They've also been reborn as a health devices manufacturer, Withings.

Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.

AI now offers to post my ads for me on Kijiji. I provide pictures and it has been accurate on price, condition, category and description. I have a lot of shit to sell and was dreading it, but this use removes the biggest barrier for me getting it done. Even helped me figure out some things I was struggling to find online for reference. Saved me at least an hour of tedium yesterday. Excellent use case.

Really?!

At least with AI it's easy to see how shitty it gets as the codebase grows working on even a toy project over a week. Then again, if you have no frame of reference maybe that doesn't feel as awful as it should.

What is the connection to technology here?

If you're after text, there are a number of options. If you're after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but "where everyone else is" will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision. If you want both together, then there's probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren't centralised, where you're the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that's another topic). I've prepared for Discord's inevitable "final straw" moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It's worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element...