IncandescentGas

> This is likely a pricing failure.

They wanted direct access to the repositories for other purposes than serving the customer. Such as training data for copilot, and who knows what else.

Pricing low helped ensure access to that data.

> "An LLC will help you force a separation of personal and work finances"

An LLC will require you, under civil or criminal penalty for non-compliance, to separate personal and work finances.

> Cost-wise it’s maybe $500 a year

This is not my experience. My costs are higher, but the costs offset and then some by tax advantages.

Sharing here, to give a picture of what a real single person LLC looks like, compared to a vanity hobby LLC as described by OP.

I'm a contractor with a registered LLC S-Corp in the US. Almost all of my income is 1099 from one source. I was converted from W-2 to contract when my employer was acquired, my job role did not change. You might call me a misclassified full time employee. I could report this of course, and then I would burn my professional contacts and lose my job. So I don't.

I hire myself, pay myself a fair market rate as a salary, and run a payroll just for me. And I provide myself a few benefits from the LLC, like health insurance.

I'm required to keep up with a pile of quarterly and yearly fillings between the state, county, city and IRS. This is a non trivial amount of time and effort. I have to maintain separate business books and bank accounts in coordination with my accountant. I don't actually get to access the money I earned until it exits the business entity through a controlled process. I have to file business taxes separate from personal taxes. I still have to pay quarterly estimates on my personal taxes too.

My family health insurance is roughly $12k this year. If I purchase that insurance directly, I use post-tax income to do so. I'd pay ~$4k in taxes to take home the ~$12k income used to buy health insurance. But when the LLC buys the health insurance and provides it as a employee benefit, the ~$12k is not taxed.

The salary I pay myself is taxed at ~37%. The same as if I just filed as self employed. But the business income I earn over that salary is taxed at ~20%. This is the biggest advantage. The gap between a "fair market value" for my role, and my actual contract rate. In that gap, the LLC structure saves me 20% on taxes by labeling that portion of income as "shareholder profit disbursement".

Rough yearly costs:

$150 registered agent service $150 state registration filing $2500 tax prep and account services throughout year $1500 payroll services, including payroll tax filings

Rough yearly tax advantage:

$15,000

Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.

Thanks, your comment got this song stuck in my head. (I like my gym membership, thank you very much. I even visited the gym once several months ago.)

We wasted every second dime On diets, lawyers, shrinks, and apps, and flags And plastic surgery

- So long & thanks for all the fish, a perfect circle

> You are perfectly free to keep selling what we've been eating. No one is forcing people to plant the new stuff.

This common sense statement should be true, but is wholly ignorant of the lawsuits farmers deal with from seed suppliers

No. They should be available for legit use cases and not available for data scrapers who will use it to facilitate algorithmic housing and employment discrimination. Especially not available for scammers who make mugshot extortion websites.

Few who paid their debt to society and moved on are excited about random strangers wanting to do their own petty little performative mock show trials to sit in smug judgement over them. Please stop.

I think the point is intent. Sure, no chance of success to build a reactor. But he created a radiation hazard situation all the same.

If a nuclear engineer enabled and instructed him, would there not be liability for the hazard? If ml is going to be an expert instructor for nuclear, hacking, bio hacking, virus research, do the peddlers of the ai product escape ethical or legal responsibility just because "its an app?"

> succeeded in making a real reactor

The concern here is not if an amateur attempt to make a reactor, hack a bank, bioengineer a medicine/poison is successful or not. Interactive and instructive access to some forms of knowledge used to come with discretion along side instruction.

Yes, perhaps your swearing at me in this context is a little hysterical

Of course. "tried to" being key words in the comment. If he had the help of Claude at the time, how much more dangerous would his bumbling have been?

A real nuclear engineer with the knowledge he needed would also have said "no, don't do that and I won't help you." We are programming the knowledge into the ai agent. Giving ai a little discretion makes sense too.

Fastmail reads or analyzes users email to sell ads? Fastmail trains ai models on their user's email messages?

Metadata is more valuable than message content for analysis. GPG solves that how?