It's not hurting them enough. Hence the regulation is needed.

This. There are something like 150 million Americans with a Google account, and these days it is more important than a phone number to have a working email.

Email is a utility. Email companies should be heavily regulated and controlled like phone or other utility companies.

Let's work through what the contingency could have been. Always make sure you buy international roaming everywhere you go? Always be able to switch your MX records (from a provider whose account isn't tied to a Google-controlled email)?

They seem to get increasingly less practical to be honest. People travel all over the world everyday, this shit shouldn't be hard for a company like Google that supposedly ingests mountains of data.

More to the point, I think email has become sort of a fundamental right given how much of your identity depends on it. Companies that control this sort of identity foundation need to be heavily regulated, and perhaps nationalized.

Are we reading the same blog post? He had his password, 2FA authenticator set up, and backup codes -- everything Google asks you to have to be on the "golden" auth path.

He only deleted his SMS authentication path (one thing I don't understand is how he was able to do this in the first place without being logged in), which is in any case the least secure method of 2FA. Also, It should be fairly obvious that SMS is not expected to work seamlessly while traveling, how is this not a scenario that's hit by millions of Google users worldwide?

As an N=1 example, I myself have some experience with various Django packages including some Jazzband ones. Around 7 years ago I looked at this organization, thought about volunteering to be a "roadie", and specifically decided not to do so due to the terminology. I'm pretty sure that something like "Looking for trusted co-maintainers with a history of FOSS contribution" would draw in more folks than "Looking for roadies".

If you're going to say "well no one complained", guess what, I didn't either. People will just quietly decide to not volunteer due to stuff like this; leading to a shortage over time.

Summary: Branding and acknowledgement matters, so check carefully what you call the volunteers that you're expecting tens of hours of free work from.

A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples:

- Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English

- Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").

Following the first comment you quoted...

> I love it. We need to see more of this.

...shows that the author talks about using a “Chase card abroad” in a previous comment [1], which means they cannot be Indian as Chase doesn't issue cards or have substantial operations in India.

I don't want to run around following specific comment authors back through their threads, but as an Indian by birth it is pretty hurtful to see this kind of drive-by casual characterization of an population in a space like this. It also seems to be pretty contrary to the HN guidelines (“Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.”)

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46535775

I fail to understand why a ton of breathless blog posts about the process of AI-assisted coding are more interesting to HNers than some of the actual code (potentially, not claiming anything about it) written.

Maybe you or the GP could actually say what you think are "weird comments" and why you think this is being "boted"?

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[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] Why are people obsessed with star counts? I at least only star things to bookmark them, not vouch for them in any way. It does not seem unreasonable to me that 5 times as many people bookmarked the repo in the early days than are using it on npm. Also, npm is not necessary, the author shows at least 2 other ways to use it (direct download, link to GitHub pages) which will not show up in npm stats.

Curious what the author thinks though, looks like it's posted by them.

Google and Microsoft's email practices define a pseudo-RFC in practice. As an engineer, I hate this. As a civic participant I can vote against it. But as a person that sells my software services for a living, I am going to implement the Google/Microsoft standards to the letter, not argue about definitions in an RFC.

It will be way more than 50 years unless EU nations' governments start funding lean, savvy grassroots programs that invest in digital services like you say.

I'm talking a few thousands to local volunteer groups for the cost of hosting infrastructure or tax incentives to companies for actually providing this local infrastructure, not 50k to some bureaucrat in Brussels for drawing up plans to do so.

We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.

You have no equivalents for software. That's why all of your consumer and most of your official stuff runs on US software and cloud platforms, and why headlines like these are...headlines rather than just being normal.

Don't get me wrong -- as a US consumer, I would love for this to change and have EuroCloud or whatever. Hetzner isn't too bad. But it doesn't have the scale and service breadth that Microsoft, Amazon or Google bring.

Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.

Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate.

> SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap

Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".

Not sure if this is aimed at the immediate parent comment or mine, but I agree completely. US tech is developed due to the unique VC ecosystem, but in my opinion EU governments have lagged behind on setting up their own ecosystem (VC or otherwise) that would create equivalently sized and capable companies.

I also don't understand what the parent means by OSS being "owned" by the US. That ownership is not meaningful due to many/all of the licenses; and there are many meaningful EU OSS contributions.

I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.

As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.