bobbyfiend

I have been on Opalstack since they started. I like them. I pay for hosting monthly. I've self-hosted several apps there (or tried to, sometimes; I couldn't make everything work all the time). Nextcloud is dodgy; I like it, but it's a pain in the ass for someone like me (not a dev, not a coder) to deal with the almost inevitable problems every 2 or 3 times I need to upgrade. And I've never been able to get an office suite working well. Much of this could be because I'm trying to run NC on shared hosting; even opalstack's support doesn't fix all of that.

Email: opalstack has email. I use it. I don't actually know what service it is, but I have three or four mailboxes linked to a couple of domain names I own, and several hundred email addresses* Thunderbird does great with IMAP on my laptop, desktop, and phone, with opalstack as the server.

*lots of emails because when I sign up for something I create a new email address just in case they sell my stuff and I start to get spam.

This is cool info. I also wonder, looking at his picture, if he was born in 1988. No idea, but hey.

As a smart person said several years ago, "Context is everything and everything without context is a lie."

On the surface, yes. Look up Gail Slater and then decide if you really think she's going to do anything about monopolies. Her career since leaving the FTC has been spent defending them.

I think we have different ideas of what "politics" means.

After I eventually parsed that sentence: think hard about how logic and language work. A person promoting a lot of horrible things isn't the same as that person inventing them.

You seriously don't know anything about Trump?

This is the best thing I have seen all week

As some witty folks have put it, LLMs can't give you anything truly, interestingly new when all they're capable of is some weighted average of what's already there. And I'll be clear in saying I hate with the force of a tsunami the way AI is being shoved at us by desperate CEOs, and how it's being used to kill labor, destroy copyright law, increase income inequality, destroy the environment, and increase the power of huge corporations headed by assholes like Altman and Musk. But AI is getting pretty good at that weighted-average-of-what's-out-there, and a lot of the work done in several industries can benefit from that. For me, one of the great perversities or tragedies of AI is that it could be a targeted, useful tool but, instead, it's a hammer to further erode freedom. Even the coders, editors, advertisers, educators, etc. using it to do their jobs are participating in a short-term selloff of their profession to their CEOs, shareholders, etc. at the expense of large numbers of their colleagues or potential colleagues who will now never get jobs.

It's like if someone invented the wheel and Sam Altman immediately patented it and sold it to Raytheon.

I have a very good friend who is brilliant and has slogged away slowly shifting the sometimes-shitty politics of a swing state's drug and alcohol and youth corrections policies from within. She is amazing, but she has a reading disorder and is a bit neuroatypical. Social niceties and honest emails that don't piss her bosses or colleagues off are difficult for her. She jumped on ChatGPT to write her emails as soon is it was available, and has never looked back. It's been a complete game changer for her. She no longer spends hours every week trying to craft emails that strike that just-right balance. She uses that time to do her job, now.

Imagine staying onboard with someone promoting nearly every horrible thing in our world just so you can have easier email access.

I don't think I do this like you're suggesting, but I have my email hosted at opalstack. I've been really happy with them. I don't have a server-side spam solution yet, though. I just set up spam rules on Thunderbird on my local machine.