As of now, at least, nobody is actually seeing an increase of productivity from AI that shows up in any measurements anybody is making. So some of this talk is really getting ahead of the facts on the ground.
As someone living in a non-net-neutral country this really is the big advantage everybody in net-neutral-land ignores: Meta and Google pay for nearly all of my data use (one of them even seems to cover HN).
If the purpose of every business were making profits every business would be a hedge fund (at which point there could be no hedge funds, but that's a separate issue). Profits are a necessary component of a businesses's activities, but not its purpose.
Ain't that the truth. It's common to see businesses using systems from the 90s in my line of work, or managing crucial business data and workflows in spreadsheets. Once companies establish a workflow they're often very hesitant to change it due to all the dependencies.
And in a lot of cases they're making the right call. Change is incredibly expensive and risky and if the only real payoff is "it's slightly faster" that's probably not worth it.
Nobody could find it back in 1994 either! That was part of the fun. You stumbled on a webring or somebody's curated oracle and found a bunch of interesting weird tiny websites.
Oh Lord you need to take on some non-tech companies as clients if this surprises you. I've had clients who forgot they had a website and thought that monthly hosting bill was just for something to do with the back-office Internet connection.
It was a janitorial temp company and they didn't really care about computers. Whoever had been their IT guy before me had made a pretty neat website that would let clients book cleaning staff and give them a birds-eye- view of upcoming staffing needs. It was marginally better than their existing phone and email based system but not enough to make them change it, and over years of saying "let's try it next quarter" eventually everybody forgot about it.
I still in 2026 do not understand the absolute manic drive websites have to push me to the app. I've administered services that have both a web client and an app client and the metrics just really weren't better, certainly not enough to spend energy actively pushing people to the app.
I flinch at "everywhere", particularly when people keep asserting they are places that they aren't (and in fact can't be). Nothing with a hard zero can be normally distributed, for instance, but people will keep insisting quantities with a hard zero are.
Is this not just a linguistic issue, where people say normal distributed but actually mean approximate or assumed normality? Its not like height is normally distributed (there is nobody 8 feet tall), but its not like the distribution bares no resemblance to the normal distribution either, and in a colloquial sense the term seems to he used more freely than the mathematical defined term.
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