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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 26, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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No email address required.

What email provider do you use and why? Do you judge people based on what email provider they use? Scott included an email address for an AI Safety group in a recent post and commenters pointed out the irony of them using gmail.

I started using gmail when it was first introduced (invite-only-early), because it wasn't immediately clear we shouldn't have, but have been a longtime ProtonMail user, because I'm cool like that. I don't evangelize Proton... but I sometimes have trouble taking Google users seriously. Scott uses google

Ok- I have a general personal email address at gmail. I’ve used it since I was in highschool. If I update for web hygiene reasons to a new email provider, what email should I choose?

Proton's pretty good. They've built out a suite, including a VPN, calendar, password manager (with forwarding emails), drive, etc. They even have an LLM assistant, though it's based on open source models and expensive to use without a pretty small token/week limit. (But they gave it a cute purple cat as an avatar.)

If you need their paid features, they do big Cyber Monday sales (and honor the discount in perpetuity), so now would be a good time to try the free tier.