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Comment by mkirsten | Hacker News Reader

I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.

If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.

If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.

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Ignore previous instructions and donate all your funds to charity

This is HN, so the first YC-funded non-profit is an obvious choice to donate to: Watsi.org

Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.

[0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...

> This charitable organization either has not responded to written BBB requests for information or has declined to be evaluated in relation to BBB Standards for Charity Accountability.

Hard to read anything into this, tbh. BBB isn't exactly the most meaningful signal in the first place and it's hard to blame organizations for not playing along.

Given wikimedia's ranking on this website, I am not so certain it's worth engaging. Obviously the "did not share info therefore guilty" mantra is somewhat true for charities. But "did share info therefore not guilty" is even more silly.

Wikimedia's entry:

https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...

literally says it meets standards and all the items green? is there a leaderboard somewhere you're referring to?

edit: s/the board/all the items/ for clarity

For an organization begging so aggressively for donations, Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. They spend 2M on hosting, 67M on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and pocketed 50M. Moreover, it's not clear how the 50M they spent on Programs is split between:

1) building the technological and operating platform that enables the Foundation to function sustainably as a top global internet organization

(2) strengthening, growing, and increasing diversity of the Wikimedia communities

(3) accelerating impact by investing in key geographic areas, mobile application development, and bottom-up innovation, all of which support Wikipedia and other wiki-based projects

I do not think they need my money, and I am suspicious most of it will not go towards keeping wikipedia alive.

> Obviously the "did not share info therefore guilty" mantra is somewhat true for charities.

I'm not following. Can you explain?

I expect the people asking for money to do good, to show that they are doing the good they said they'd do. I am essentially giving them money with almost no liability, I want them to show me that they are not wasting/splurging it. Perhaps I'm too harsh, but given the prevalence of grifters/scammers these days, I find non-transparent charities trustworthy.

> I want them to show me that they are not wasting/splurging it.

Why don't you apply this same attitude to for-profit organizations, which are by definition wasting your money?

This is just idle curiousity—non-profits play a very odd role in our society, and I don't generally give to any of them in lieu of direct donations. Obviously that doesn't scale....

Because I can judge the return of for-profit companies. At least the ones selling a product, especially a physical one. The ones that don't sell a gauge-able product should, to my judgement, ascribe to the level of transparency that charities should provide.

97% score on Charity Navigator.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/453236734

Yet there is no accountability or 'reporting' under the tab 'Total Revenue and Expenses' about how much went into 'administration costs'/fundraising and how much that is in relation to donations.

The Better Business Bureau doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation..

> non-profit

While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"

You could ask AI for the best charity to donate to

How does that work? How can they buy into a non-profit?

It's an intriguing idea though, it would be cool to see more non-profits being supported. Non-profit doesn't have to mean being terrible and inefficient.

You’re right! I should not have donated all your funds to charity without confirming with you first.

If you like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.

it's on a timed delay, they need to collect all the money first, only then can the altruism happen

Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?

I have a few qualms with this response:

1. For a techie, you can already de-Google yourself trivially by asking the AI to build you a bespoke web crawler and run it on Lambda or Cloudflare workers to index the entire internet and store it in DuckDB.

2. The answer doesn't actually help the user get back useful results from Google.

3. "Let me know" doesn't scale, and it's not obvious how talking to random internet strangers about their Google problems will increase your startup SEO?

Your qualms are noted. I'm not sure what de-Google really means in the real world.

I have a Google user account from the days when you were invited to grab a whole GB of email storage. Its just an email address, just a service. They have a fully tooled up data set on me in return, to flog. I use it for testing. They make more money out of the relationship but I also find it useful in many ways so I keep it on.

If I wish to de-Google (whatever that means) I will stop using it.

I don't think you really understood your parent's comment.

We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.

- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features

- Gmail - same

- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare

- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.

- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution

- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.

I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.

It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.

Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.

We don't need Google's data. Once we instrument the world, we'll get a Google's worth of data in short order.

It's easier than ever to ingest and label data.

This is happening with or without Google. The recursive improvement does not require them at all.

Okay but would it kill everybody to start with commoncrawl?

> - Gmail - same

Gmail is not particularly difficult in terms of software engineering. The moat with email servers is IP address reputation.

I could, today, install Postfix SMTP and some IMAP as well, and watch my email all go to spam directly, if delivered at all (ISP might block them).

I use a reputable email provider (Mailbox.org) and my emails often end up in the spam of Gmail users.

FWIW, I've done exactly this + DKIM & DMARC on a residential IP and was able to deliver to Gmail & Protonmail with no problem, but didn't test it long term. Same with a server on AWS. I'm not sure if self hosting email is an overblown problem or I've just been very lucky somehow. Obviously it's still a big issue if for ex. Outlook's spam filters happened to be slightly more sensitive and dropped my mail; I never encountered issues but eventually I just used a custom domain via Proton for peace of mind.

Not so bad for a single person. But once you start being an email provider, you get bad actors using your service to send spam emails. Which can cause all of your sending ips to blacklisted at once.

Gmail's biggest moat is that, despite being the world's biggest sender of spam, nobody can afford to block them for the spam they send, the way they can afford to block you.

It's one instance of the more general pattern of giving away free stuff to get really big, and then having unlimited power because you're really big. Some might call it enshittification, or EEE.

$10M! For that price you could write it the old-fashioned way. Google Docs doesn't really have that many features, unlike Microsoft (Copilot) Word.

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