Seriously: I roll my own harness over OpenRouter and GPT 5.6, and it is genuinely better than CC+Fable for my maths and programming use cases.
The one thing Fable 5.1 still tops out on is the ability to take a simple "Let's engage in an interactive complexity-removing session" and materialize abstractions and semantics quickly.
You can wrap claude code in a harness without -p, it works fine. I think most of the concern was that -p resubmits the entire chat history on each prompt which is really bad for kv caching, and when Anthropic announced that they were ok with 3rd party harnesses that DO use -p I think they had figured out the routing and caching for thinking token hash ids
And if I am not mistaken, Theo’s T3Code (which was explicitly told was bad), doesn’t even use anything else than AI producer provider command line tools and use them with `-p`.
It’s detectable and has been known to result in account bans. People have been doing it since the early days of Gemini, when the ToS was still unclear, and some only found out after their accounts were banned. There have been multiple GitHub issues and reports to Google about it. It’s not worth the effort unless you’re willing to risk a secondary Google account.
Apart from the products not being very competitive this is the main reason I'm reluctant to use any Google models / AI products. The account is way to precious thing to lose based on some AI classifier misfiring and then you know there's good route to get it reenabled.
Same. The more of Google's services I touch, the more chance that some errant auto-moderation system will lock me out of Gmail and their support won't do anything about it. Better to not risk it, I don't even log in to YouTube.
Google made some noise awhile back about banning youtube accounts for using adblockers. I'm not sure if they went through with it but it just isn't worth the risk if you have a more important service the relies on google.
Sounds like a good reason to start eliminating your dependence on Gmail. You don't want to tie something as important as your E-mail identity to an account that you might get banned from.
Yes as a teenager I made many mistakes, not least of them being making a Gmail account. I even used it to sign up for a few services. I do have a bit of a wild side so sometimes I log in to check it.
Couldn't one just make a separate Google account for the models/AI products? I usually have multiple accounts with most providers, multiple banks, multiple brokerages, etc.. It really is not that difficult to manage.
I think the problem with his ask in that initial picture is mentioning Pi, which doesn't do headless CLI, but does do the OAuth that the TOS specifically mentions.
The larger issue here is the fact that access to an account can hold you hostage and impact your life in essential services.
We should really find a way to break the tightly coupling to these platforms, including mobile carriers, and not have to live in fear.
Having a real representative of each platform in a government branch under regular hours that citizens can access with their documents so that any issues with it can be dealt is a good first step.
But.. Internet mail is not a lossy system. Quite the opposite!
Unless providers do insane things (e.g. accept then discard), it is much safer than snail mail, where messages may not arrive and not cause the sender to be notified of non-delivery either. With email, the sender gets explicit per-recipient-and-message feedback on what the recipient provider has accepted responsibility (to not lose them) for.
They absolutely do accept then discard when it's flagged as spam above a certain confidence threshold (below that it "only" ends up in the spam folder).
I've built a personal meta-harness on top of agy, cc, codex, kiro-cli, ollama that I use to schedule jobs, run oneshot tasks, etc. which provides a general API for my other personal apps that need to do some inference. For example, I built a personal trip app for an upcoming family vacation that uses the inference API to do things like research locations and plan routes, it basically just calls the various cli harness underneath, so it would look like i'm using them directly with their respective model.
I wonder if that would get my google account banned? If so i'm definitely taking agy out of the provider options..
I also temporarily had agy as a harness in my orchestrated workflow until I learned about the account bans. IANAL but frontier models examining Google's TOS suggested my use could be in violation. Haven't touched agy for anything since.
Just google things. If you buy a monthly package, you pay next day, let's say on the 15th. Then they again pull the monthly amount on the 6th of next month. They pocket your money and the moment you have any issues, well, go F yourself. Everything is automated. They shove your arse out from any service they deem redundant or useless. They zero your data without recourse.
GOOG is like a soulless, flesh eating antihuman robot, junkie monopoly-behemoth. Terrible UI/UX, very good models, braindead execution. Protected entity, just like NVDA.
Btw Antigravity is the worst of all environments. No money for the braindead. Well, bring your money elsewhere, to small joes instead.
I think an interesting side of this conversation is how the Google employees are jumping in with DARVO attacks, trying to accuse people of spreading misinformation when they're literally quoting the ToS.
This is something I've seen happen a lot with Google- their employees (especially the director+ folks) are absolutely rabid on social media when it comes to defending their products, and they don't let little things like "facts" get in the way.
Google needs to get a better social media policy because they look like clowns when they do this.
There have been cases in which friends or family of Google employees have gotten the Google Death Penalty. In those cases they were internally stonewalled about this for weeks. Google's risk department works like secret police[0] and I would not be surprised if there is internal disinformation about what the policies actually are in there too.
Also keep in mind nobody reads the TOS. The TOS is pure Wilhoitism: it exists to protect Google and bind you. There is plenty of shit that gets put in there that Google never intends to do to 90%+ of their customers, but they have to reserve the right to do this anyway. You can infer the general shape of business policy from the the TOS but not the exact details.
The only people who actually know anything about Google's business policies are the people in the risk department doing enforcement. The CxO level might have be consulted about specific policies, but a lot of stuff isn't going to rise to their level until it blows up and becomes a PR disaster.
[0] I call this the "Maoists in the Risk Department": in general, there is a tendency of all businesses to independently reinvent Maoism when enforcing rules with their customers. You actively discourage "edge-touching" behavior from your customers by making the rules murky and incomprehensible.
Just for reference, stuff like this is exactly why some people oppose the forced Apple/Google requirement in government systems like the new eIDs (eIDAS) in Europe. If you're forced to use Apple/Google for digital identification, playing around with your Google account and get it banned can have disproportional consequences. Suddenly you're locked out of all online government systems.
Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems. This prevents them from revoking access, as the identity management is within nation state control vs big tech. You potentially have recourse with your government, you have no recourse with Google and Apple (current state). They may consume your identity for your benefit, but they may not control your digital identity.
I strongly doubt the US would mandate this, but could see the EU doing so.
The way the EU could implement this is to mandate only using identity providers can guarantee they will not revoke people's identities, and the only way to make that guarantee watertight is to mandate only identity providers based within the EU.
There are no guarantees unfortunately, just contracts (formal and informal) that can be broken and paths as to what happens when those contracts degrade or fail. Agree with you on mandating EU only idps for those who reside within the EU jurisdiction.
Banks can't just ban you, nor just take your money. The price they pay for being gatekeepers is a ton of regulation.
This is why PayPal for the longest time made it really clear that "we are not a bank". So that they wouldn't be subject to those regulations and could suspend accounts and keep the money.
I think in this context, the concern isn't that you'll lose the money, but the loss of all legal/practical authentication mechanisms.
In other words, you might still have your life-savings as a sack of cash... But it won't help if your car is impounded because you aren't the owner or your license expires, you'll live in a tent in the woods because landlords can't verify your credit/rental history, etc.
Banks can just ban you if they whisper the magic words "suspected money laundering". They are theoretically accountable to a process that takes 500 years and 3 quadrillion dollars to reach a resolution, then they will unban you. You might notice both you and the bank will be dead by that time.
I actually know someone this happened to. While they did ban him from using the bank, they first warned him, gave him a chance to close out his open transactions, and then helped him move all the money somewhere else at no cost.
The important part is that they can't just close your account and keep everything.
Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them.
Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be.
These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, algorithmic control what content you know exists, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of humans rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally.
I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding of first of this new sort of entity. And a morality system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described.
Centralization of power at all levels is bad. I therefore agree in spirit.
But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism.
> If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests.
You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.
Compare two alternatives.
One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.
Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.
The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.
Open standards, protocols, and interoperability are definitely part of my values.
But if the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting lawmakers to force them, then they will be implemented cynically and not within the spirit of the values. The type of thing that happened with apple's implementation of the anti-gate-keeping laws 'enforced' by the eu.
What you describe requires a flexible values system - not a single semantic standard. I'd love to live in a world where if you were big enough to have people wanting to interoperate with your service on behalf of your users and you were actively preventing it, you'd be an outcast in the deepest sense. That no users would touch your service, and it would be politically unfeasible to deal with you.
We don't live in that world because people have not developed this sort of social norm.
This is one of those problems where there are different ways to solve it but all of them require you to put in the work.
We currently have an army defeatists who show up to tell you that if you think companies would get more customers by selling products that screw them less, nobody cares about that and people just want to live in a convenient cage with an unlimited supply of artificially sweetened penitentiary gruel. These people (to the extent that any can be found who are not robots) should obviously be burned alive in the town square to serve as an example to the others, but the most important thing if you intend to solve the problem in that way is to ignore them and build the product that screws customers less anyway. And then shame the services not doing that into irrelevance, once the alternative actually exists.
Likewise, there are better ways to do anti-gatekeeping rules than what the EU is doing. For example, require two things. First, that source code be published as a requirement to receive copyright protection -- not that the customer can make unlimited copies, but that they can read it to know what it's doing or make changes to their own copy. And second, require that if the manufacturer/seller can modify any code running on the device, so can the customer. Now Apple can do malicious compliance all they like, but any vendor locks they put in will have someone distributing a patch to remove them the next day, and inhibiting that is the thing which is prohibited.
That is ridiculous. These big tech companies are supposed to be broken up under the current rules.
Effective government is not big government, it is right sized.
Rich people and fascists don't want a smaller government, they want a government too weak to protect you from them.
I agree with you. They are in violation of a reasonable interpretation of anti-trust laws already on the books. It's quite clear. And yet those laws are not enforced.
You seem to be saying that there are a group of people who want it this way and they have more power so that is why is it the case.
But how did we get here? It's a complicated question for sure. And for anything that occurred like this, there are many answers depending on where you put the weights.
I put the weights cultural norms of the maybe 100s of thousands of people that had a hand in how we got here in varying degrees. The leaders of the companies of course who didn't get flack in their communities for doing something that was negative to the rest of society. The politicians who played along, the employees who were proud to work at such a place and the family that could be proud of them for it, even us users who sacrificed liberty for safety and convenience.
At every level, it's social norms that caused this to be.
We are, primarily, social creatures. Even the rich - maybe especially the rich - are greatly influenced in how they act by what those they respect think of it.
I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it." Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
If anything, I think software needs more of these sort of top down safety rules. I want to companies held financially / criminally responsible for data leaks. Just like restaurants are held responsible for food safety.
> I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it."
Strawman fallacy: It is in the interests of private enterprise to not have their $100-million+ airplanes crash, because it means $100-million+ going up in smoke. The owners of those planes would therefore have an interest in not having them crash.
> Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
Under this scenario, if the public finds out that a drug is harmful/lethal, the public jerks away from that drug towards solutions that have a reputation of working.
Is the resulting rate of fatality/worse-QOL lower than (a central authority filtering out drugs & holding them to standards)? No, definitely not. But the gap between the two is not infinite, and in most cases falls into an order of magnitude of difference.
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> I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
An axiom of (feeble-mindedness in the average person) is proposed here. People are as good/competent as the standards that they are held to.
> medical licensing
There's a difference between a certification of competency, and a deliberate constriction of the supply of medical residencies.
A politically impossible outcome that isn't worth hanging our hopes on.
A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.
Is it? Are tech companies so popular that voters would revolt if politicians proposed break-ups? They would not be the first - Standard Oil and Bell were also powerful corporations that got split.
What the voters want is of minimal importance. There are near zero politicians that want to break up big tech, and absolutely zero that would be able to actually achieve a break up if they tried. You can see my reply to a sibling comment where I outline why this is the case.
> A politically impossible outcome that isn't worth hanging our hopes on.
> A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.
There's more history in the US of successful legislation aimed at breaking up big companies than at that sort of specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation.
The former is blunt force. It's relatively easy to target and make effective. It just needs enough ground-level support to get enough people from both parties on board - and we're seeing some shifts that way in the current Republican mishmash of groups.
The latter needs excellent technical knowledge and resistance to super-sophisticated lobbying and loophole-creation. It's very hard to get right.
> There's more history in the US of successful legislation aimed at breaking up big companies than at that sort of specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation
We live in a much different world today than during the trust busting era. Extreme concentration is the status quo of today's economy and it's happening across basically every sector and industry.
Lina Khan as the head of the FTC under the most legislatively prolific Democratic president of the last 30 years was completely powerless to break up anything. Even Trump and an army of partisan DAs that were frothing at the mouth to dismantle Trump's enemies have failed to do so.
Just yesterday Google prevailed against the threat of a breakup of their ad businesses which is perhaps the single most compelling example of anticompetitive abuse by big tech besides maybe the Apple ecosystem.
This trend is only going to accelerate as skilled workers age out of the economy and white collar economic activity aggregates into a handful of massive tech companies.
That's all without factoring in that government quid pro quo is now defacto legal and these companies have very deep pockets for donations.
There are many other factors I could mention but the point is that nobody with any power wants to break up these companies.
> Lina Khan as the head of the FTC under the most legislatively prolific Democratic president of the last 30 years was completely powerless to break up anything.
Only because she was blocked by both Republicans and Democrats who are sold out to the same plutocrats. I agree with the parent that the problem remains very simple and is a matter of balance of powers. Any fine-grained regulation will be simply ignored by those people who are above all laws.
Cultural understanding without regulation is just serfdom. That's basically what we have now where most people aren't willing to fight Apple/Google/Meta/MS.
It's still about framing, though. It's not a fight. The gatekeepers, like governments, laws, and money are social constructs - shared fictions. They are not physical things but made agreements by society. We can't fight them anymore than you can fight ourselves. And they stop working the moment we stop believing in them.
The only way to fight a social construct is to create a new shared fiction that is more desirable and works better.
The machine created by the current social fiction is composed of people who would all be better off with a better narrative. We just don't have the imagination right now to see it. But it is there waiting for us somewhere. Like all the best ideas that transformed us for the better throughout history.
> I don't believe government regulation is the answer
While I agree with where you're coming from in spirit, if you want to push this then you've got to do the work of actually coming up with workable concrete approaches rather than hand waving against a whole general category of action. The problem is that digital communications lend themselves to centralized power, and power vacuums inevitably get filed by something, right?
I too would love to see the power of surveillance companies get magically reduced by something that isn't centralized government action. But that hasn't happened so far, right? If anything, they've grown stronger - sucked in ever more of our lives, sucked in technical communities who were culturally predisposed to and capable of resisting, and even taken over control of parts of the government!
So barring that, government regulation (ie democratic accountability) seems like a necessary approach. This fails too of course (eg how all the natural rights referenced in the Bill of Rights are being infringed in one way or another). But once again what is the alternative to attempting to codify lofty ideals, writing them down, and then pushing to implement them wherever they're being infringed? Regulation like the GDPR and other EU directives at least attempt to draft rights-based paradigms, as imperfect as their implementation and enforcement may be.
The real problem would seem to be that we're soured on the idea of having reasonable laws in the US from every attempt at meaningful regulation ending up with a multitude of holes in it due to corporate lobbying. It seems like that is what needs to be focused on and addressed - thinking one can let the corpos run wild and then somehow outrun or individualistically push back on them is a pipe dream.
What you're saying is super reasonable and the ways I think about it too sometimes. I have two thoughts on this and I'm not sure how clear I can be.
1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.
Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.
The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.
2. From what I can tell, Pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.
The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.
That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.
There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.
It is the pessimism that kills all of that. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit which makes it so. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.
It is our values that shape the rest.
Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.
(Sorry for the delay in replying. There is definitely an analog of Gresham's law for discussions)
I completely agree about the feedback loops. They're mutual feedback loops though, and causality can go both ways. We're currently stuck with a strong attractor of surveillance-based software. It's certainly possible to escape from the local minimum, but requires a lot of activation energy to escape it (compelling functionality, features, ease of use, etc, to prime its own network effects).
I don't think it was ads per se, but rather the centralizing software architecture of AJAX (et al). Everyone wanted to build things that were "easy" for "everyone" to use, how to make money came later. Or going back even earlier, if "the web" had been designed around something like content centric networking rather than HTTP.
On "tech moment right now is ripe for it" - for me, it has felt this way for the past twenty five years! I generally agree about pessimism as well, so let's just say at this point I'm tired. I certainly don't want to dissuade you from pouring new energy into software that is going to change the world [for the better]. But I'm also cautioning you to not reject other angles of reform!
Further on the pessimism point, isn't shying away from government (ie collective) action itself a form of pessimism? I'm pretty pessimistic about groups (herds) of people in general (things always end up going "sideways" due to opportunists). But looking at the structure of US politics it seems there is a large contingent of "government can never work" that ends up running interference whenever de jure government tries to reign in the corpos, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Or putting my general point another way, in terms of the culture point you made elsewhere - our mass culture is currently strongly steeped in centralized political action/narratives. If you want our mass culture to change to value technical decentralization and privacy, then how else would you expect that to manifest itself beyond calls for centralized/government action to do things, ala privacy regulation? We can certainly lament the centralized political culture, but unless you're talking about changing two aspects of our culture simultaneously, then that basically is what it is.
I appreciate the sorts of ways you're thinking about this. I don't think I see it much. It feels like you're looking at things similar to me but arriving at different conclusions. That's super interesting. So here's my belated reply in return.
I don't think shying away from governing hierarchies are pessimistic but maybe you see it that way because I didn't explain myself well.
It's important to separate something. Hierarchy and cooperation are not the same thing. Though I guess in instantiation at the human level, they seem to mostly be.
But multi-cellular creatures are made up of cooperating cells wherein there is no centralized power. It seems like nature has borne out that this configuration is robust.
And, if you squint, markets are a similar thing. I love markets. They're a way that people can make individual choices about what they can offer their neighbor and so be rewarded by their neighbor in this positive sum way. It is, by nature, decentralized (though regulation exists in modern markets and sometimes work well for a time as a patchwork kludge over a janky system).
Anyway, there's trust networks there and lots of interesting stuff we could tangent about. But the point is that markets are a decentralized thing have been around longer than governments. We don't need monopolies on violence to cooperate if social norms forbid violence. Of course, the violent ones hacked the system and so we needed to defend against that, so we picked the violent winner, and governance is born.
This is also an interesting path turning point that, given our current technology and understanding, if we started from zero, you could wonder if we could develop in a way without a single entity with a monopoly on violence because we handle this sort of threat somehow else.
There's that whole debt and reciprocity thing that is even older than markets - hell, animals do it. But I wonder about the scalability of that. I don't believe david graeber's idea that the abstraction of reciprocity was the root of all evil but that's like one take and maybe we could make better reciprocity networks.
This is all rambly. I hope my point comes across though. We lack imagination for configurations that can be that are cooperative without the cancer of centralization.
It would be nice if someone starts imagining this for us. It's very hard to imagine a world so different from our own. But we know, by nature, that it is possible. There are a lot of cells in my body - it's not a scale issue.
My take is that cultural values/social norms are the real thing that makes society. We think it's all these things like laws, money, and borders. But those things are secondary fiction memes to the primary fiction meme of values.
IP is super decentralised. Digital communications could have led to a more decentralised society than ever before, and in the beginning , they end. But in the end, they didn't, because large actors figured out how to exploit them.
De/centralization is not an either or, but more like a yin and yang. There are aspects of IP that are highly centralized.
1. Assignment of addresses is centralized. Even though it's federated (ie distributed), authority still flows logically from one single authoritative view. And even though individual networks can choose to go against that central view, diverging too much prevents them from talking to one another (ie most of the bargaining is on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, rather than something more nimble or adaptive)
2. It's a protocol for communication between nodes. Reusing node addresses as service/contents addresses leads to services being inherently centralized on those (logical) nodes. Not a problem with IP itself, but definitely an attractive nuisance that made problems for things naively layered on top of IP like HTTP(S) and DNS.
It's actually why I will never use any of Google's paid services like compute or LLMs or storage. I will not risk my access to important services. "Free" Gmail and search is all I will use.
Which is funny because the government can't legally ban you from the government. If you suffer any consequences from this, the government is at fault in every case. Of course, good luck proving it while you're in jail.
Politicians have been pushing companies to be more aggressive about banning individuals who open new accounts after their previous one gets banned. That was even one of the requirements of the deal in the recent social media court case in the US.
And there's the problem that they can do this with no recourse and no defense permitted.
I'm reminded of the guy who lost his Google access over "child pornography"--a picture sent to his little boy's pediatrician that got automatically uploaded. The police agreed he had done nothing wrong, Google didn't give him his account back.
I don't get these model providers forcing people to use their (bad) software. I just downgraded my anthropic account because I can't stand the bugfest that is Claude. I won't even touch google for AI. Doesn't matter if your model is good if I have to use your software.
With open-weight models getting closer and closer to parity with frontier models for specific tasks (coding,etc) the frontier labs are trying to make moats via their software.
Personally, this is why I foresee Anthropic/OpenAI/Google taking a bath once their creditors come calling. I think the individuals most attached to a specific app are the ones least willing to pay the true cost of inference. (IE: your grandma using chatgpt to ask for recipe recommendations probably isn't going to pay $400/mo).
"programming is solved" has also been said, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face, let alone going on a podcast tour with it as the mantra
> (from Twitter) ...My Google account too valuable to risk it impacted by Antigravity usage
If your account is that valuable, it's time to consider moving to a self-hosted option. Or at the very least, start by purchasing a domain and linking it to your Google account, while keeping offline backups of all your emails and documents.
The real problem isn't that Google might accidentally ban you; it's that there's no way to get a human in the loop to review the issue. My client is an enterprise GCP user paying a hefty sum every month. Getting someone knowledgeable typically means wading through Gemini or talking to non-english-speaking support who just read GCP documentation back to you; and that can take months to get resolved. Now imagine the situation for someone paying nothing or a double-digit amount for their gmail account or workspace.
I'm aware people will complain that "self-hosting is hard, insecure, etc.", but it's like a backup: an annoying process you truly appreciate when shit hits the fan.
I don't self host anymore, as it really is a pain, but use Fastmail instead (while my wife uses Protonmail). I would never rely on Google for, well, anything if I can help it.
I have been self hosting E-mail for close to 15 years now, and apart from the occasional and very rare delivery problem, it's not really a pain at all. Get a dedicated IP address not on a spam blacklist, don't spam, and it's pretty much set and forget. Well worth it to not have your very identity hanging off an account that you might one day be banned for for reasons you can't figure out.
I’m also doing YouTube and the first thing I did was create a separate Google account for it. I’d be very surprised if Theo has everything running on the same personal account
I don't understand why google are being like this. This is an opportunity to extend an olive branch to developers (like openai has) and a great way to get data around how people are actually making this model work for them regarding coding…
The VSCode Antigravity extension I was using turns out to be a 3rd-party one. I found out only today that there's an official extension too, which I think wasn't there earlier.
Is Antigravity CLI still the only TUI allowed for Gemini? Coming from Claude Code, agy is quite a few steps back. Particularly I miss /ide that can connect to vscode and then can display a pre-write diff which then can be acknowledged or declined in CC.
Banning the entire account rather than AI access is wildly user hostile. People have years of emails and calendars on their accounts.
And then you get to fight the support bots and eventually go to the actual unofficial Google support - asking hn whether anyone knows someone with a pulse at Google.
This feels like the sort of thing that needs to be legislated. Banning accounts after breaking ToS is a pretty common behavior across many companies. The fact a Google account ends up being used for multiple products makes it more interesting but the overall problem here is not unique to them.
Big companies are all becoming user hostile these days. They act like the customer is an inconvenience rather than a fundamental part of their business. Every interaction exudes this feeling that your primary role is to serve as an unwanted impediment to money flowing out of your bank account and into theirs.
My mom’s Gmail account got banned for no reason whatsoever last week. Since then they removed her recovery number and 2FA as they ‘looked suspicious’.
Access to nearly 20 years of emails, photos and docs gone in an instant.
It’s been particularly painful because she used Google to log in to everything too, including for health records that she needs.
There is no way of contacting anyone at Google about it and apparently nothing that can be done anyway. It’s absolutely devastating. They’re still charging her for Google One and she can’t even manage the subscription because she can’t log in.
I urge anyone reading this to do a Google Takeout request and make a local backup of all the data they hold.
I have an auto "checkout" every month and I download my data. I don't know if it's readable, I haven't checked, but it feels comforting. My email is also just a private name@domain that forwards to my Gmail. If I ever need to switch, it would be a simple update with my registrar.
(I'm aware domains can be stolen too, but I expect to have some leverage as I'm paying for that in the UK.)
If not directly through what is offered there, under the DSA (eu citizens and residents) have further ways to appeal their decision, and also Google takeout should be a last option even for banned accounts.
If you have any luck post a followup on HN to guide other users having a similar issue.
Nah, we all pay for a lawyer with our taxes: the attorney general.
What you do is send Google your own correspondence, certified mail, giving them a heads up that you've contacted the attorney general. That usually gets an even quicker response than from a personal lawyer :)
It also gives the attorney general office a heads up if they need to be scrutinizing a company like Google more carefully if they're getting a lot of complaints.
Situations like this are exactly what they're here for.
My youtube student account was blocked this week. Google offers a student discount if you register with your school email, so I created a new youtube account for that.
Flagged as a potential bot, gotta tread really carefully or they'll nuke my "normal" google account too.
No one has actually had their account banned for this, Google just disables their Antigravity access due to breaking TOS. People just repeat the line that “Google bans accounts” because it’s a bigger headline draw.
Yes, this is why I avoid using my Google account for anything really. Risks from banning are not proportional. It's better to always use separate email logins, and when possible, non-Google services.
This is why I'm hesitant to buy Google AI again. I don't want to risk some npm install compromising my Google account which also happens to do AI coding.
This is exactly why I haven't used any of Google's AI stuff. Unlike other providers, I'm risking my email and internet service (GFiber!) to some capricious ban-happy whim you probably can't even appeal.
If there is any company that can "ban your account" which would result in big problems for you (because, for example, they host your E-mail which means you've just lost access to password recovery for every account you have) with no recourse or due process, you should seriously rethink your approach to your online life.
Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths that sell you to advertisers. Those smaller E-mail providers will have actual support that you can contact in case of problems and will not "ban you".
And what do you do when VeriSign just decides that they don't like hosting your domain anymore? You just lost access to password recovery for every account you have https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
Also word of warning: don't buy Google AI subscription before you confirm you have "Antigravity entitlement" whatever that is.
You can have "verified" account (for 18+ and Gmail), bank card added, active AI Pro/Ultra subscription, and still you won't be able to use even the free tier of Antigravity.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 23.0 ms ] threadIs OpenAI the only one that allows this? Because Codex without codex is fantastic.
Seriously: I roll my own harness over OpenRouter and GPT 5.6, and it is genuinely better than CC+Fable for my maths and programming use cases.
The one thing Fable 5.1 still tops out on is the ability to take a simple "Let's engage in an interactive complexity-removing session" and materialize abstractions and semantics quickly.
per token pay-go is typically unrestricted aiui
Remember that this is a TOS, so you gotta presume that they will act as malicious as possible within the text.
Though, I only have one HN account, fwiw.
I don't necessarily feel safe, though, and have moved my important stuff off of gmail.
It doesn't seem like T3 Code ever implemented antigravity at the time of the post. Now they've added it via ACP: https://github.com/pingdotgg/t3code/pull/9348
If I write my own harness, is that third party?
Insane policy
Why bother creating a CLI and OAuth interface if your ToS punishes for using it
If you register a new OAuth client and generate access tokens for it to call the API, then you are following the rules.
We should really find a way to break the tightly coupling to these platforms, including mobile carriers, and not have to live in fear.
Having a real representative of each platform in a government branch under regular hours that citizens can access with their documents so that any issues with it can be dealt is a good first step.
Ours sends revenue service notifications exclusively via email, a lossy system... and legally assumes you got it.
Unless providers do insane things (e.g. accept then discard), it is much safer than snail mail, where messages may not arrive and not cause the sender to be notified of non-delivery either. With email, the sender gets explicit per-recipient-and-message feedback on what the recipient provider has accepted responsibility (to not lose them) for.
I wonder if that would get my google account banned? If so i'm definitely taking agy out of the provider options..
GOOG is like a soulless, flesh eating antihuman robot, junkie monopoly-behemoth. Terrible UI/UX, very good models, braindead execution. Protected entity, just like NVDA.
Btw Antigravity is the worst of all environments. No money for the braindead. Well, bring your money elsewhere, to small joes instead.
This is something I've seen happen a lot with Google- their employees (especially the director+ folks) are absolutely rabid on social media when it comes to defending their products, and they don't let little things like "facts" get in the way.
Google needs to get a better social media policy because they look like clowns when they do this.
Also keep in mind nobody reads the TOS. The TOS is pure Wilhoitism: it exists to protect Google and bind you. There is plenty of shit that gets put in there that Google never intends to do to 90%+ of their customers, but they have to reserve the right to do this anyway. You can infer the general shape of business policy from the the TOS but not the exact details.
The only people who actually know anything about Google's business policies are the people in the risk department doing enforcement. The CxO level might have be consulted about specific policies, but a lot of stuff isn't going to rise to their level until it blows up and becomes a PR disaster.
[0] I call this the "Maoists in the Risk Department": in general, there is a tendency of all businesses to independently reinvent Maoism when enforcing rules with their customers. You actively discourage "edge-touching" behavior from your customers by making the rules murky and incomprehensible.
they don't understand the concept of external users being a thing
that's the impression I've gotten
I strongly doubt the US would mandate this, but could see the EU doing so.
With which states?
I'm I'm a citizen of two and live in the third, potentially having eSIM of the fourth?
This is why PayPal for the longest time made it really clear that "we are not a bank". So that they wouldn't be subject to those regulations and could suspend accounts and keep the money.
They kinda can.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
In other words, you might still have your life-savings as a sack of cash... But it won't help if your car is impounded because you aren't the owner or your license expires, you'll live in a tent in the woods because landlords can't verify your credit/rental history, etc.
The important part is that they can't just close your account and keep everything.
Meaning the requirement is just Apple or Google account with extra steps.
Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be.
These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, algorithmic control what content you know exists, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of humans rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally.
I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding of first of this new sort of entity. And a morality system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described.
How should our collective values shape this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism.
The cultural norms are the prime mover.
You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.
Compare two alternatives.
One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.
Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.
The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.
But if the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting lawmakers to force them, then they will be implemented cynically and not within the spirit of the values. The type of thing that happened with apple's implementation of the anti-gate-keeping laws 'enforced' by the eu.
What you describe requires a flexible values system - not a single semantic standard. I'd love to live in a world where if you were big enough to have people wanting to interoperate with your service on behalf of your users and you were actively preventing it, you'd be an outcast in the deepest sense. That no users would touch your service, and it would be politically unfeasible to deal with you.
We don't live in that world because people have not developed this sort of social norm.
We currently have an army defeatists who show up to tell you that if you think companies would get more customers by selling products that screw them less, nobody cares about that and people just want to live in a convenient cage with an unlimited supply of artificially sweetened penitentiary gruel. These people (to the extent that any can be found who are not robots) should obviously be burned alive in the town square to serve as an example to the others, but the most important thing if you intend to solve the problem in that way is to ignore them and build the product that screws customers less anyway. And then shame the services not doing that into irrelevance, once the alternative actually exists.
Likewise, there are better ways to do anti-gatekeeping rules than what the EU is doing. For example, require two things. First, that source code be published as a requirement to receive copyright protection -- not that the customer can make unlimited copies, but that they can read it to know what it's doing or make changes to their own copy. And second, require that if the manufacturer/seller can modify any code running on the device, so can the customer. Now Apple can do malicious compliance all they like, but any vendor locks they put in will have someone distributing a patch to remove them the next day, and inhibiting that is the thing which is prohibited.
Rich people and fascists don't want a smaller government, they want a government too weak to protect you from them.
You seem to be saying that there are a group of people who want it this way and they have more power so that is why is it the case.
But how did we get here? It's a complicated question for sure. And for anything that occurred like this, there are many answers depending on where you put the weights.
I put the weights cultural norms of the maybe 100s of thousands of people that had a hand in how we got here in varying degrees. The leaders of the companies of course who didn't get flack in their communities for doing something that was negative to the rest of society. The politicians who played along, the employees who were proud to work at such a place and the family that could be proud of them for it, even us users who sacrificed liberty for safety and convenience.
At every level, it's social norms that caused this to be.
We are, primarily, social creatures. Even the rich - maybe especially the rich - are greatly influenced in how they act by what those they respect think of it.
I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it." Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
Strawman fallacy: It is in the interests of private enterprise to not have their $100-million+ airplanes crash, because it means $100-million+ going up in smoke. The owners of those planes would therefore have an interest in not having them crash.
> Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
Under this scenario, if the public finds out that a drug is harmful/lethal, the public jerks away from that drug towards solutions that have a reputation of working.
Is the resulting rate of fatality/worse-QOL lower than (a central authority filtering out drugs & holding them to standards)? No, definitely not. But the gap between the two is not infinite, and in most cases falls into an order of magnitude of difference.
-----
> I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
An axiom of (feeble-mindedness in the average person) is proposed here. People are as good/competent as the standards that they are held to.
> medical licensing
There's a difference between a certification of competency, and a deliberate constriction of the supply of medical residencies.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5550556-residency-cap...
A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.
Is it? Are tech companies so popular that voters would revolt if politicians proposed break-ups? They would not be the first - Standard Oil and Bell were also powerful corporations that got split.
> A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.
There's more history in the US of successful legislation aimed at breaking up big companies than at that sort of specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation.
The former is blunt force. It's relatively easy to target and make effective. It just needs enough ground-level support to get enough people from both parties on board - and we're seeing some shifts that way in the current Republican mishmash of groups.
The latter needs excellent technical knowledge and resistance to super-sophisticated lobbying and loophole-creation. It's very hard to get right.
We live in a much different world today than during the trust busting era. Extreme concentration is the status quo of today's economy and it's happening across basically every sector and industry.
Lina Khan as the head of the FTC under the most legislatively prolific Democratic president of the last 30 years was completely powerless to break up anything. Even Trump and an army of partisan DAs that were frothing at the mouth to dismantle Trump's enemies have failed to do so.
Just yesterday Google prevailed against the threat of a breakup of their ad businesses which is perhaps the single most compelling example of anticompetitive abuse by big tech besides maybe the Apple ecosystem.
This trend is only going to accelerate as skilled workers age out of the economy and white collar economic activity aggregates into a handful of massive tech companies.
That's all without factoring in that government quid pro quo is now defacto legal and these companies have very deep pockets for donations.
There are many other factors I could mention but the point is that nobody with any power wants to break up these companies.
Only because she was blocked by both Republicans and Democrats who are sold out to the same plutocrats. I agree with the parent that the problem remains very simple and is a matter of balance of powers. Any fine-grained regulation will be simply ignored by those people who are above all laws.
It's still about framing, though. It's not a fight. The gatekeepers, like governments, laws, and money are social constructs - shared fictions. They are not physical things but made agreements by society. We can't fight them anymore than you can fight ourselves. And they stop working the moment we stop believing in them.
The only way to fight a social construct is to create a new shared fiction that is more desirable and works better.
The machine created by the current social fiction is composed of people who would all be better off with a better narrative. We just don't have the imagination right now to see it. But it is there waiting for us somewhere. Like all the best ideas that transformed us for the better throughout history.
While I agree with where you're coming from in spirit, if you want to push this then you've got to do the work of actually coming up with workable concrete approaches rather than hand waving against a whole general category of action. The problem is that digital communications lend themselves to centralized power, and power vacuums inevitably get filed by something, right?
I too would love to see the power of surveillance companies get magically reduced by something that isn't centralized government action. But that hasn't happened so far, right? If anything, they've grown stronger - sucked in ever more of our lives, sucked in technical communities who were culturally predisposed to and capable of resisting, and even taken over control of parts of the government!
So barring that, government regulation (ie democratic accountability) seems like a necessary approach. This fails too of course (eg how all the natural rights referenced in the Bill of Rights are being infringed in one way or another). But once again what is the alternative to attempting to codify lofty ideals, writing them down, and then pushing to implement them wherever they're being infringed? Regulation like the GDPR and other EU directives at least attempt to draft rights-based paradigms, as imperfect as their implementation and enforcement may be.
The real problem would seem to be that we're soured on the idea of having reasonable laws in the US from every attempt at meaningful regulation ending up with a multitude of holes in it due to corporate lobbying. It seems like that is what needs to be focused on and addressed - thinking one can let the corpos run wild and then somehow outrun or individualistically push back on them is a pipe dream.
1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.
Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.
The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.
2. From what I can tell, Pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.
The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.
That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.
There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.
It is the pessimism that kills all of that. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit which makes it so. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.
It is our values that shape the rest.
Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.
I completely agree about the feedback loops. They're mutual feedback loops though, and causality can go both ways. We're currently stuck with a strong attractor of surveillance-based software. It's certainly possible to escape from the local minimum, but requires a lot of activation energy to escape it (compelling functionality, features, ease of use, etc, to prime its own network effects).
I don't think it was ads per se, but rather the centralizing software architecture of AJAX (et al). Everyone wanted to build things that were "easy" for "everyone" to use, how to make money came later. Or going back even earlier, if "the web" had been designed around something like content centric networking rather than HTTP.
On "tech moment right now is ripe for it" - for me, it has felt this way for the past twenty five years! I generally agree about pessimism as well, so let's just say at this point I'm tired. I certainly don't want to dissuade you from pouring new energy into software that is going to change the world [for the better]. But I'm also cautioning you to not reject other angles of reform!
Further on the pessimism point, isn't shying away from government (ie collective) action itself a form of pessimism? I'm pretty pessimistic about groups (herds) of people in general (things always end up going "sideways" due to opportunists). But looking at the structure of US politics it seems there is a large contingent of "government can never work" that ends up running interference whenever de jure government tries to reign in the corpos, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Or putting my general point another way, in terms of the culture point you made elsewhere - our mass culture is currently strongly steeped in centralized political action/narratives. If you want our mass culture to change to value technical decentralization and privacy, then how else would you expect that to manifest itself beyond calls for centralized/government action to do things, ala privacy regulation? We can certainly lament the centralized political culture, but unless you're talking about changing two aspects of our culture simultaneously, then that basically is what it is.
I don't think shying away from governing hierarchies are pessimistic but maybe you see it that way because I didn't explain myself well.
It's important to separate something. Hierarchy and cooperation are not the same thing. Though I guess in instantiation at the human level, they seem to mostly be.
But multi-cellular creatures are made up of cooperating cells wherein there is no centralized power. It seems like nature has borne out that this configuration is robust.
And, if you squint, markets are a similar thing. I love markets. They're a way that people can make individual choices about what they can offer their neighbor and so be rewarded by their neighbor in this positive sum way. It is, by nature, decentralized (though regulation exists in modern markets and sometimes work well for a time as a patchwork kludge over a janky system).
Anyway, there's trust networks there and lots of interesting stuff we could tangent about. But the point is that markets are a decentralized thing have been around longer than governments. We don't need monopolies on violence to cooperate if social norms forbid violence. Of course, the violent ones hacked the system and so we needed to defend against that, so we picked the violent winner, and governance is born.
This is also an interesting path turning point that, given our current technology and understanding, if we started from zero, you could wonder if we could develop in a way without a single entity with a monopoly on violence because we handle this sort of threat somehow else.
There's that whole debt and reciprocity thing that is even older than markets - hell, animals do it. But I wonder about the scalability of that. I don't believe david graeber's idea that the abstraction of reciprocity was the root of all evil but that's like one take and maybe we could make better reciprocity networks.
This is all rambly. I hope my point comes across though. We lack imagination for configurations that can be that are cooperative without the cancer of centralization.
It would be nice if someone starts imagining this for us. It's very hard to imagine a world so different from our own. But we know, by nature, that it is possible. There are a lot of cells in my body - it's not a scale issue.
My take is that cultural values/social norms are the real thing that makes society. We think it's all these things like laws, money, and borders. But those things are secondary fiction memes to the primary fiction meme of values.
1. Assignment of addresses is centralized. Even though it's federated (ie distributed), authority still flows logically from one single authoritative view. And even though individual networks can choose to go against that central view, diverging too much prevents them from talking to one another (ie most of the bargaining is on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, rather than something more nimble or adaptive)
2. It's a protocol for communication between nodes. Reusing node addresses as service/contents addresses leads to services being inherently centralized on those (logical) nodes. Not a problem with IP itself, but definitely an attractive nuisance that made problems for things naively layered on top of IP like HTTP(S) and DNS.
Additionally, they are unelected.
I'm reminded of the guy who lost his Google access over "child pornography"--a picture sent to his little boy's pediatrician that got automatically uploaded. The police agreed he had done nothing wrong, Google didn't give him his account back.
I don't care if my Claude or OpenAI account is banned, but risking a Google account is different.
1. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...
They un-banned him later, but that was enough to stay away. There are much better services than Antigravity out there.
I am also fairly confident that nobody sees the moderation decisions either.
Personally, this is why I foresee Anthropic/OpenAI/Google taking a bath once their creditors come calling. I think the individuals most attached to a specific app are the ones least willing to pay the true cost of inference. (IE: your grandma using chatgpt to ask for recipe recommendations probably isn't going to pay $400/mo).
If your account is that valuable, it's time to consider moving to a self-hosted option. Or at the very least, start by purchasing a domain and linking it to your Google account, while keeping offline backups of all your emails and documents.
The real problem isn't that Google might accidentally ban you; it's that there's no way to get a human in the loop to review the issue. My client is an enterprise GCP user paying a hefty sum every month. Getting someone knowledgeable typically means wading through Gemini or talking to non-english-speaking support who just read GCP documentation back to you; and that can take months to get resolved. Now imagine the situation for someone paying nothing or a double-digit amount for their gmail account or workspace.
I'm aware people will complain that "self-hosting is hard, insecure, etc.", but it's like a backup: an annoying process you truly appreciate when shit hits the fan.
These days, those two might be the same thing.
The VSCode Antigravity extension I was using turns out to be a 3rd-party one. I found out only today that there's an official extension too, which I think wasn't there earlier.
And then you get to fight the support bots and eventually go to the actual unofficial Google support - asking hn whether anyone knows someone with a pulse at Google.
Luckily I use a custom domain so accounts won't need to be updated, just emails exported and DNS changed.
Access to nearly 20 years of emails, photos and docs gone in an instant.
It’s been particularly painful because she used Google to log in to everything too, including for health records that she needs.
There is no way of contacting anyone at Google about it and apparently nothing that can be done anyway. It’s absolutely devastating. They’re still charging her for Google One and she can’t even manage the subscription because she can’t log in.
I urge anyone reading this to do a Google Takeout request and make a local backup of all the data they hold.
(I'm aware domains can be stolen too, but I expect to have some leverage as I'm paying for that in the UK.)
I've been meaning to get back to tinkering with a Immich on a docker container, as a Google Photos competitor I can self-host.
If not directly through what is offered there, under the DSA (eu citizens and residents) have further ways to appeal their decision, and also Google takeout should be a last option even for banned accounts.
If you have any luck post a followup on HN to guide other users having a similar issue.
“”” Ask us to restore your account
If you own the account, you can request access to it again.
- Sign in to your Google Account on a browser, like Chrome. - Select Start Appeal. - Follow the instructions. “””
C’mon Google, if I could do step 1 then I wouldn’t be on this page.
I will absolutely post a guide if we can figure out a way out of this mess.
Appreciate you trying to help. I’ll do a bit more digging on that page and see if I can find anything.
Otherwise the DSA approach, with whatever that may entail process wise.
Of course there is: you pay your lawyer to send correspondence by registered mail.
Then you have them send followup correspondence a week or so later.
You will absolutely get a response.
What you do is send Google your own correspondence, certified mail, giving them a heads up that you've contacted the attorney general. That usually gets an even quicker response than from a personal lawyer :)
It also gives the attorney general office a heads up if they need to be scrutinizing a company like Google more carefully if they're getting a lot of complaints.
Situations like this are exactly what they're here for.
https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
Flagged as a potential bot, gotta tread really carefully or they'll nuke my "normal" google account too.
not to beat a dead horse in this thread , but that should give the motivation needed to seek alternatives.
Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths that sell you to advertisers. Those smaller E-mail providers will have actual support that you can contact in case of problems and will not "ban you".
You can have "verified" account (for 18+ and Gmail), bank card added, active AI Pro/Ultra subscription, and still you won't be able to use even the free tier of Antigravity.
And their verification is some major AI slop that just doesn't work. This is open from June but this was already a bug in Gemini CLI before then: https://github.com/google-antigravity/antigravity-cli/issues...