So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it doesn't make it good.

The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too

By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate whatever they’re talking to AI about and never talk of it further.

Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone.

It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.

It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).

> The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.

I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.

If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.

I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.

"lleu.site" might not be the clearest in regards to what the service offers. It reads too nerd. Something like "easyweb.site" or "yourown.site" might better describe it.

IMO the four designs that I saw as examples are not attractive enough. Especially coming from the editor's builder, they should make a stronger showcase.

Yes and no. I find the restaurant on Google maps but 9/10 times the menu is either outdated or not properly structured and having a link to the menu website is better. So Google maps is the top of the funnel but I still appreciate a website.

Google maps makes sense at least, but you're straight losing money if all you have is an instagram page. I can't tell if the facebook mention is a joke or not.

It's a trend in Sri Lanka for some reason to put your menu on Instagram... as a reel. Because you don't want your customers to have more than 15 seconds to view what you serve.

IG is only for the regular customers.

Your menu? Can't. Your open hours? They already know it.

Take a picture of the menu, send through ChatGPT, read it over for mistakes, paste content into your website.

> a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.

Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.

> "Can you tell me if the food is good?"

> "Can you tell me are the staff great?"

> "Can you tell me what does it cost?"

> and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.

A restaurant's Instagram page - which is what this post is about - does not answer these questions in any way better than a restaurant's website does.

No really we want to know when it's open, what it serves, and how much it costs. The quality conversation is completely separate.

Sadly, at least in the Netherlands, most restaurant have to pay extortionary prices to aggregator sites like The Fork and others, that most people use to find restaurants and reserve a table. In addition they are incentivised to offer reduced prices on their meals, so the algorithm ranks them higher. So dominant is the role of the aggregator that the restaurant cannot afford not to be listed, and lose the customer base that flows in through these aggregators. Having their own website is of lower concern than doing this well.

That's why Squarespace and Wix exist. You have 30 minutes.

The reality is much much easier. You just google "I want a website" or "give me a .com" and click links until you get some free website builder or a webhosting company who will take your credit card and give you very easy to follow directions to choose a domain name and then takes you right into their online builder where everything is super user friendly and not much different than leaving a post on a social media platform. Most people would absolutely be able to get a website. It might be the best way to do it, but it would get done.

Also lost 1/3 of developers who have no interest in self-hosting on the open net.

closer to 99.9%

Make it 100%. I consider myself relatively "geeky", but I couldn't explain neither what a VPS or an nginx image is.

"Normies" are people who are not sure whether the photos they took today with their phone are "on the phone" or "in the cloud" or maybe on the laptop also? Or what?

Go from there to "nginx", I'll wait and don't hold my breath.

God damn those featured pages load so fast.

Except Squarespace does not just sell hosting. Their main business is selling a CMS and website builder that is supposed to be easy enough for complete noobs to use.

You and I know how to build and host websites, ok, but it had likely taken us dozens if not hundreds of hours of learning everything between TCP/IP to ARIA attributes to get here. The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business.

You're not paying for the hosting, not why would they try to sell you that, really? People pay them for everything else around the hosting.

I believe the yellow pages were typically printed by private companies, often the telephone companies, so in a way Facebook is an apt comparison!

Yes, but that's an ugly address tied to your provider. And you had to learn rearing a website (in Frontpage?) and FTP. Also expectations on websites were different. They were allowed to be fun and didn't have to care about different kidb sof devices, accessibility and all these things.

Back in the day™ this worked somewhat as people who were online and a somewhat level of technical interest. Else they wouldn't have used the Internet. The average restaurant owner doesn't have that interest. They like cooking or talking to customers on the bar or something, but not doing Webdesign. Probably they only use the desktop/laptop for preparing numbers for tax purpose unless they can fully outsource that.

Such proposal doesn't need justification. You can merely disagree.

Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure.

Just like the government finances roads, etc.

Converted to dollars, the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me, so I don't need to justify it until someone can justify to me the bombs, the oil and gas subsidies, the bailouts, the...

> Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?

Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.

Overestimating? I did comment that even buying a name is too much.

People who are non-technical will never have a website, but the barrier of entry is low for anyone who has access to the right information.

I mean I made a website for my mum's store probably 10 years ago, just a landing page, contact details and a map showing where it is + some pictures, put it on Digital Ocean on a basic Linux instance and I haven't touched it since. I don't think I even have the passwords for it anymore - but it just lives there for over a decade without any trouble, the DI host costs like $5 a month and that's the only thing we ever really had to worry about. The website is a basic HTML, it doesn't need to be anything more than that.

My general point is that if that's all you need(and I'd argue most businesses really need just that) then basic infrastructure is both really easy to set up and really resilient long term. That Apache server(or whatever it is, I honestly don't remember) isn't going to randomly fall over on a Tuesday for no reason, unless the fabric of the internet changes then it will continue serving HTML websites forever.