My strong feeling while reading this “philosopher CEO”’s manifesto: consumer VPNs primarily help customers fight for their right to stream Netflix. This doesn’t strike me as effective advertisement.
This thread is pretty quiet for what strikes me as a substantial set of changes with, presumably, more substantial changes still to come for anyone not grandfathered into a Pro plan.
I get the impression that the intersection of HN posters and Copilot users is quite small in practice; that Claude Code and Codex suck up all the oxygen in this room. But it seems plausible we’ll see similar “true costs greatly exceed our current subscription pricing” from Anthropic and OpenAI someday soon…
My parents bought one for the house when I was in elementary school. I still remember the sound of the Speech Synthesizer, discovering 20 GOTO 10, and playing Hunt the Wumpus.
CEOs have many audiences; great CEOs communicate capably with each.
FWIW it's not entirely clear to me who Entire's long-term customer is, but the (interesting!) CLI that shipped today is very much for developers who are busy building with agents.
Watching their public roadmap to see what happens. Right now, it looks about the same as it has for a while: useful new features and expected maintenance, moving along at a reasonable if not blistering clip.
Oh, that's very interesting work. And, yes, I'd also be surprised if (today's) agentic tools were at all helpful for that: it's way outside of distribution, and conceptual correctness truly matters.
I made some small contributions to cpython during the 3.14 cycle. The codebase is an interesting mix of modern and “90s style” C code.
I found that agentic coding tools were quite good at answering my architectural questions; even when their answers were only half correct, they usually pointed me in the right direction. (I didn’t use AI to write code and I wonder if agentic tools would struggle with certain aspects of the codebase like, for instance, the Cambrian explosion of utility macros used throughout.)
Hi! Thanks for your deeply non-silly reply; it's nice to (virtually) meet a cofounder.
If you have time, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Mullvad's campaign here in Seattle.
For what it's worth, I suppose my perspective boils down to: the first three issues aren't issues here in town, or can be addressed in more direct ways (we have a wide choice of providers; 1st party browsers and services cover the gamut of tracking concerns; etc). Circumventing geographical restrictions is useful, but -- perhaps understandably! -- doesn't appear to be what Mullvad is advertising on the trains I ride.
Long ago, in the era of Firesheep and exploding prevalence of coffee-shop Wi-Fi, consumer VPN services were definitely valuable.
But that was long ago. Now, HTTPS is the norm. The only use cases for consumer VPNs today seem to be (1) "pretend I'm in a different geography so I can stream that show I wanted to see" and (2) "torrent with slightly greater impunity".
I live in Seattle and Mullvad VPN seems to have bought approximately all of the ad space on public transit over the past couple months. Their messaging is all about "freeing the internet" and fighting the power. It's deeply silly and, I worry, probably quite good at attracting new customers who have no need for (or understanding of) VPNs whatsoever.
It's not unreasonable to ask but I think it probably is unreasonable to expect a strictly technical solution. It feels like we're in the realm of politics, policy, and law.
> Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web. But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots?
I'm old enough to remember when people asked the same questions of Hotbot, Lycos, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, and -- eventually -- Google.
Then, as now, it never felt like the right way to frame the question. If you want your content freely available, make it freely available... including to the bots. If you want your content restricted, make it restricted... including to the humans.
It's also not clear to me that AI materially changes the equation, since Google has for many years tried to cut out links to the small sites anyway in favor of instant answers.
(FWIW, the big companies typically do honor robots.txt. It's everyone else that does what they please.)
There are many reasons that "I used AI to do it all and now I've got $REAL ARR" strikes me as unlikely. To name just two:
1. I code with LLMs (Copilot, Claude Code). Like anyone who has done so, I know a lot about where these tools are useful and where they're hopeless. They can't do it all, claims to the contrary aside.
2. I've built a couple businesses (and failed tragicomically at building a couple more). Like anyone who has done so, I know the hard parts of startups are rarely the tech itself: sales, marketing, building a team with values, actually listening to customers and responding to their needs, making forward progress in a sea of uncertainty, getting anyone to care at all... sheesh, those are hard! Last I checked, AI doesn't singlehandedly solve any of that.
Which is not to say LLMs are useless; on the contrary, used well and aimed at the right tasks, my experience is that they can be real accelerants. They've undoubtedly changed the way I approach my own new projects. But "LLMs did it all and I've got a profitable startup"... I mean, if that's true, link to it because we should all be celebrating the achievement.