If Scientology can get a tax exception as a religious institution, then this guy can get title 9 coverage to not use AI at work as far as I am concerned.
If it was anywhere but a university I would have also expected him to be on the short list for layoffs next round for such a choice as well.
They are going to end up burning the whole thing to the ground in a bid to make investors money on something that never had hard quantifiable monetary value to begin with in a way that you could easily turn up the dial on “line go up” enshitification like Google can with ad impressions.
Its a fancy web forum, a big popular one for sure, but there are God knows how many similar options out there already competing for users. There is a very low ceiling on just how profitable it could ever be as a business all on its own.
There is a reason a lot of these websites, like Gamespot for example, ended up consolidating into holding companies that own a bunch of them.
I wonder what these people honestly thought the end result of building robots would be in the real world.
These sorts of use cases have always been the most likely end result.
Reminds me of the scientist that creates the torment machine then is shocked and appalled when it is used for awful things.
Some people are too idyllic for their own good.
As someone that works in tech, this doesn’t really surprise me at all.
Stuff like Claude Code is very useful to me both professionally and sometimes with tech hobby projects. But outside of that it is just a worse, albeit faster, version of a standard web search.
Its not just PHP, or even just software and digital infrastructure. Most average people would be appalled to get a look behind the curtain of how a great many things they depend on every day are operated once it is not sexy anymore and just fades into the background of the machinery that keeps the lights on and their lives going.
You ever tried to enforce the changes needed to stop all of that tracking on a small group of friends/family? The number of people that actually like it as long as the down sides are not put in there face is wild.
I don’t mean this as disagreement, just an interesting observation about people.
I wish I could just throw out email and calendars as a service and still live in the modern world. I really don’t like my only options for them being having to host it myself with all the pitfalls that can come with or using services controlled by data brokers like Google, shit heads like this guy apparently is, or our way or the highway gatekeepers like Apple.
I just want to give someone money to let me point my domain at it for email services and host my calendar without any drama or BS. Why does that concept have to be so complicated these days?