely strong.
I disagree, Yahoo was actually seen as a technological leader and, unlike Google that was purely a search engine in its early years, Yahoo was a full platform that seemed poised for a while to become a landing page for the internet.
When it comes to AI there simply isn't a moat - Anthropic would be my best guess out of the current entrants due to them trying to construct one via value-adding code assistance tools that might create enough friction to prevent customers from jumping ship but the models themselves are a commodity that depreciates extremely quickly. If you want to retain the frontier premium you need to constantly be improving due to the ease of distillation.
Your comment makes the timeline seem very different from the way I remember it. Yahoo was dominant much earlier than Google, and was one of a handful of big search engines. Google was a relative newcomer at the time, which had the benefit of being way better at search, which is why it eventually dominated the competition.
Google Maps shows Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America) to Canadians - it does properly label Lake Ontario, though. The idiocy isn't limited just to the US.
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