I’m not sure about copy but the UI seems designed to look like an AI response which is certainly a choice

What does the writing quality, genius or otherwise, have to do with the boom mic though?

Bugger all - particularly given the boom mic operator and other framing "gaffs" are (as I recall) all part of the "wide screen" 16:9 later release on BluRay etc that were somewhat rushed out the door.

A number of shows of that era were filmed wide (16:9) and post processed / coloured / reframed and broadcast on TV in a box 4:3 aspect ratio

No visible boom mic operators, etc - careful eyes in the initial post production for TV phase saw to that.

Later wide screen releases were rushed with no real post production budget to address these and other issues - that's on the studios wanting a second grab at money, not the original creative teams.

Similar complaints abound for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and (IIRC) The Wire (?) and their wide screen releases.

There's a famous example of this in Malcolm in the Middle where the camera cuts to a different shot and a stand-in for Dewey is visible in the 16:9 release, but was not visible in the original 4:3 broadcast. So in one shot you have Dewey's normal actor, then in the next there is some random kid.

A recent similar example was Mad Men rerelease in 4k where the VFX weren't redone properly after a rescan of the film and you can see the man operating the machine with the pipe that spews sick out of a characters mouth.

Used Heroku until they got rid of free

Used Vercel until they banned img tags

Used AWS until they suspended my account (they always do this, new account -> week later suspended, can’t pay them, they don’t want me)

Used GCP until I got the first bill

Every option was a headache, so now I just self host. Forward router ports, install an SSL, npm start

Problem solved. For free

Is self-hosting permanent now, or would anything pull you back?

Need to scale and have deployments in different locations, more guaranteed uptime, more resources that I have at home.

Would be a good problem to have!

For hobbies and even small businesses a home server on residential ISP is a lot of fun

"fun" is kinda the last thing I want with my (small) business infra.

It should be rock solid, relatively inexpensive, and from a reliable company with some expected longevity. I want it to be boring, no surprises, never think about it because it Just Works (r).

It depends. For drivers, it’s basically been captured.

For say, peer-to-peer car or vacation rental (e.g. Turo, Airbnb) you have some one man companies but the top hosts on the platform is usually an established company often with a staff of employees.

It’s not until you tap through to see they have tens of thousands of trips, dozens of cars in each city, etc.

So when you say Uber driver - it may work in the “driver” category only. In pretty much the rest of the gig economy there is a lot of room for both solopreneuers and SMB.

The “gig economy” may well end up just being “the economy”.