1. This is why BDFL culture in open source is bad. Because if the BDFL decides to go all in on some completely bizarre mess, all of a sudden there’s massive fork politics.

2. Hey is the marquee product now?? Does anyone actually use Hey? I tried it for a year, and basically found I was paying for the privilege of having a slower, buggier, less feature-rich gmail that can’t even dent the have-a-paid-email-that-doesn’t-exploit-you market (Fastmail and Proton exist, yo).

[1] Can someone explain what the theory of the product is here? It sounds like they’re marketing these things as ways for the customer to commit fraud, for example by connecting to someone else’s login. How else would the customer expect to be able to get free Netflix or whatever?

At least a couple times a year I find myself calling some banker/travel organizer/administrator in charge of some speaking fee/etc./etc. and asking “hey, I have some Docusign with a weird name on it in my inbox, is that from you?”

(See also, every process within a million miles of the mortgage industry, which seems almost custom-made by fraudsters to help other fraudsters, like the whole practice of mailing out letters saying “Surprise! A servicer change happened, now you need to send a check to this totally other company you’ve never heard of! Trust us, it’s real!”)

You must be a Recurser, right? This is so very Recurser.

There's a kind of elegance and charm to this style of just heaping abuse on people who richly deserve it---Hunter S. Thompson was its greatest practitioner and this is in that tradition nicely.

Back in the day, my basic idea was basically this: the reason that consumer companies can impose unfair terms on people is because it's basically only a small amount of money to an individual, and it's costly for people to coordinate. For example, the expected cost to me of some company's arbitration clause is small, because the probability of any individual into a dispute with them is low. But in the aggregate it's bad: over a million customers (say) it's almost certain that one of those customers gets royally screwed by it. So: what if all those million customers of company X could all agree to automatically cancel their service contracts with X, if and only if enough other people also agree to do so that a simultaneous cancellation would cause real pain to the company's bottom line. And then enforce that agreement with automation. Some basic game theory suggests the objectionable clause immediately goes boom.

[1] https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 ... sorry for the academic journal paywall

If that's true, how does it actually achieve anything with respect to client confidentiality or anything else? (For example, there's the claim "the assistant keeps full context across every conversation and every document." --- but isn't that a function of the model one uses, which is on Anthropic or Google? Ditto the claim "Documents never leave your perimeter. Compliance, residency, and privilege stay under your control." But this is only true if you're not piping them to Anthropic or Google...) Is this just a user interface?

It would be nice if these product webpages included an easy way to find documentation so that one could figure out what the product actually does. I can't find any obvious way to discern if it can be easily used with a local model running via ollama or something, for e.g.