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I didn’t expected this kind of thing to show up today.
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I don’t want to use a vibecode slop that isnt tested by real humans.
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I just want a secure and privacy respecting email not ai slop.
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Good Bye Proton I am Not Happy With You
Any Suggestion ?
- I want drive and calender support
- Made by humans not slop machine.
- FOSS
- May Be a Linux Client Support
Your job is to push the limits of what the LLM can do autonomously, step in for the things that it cannot, and always think of how you can improve the status quo.
and always think of how you can improve the status quo.
I hate this timeline.
"The LLM is fast. You are slow, but you carry with you a lifetime of experience, judgment calls, and understanding. "
I hope their next great plan is to extend life expectancy, because without a new wave of experienced humans, this plan is shortsighted.
Tutanota is a paid service with a calendar app and email client app on Android and iOS. Fdroid availability too. For desktop, AppImage for major Linux distros, including Arch, Debian, Mint, Fedora, etc. I like it so far. My favorite is all the free aliases so that my spam goes somewhere else. My personal email never gets any nonsense.
Clients are Open Source. The service is paid, but I’d rather pay a bit instead of deal with BS. Nothing is free and they have to pay for those servers to run and keep shit in production. It just 3€ a month to get email, use of custom domains, 20GB storage, unlimited calendars, and you can select a family option to add more people for the same price. You can use 3 custom domains. Not sure if you get the domains or just carry them over, but I’d like to know.
Tuta drive is launching in a few months.
I’m also interested in disroot. Check that out. I’ve also tried kolabnow which I thought was okay but didn’t use it to long. I kind of forgot about it.
“It should come as a surprise to no one at Proton, least of all in engineering, that software engineering has irrevocably changed this year if not before”
Yep, I’ve never had to fix so many bugs and resolve so many production outages in a single year as I’ve done this year. AI is great. Couldn’t be happier. /s
Remember when Windows updates could be moderately trusted to not irrevocably brick devices if not run smoothly
I wish you were exaggerating but my workplace has been sending multiple bricked laptops a week in for warranty. All windows update.
I gotta say I’m getting real tired of having to change my email on every service over and over and over.
Custom domains
This is what I need to do, yeah. That way the underlying provider is all that changes. Good call!
True
This is why I self-host, with my own domain 😁
Attacking their AI policy is the wrong approach.
Attack their BS leadership. They are the problem.
AI can used responsibly to help make things better, but never under leadership like theirs.
I can attack both.
Curious how AI policies like this tend to be red flags for BS leadership. In this case, the two are absolutely inseparable.
Maybe it “can” be used ethically, like Theranos’ blood machine “can” detect every disease.
Theranos is different. There both the business promises and the technology was fake.
With AI, the technology works, but the business promises around them are fake.
Organizations rot from the head, and there is often no way to change a company after 4 layers of management is hired by the bad leadership.
Absolutely true. A company having 4 layers of management is usually a red flag already.
Ironically, the only thing worth automating with ai is leadership.
Correction. What the current leadership does.
Not what they should do.
Even used responsibly, the fact that LLM “AI” is trained extremely unethically means that any model that isn’t a custom, ethically trained LLM is very unethical to use. I know ethics aren’t popular these days, and I say this as someone who ran a nonprofit for ethical software development before Google helped make it quite so clear that being “Evil” won’t cost a company any money anymore.
Agree Its all because of their bad Leadership
AI can used responsibly
That’s why we’re after their policy.Attack their BS leadership.
Already thereAI can used responsibly
Not with that policy :)
This is not the death of expertise. The LLM is fast. You are slow, but you carry with you a lifetime of experience, judgment calls, and understanding.
Listen up Bart, you dumb fuck. If you willingly cede all this creation to the LLM then the last generation of fucking people with expertise are the ones working now! Go down this road and It dies with them.
Because who’s going to bother to learn code when it’s all brain dead chodes like you running the show and telling everyone to hand over the reins…. Oh but of course we’re still the one at fault if something goes wrong because we’re the manager and “Not only are you responsible for the work getting done, you also now own how it gets done.”
Holy fucking Christ, I don’t know if I ever ever gone 180 on an organization as quickly as I have on this one over the past week.
Holy fucking Christ, I don’t know if I ever ever gone 180 on an organization as quickly as I have on this one over the past week.
That’s true. They set a speed-run record for dumb-fuckery.
Currently the situation at where I work. I get paid to lobotomize a bit of myself every single day
Honestly sounds like my average day before LLMs too
This is not about chasing trends — we are being left behind here, and it is an existential threat to the success of the mission itself.
It’s wild to see how everyone successfully clocked crypto as a scam but then immediately applied the same “NGMI” FOMO mindset to the next scam.
Don’t get me wrong. LLMs are useful for several important software engineering functions: prototyping, iterating on implementations, collecting supplementary data, lining up disjoint interfaces… but it makes a terrible foundation, and it can’t refactor beyond a 101 level.
The only reason the industry is able to pretend that synthetic text extrusion is a sustainable replacement for granular human discernment is because most of our economy is just about building a marketable scam and leaving someone else to hold the bag. If company decision-makers knew they might face any consequences at all for steering the ship into a tar pit, this mass psychosis would not be possible.
Edit:
Also, this…
LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
…is precisely Cory Doctorow’s point about reverse centaurs, and the difference between labor and capital when it comes to deploying new tools. I don’t think they even realize they’re putting the quiet part in bold.
I don’t even get what “left behind” even really means here? It’s not like they’re at the cutting edge of some winner takes all race, they’re building already established tech (email, cloud storage, etc.) based on a specific ideology (privacy), and they already have enough momentum and brand recognition to just continue riding the current privacy-tech wave. I just don’t get why they felt the need to rock the boat with drama like this. This whole saga just reads too much like VC backed “move fast and break things” mindset which would put a sizeable chunk of their core customer base off the product
Profit must always increase at an exponential rate or your company is a failure. Sustainability is death to these psychos.
I believe that the CEO has delusions of being a Google competitor, at least in the EU. That seems to align with their consistent behavior of releasing new products while leaving their existing apps and services in a mostly, kinda functional state. Who asked for Lumo? How much did their customers want a crypto wallet? Spreadsheets and documents? From what I can tell, most of us wanted a fully functional email client, a working calendar and a VPN, all of which should have feature parity across all their supported platforms. Instead we put up with trash apps while Proton makes continually unfulfilled promises and rolls out another unnecessary product.
Which is ridiculous because of the non-profit majority shareholder. What the hell happened at Proton after this announcement in 2024?
It’s almost entertaining at this point to see how out of touch they are. Many Proton users chose them because they were supposed to be the anti-techbro alternative to Google and Micro$oft, and alas, instead of actually taking a look in the mirror, they double down instead.
I’m on a multi-year sub unfortunately… I guess I’ll still move out whatever I can and just set myself up to not use them
In your case I would start by getting my own custom domain, still bound to proton, and start moving my accounts to it little by little. Once you decide on a different provider you’ll switch your DNS records to it and everything will keep working (potentially also doing a backup of your whole inbox)
Yeah I’m already on a custom domain but I’ve been depending on Proton Pass’ aliases a lot… Well, it’s fine. It’ll just take time I guess
This exactly for me. At least it’ll give me time to find the best alternative once everyone settled into their perspective services
Yeah I’m also counting on that
they gave some hints when their ceo started praising fascists.
Yeah. I know thats when I canceled business with them.
I switched over to Tuta. Not sure I can escape developers using AI, but I can escape a CEO with a giant ego.
I think Andy Yen prefers that you use his entire title, which is “fucking dumbass lunatic CEO with a giant ego.”
Idgaf about them using AI per se. It is out of the bag, and it ain’t going back in unless everyone throws a revolution to kill the people in charge and destroy every bit of knowledge on how to create it again. That just isn’t happening. And it is possible for good humans to use the technology to craft good programming.
What I do gaf about is the people in charge of proton being assholes, treatingboth their employees and customers like shit, and not even trying to hide their contempt.
I guess there’s already dogshit all over the floor. It’s out of the dog so it’s not going back in. Guess we leave it how it is.
Poor analogy.
You can clean up shit. But you can’t cram it back in the dog’s ass. Well, hypothetically, but you’ll be covered in shit and have a very upset dog.
What you can’t clean up is knowledge, ideas. Where a technology to exists, and minds know if it, it can be recreated. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, it’s part of human comprehension. Ai in one form of another has been a goal for decades. You can’t erase that.
All we could do is rebuild it better. Less abusive, more regulations and controls, better planning. And I’m all for that, but it isn’t as simple as your bad analogy makes it seem
Honestly? That kind of shitty thinking is as much a problem as badly instituted ai is. You were so busy trying to pull a gotcha that you couldn’t be bothered to talk to a fellow human being with respect and decency. You know, a very similar way of thinking that makes Sam Altman and Andy Yen such horrible stewards of otherwise good software.
Yeah like imagine free and open language models trained from the ground up on data sources from people who willingly want to contribute to it, rather than ripped from everywhere and anywhere by companies desperate to make themselves valuable before the VC cash runs out.
You weren’t talking about fixing anything. You gave a defeatist, false dichotomy of “accept this thing” or “total revolution”.
The reason people chose Proton was with the expectation it could simply choose not to shove slop into its products , which is an option you omit.
The Orphan Crushing Machine isn’t bad because it’s helmed by Altman. It’s an inherently bad thing, and it attracts bad people to it like flies.
Look, I’m not sure why you’re responding here, unless you’re an alt of the person I was responding to. There’s some degree of connection, but it’s a different main thrust.
Yeah, capitalism is the problem. But when it comes to ai, Altman is the poster boy. When it comes to Proton, Yen is literally the person running the company. It’s perfectly okay you use them as specific examples.
As far as it being a false dichotomy, I disagree. It’s the very fact of the “orphan crushing machine” that makes me believe the only way to get a do over is the forcible removal of the people in charge of said machine. Oligarchy don’t give a fuck, and they’re the ones in charge. It’s not like a shift in dominant political party will be a magic wand either; Europe, the us, the uk, and canada are all under the thumb of oligarchs in their dominant parties (with varying degrees of boots on necks) Hell, I think Australia is too, but I’m less familiar with their main parties.
There’s really nowhere in the world right now that isn’t crushed by capitalist assholes. They rule by money, even when not in office themselves. That doesn’t disappear by changing from Republicans to Democrats, or Tories to Labor, or whatever biggest parties are in power (usually entrenched in power because of that money). So I don’t see any realistic scenario that results in corporate AI being eliminated that doesn’t also eliminate the assholes doing the crushing.
Also, I’m not really obligated to cram every single facet of things into one offhand comment. I didn’t talk about fixing things because you can’t fix corporate AI. You have to start over, though from what I’ve been told some of the open source models would mean not having to start entirely from scratch. Since what I was talking about was that, why waste my time? I mean, beyond tangential conversations like this being very slightly less likely. And I say tangential because the comment you responded to was from someone else, and the context was shifted slightly because of their shitty and smug analogy.
For real, people seem to expect things to fit some predetermined format, like comment sections have to be essays or debates to be graded. I made an offhand comment that summed things up in a way that matched my level of interest. You didn’t like, that, and that’s okay. But I don’t owe anyone jack shit. I don’t have to talk about fixing things, nobody does.
It’s not a false dichotomy? Proton couldn’t help but use the Orphan Crushing Machine?
Why?
People want security from their product, not slop. There is literally nothing “inevitable” about using it. They can just choose to not.
For a false dichotomy to be a false dichotomy, one has to believe that there’s are more than two alternate, opposing (at least partially) possibilities.
As previously stated
, I disagree that there are more than two options regarding the state of ai as it currently exists. Ergo, I don’t agree they it is a false dichotomy. It’s just a dichotomy.You’re free to disagree, that’s okay. However, based on apparent tone, and what seems to be a misunderstanding of intent, I very much doubt that you feel the same way. It would seem I am not free to disagree with your premise. Restating that premise won’t change my mind about my original statement, or the ways I’ve rephrased it so far. Nor will repetition of “orphan crushing machine”. Which, again, you do you, but I ain’t typing that out again and will just refer to it as capitalism, assuming we keep chatting casually. Once shit gets heated, I’m out though, I got too much shit going on in meatspace for that to be even remotely the way I’ll spend my lemmy time.
Proton, being a product run by a capitalist, absolutely would not have taken a different path. It could have, but the non profit that owns a majority of proton chose their CEO, and neither stopped him, nor removed him since. So, back to the would not. They might still reverse course, engage with less problematic standpoints regarding ai (and, again repeating myself, my issue isn’t with ai per se, it’s how it’s being used and mandated by proton leadership). I very seriously doubt that will happen. It isn’t impossible, just very unlikely in light of the CEO still being in place after two different events where he put a giant piece of his foot in his mouth.
Now, regarding ai itself, it doesn’t have to produce slop. Really, it doesn’t. A sufficiently built model will be able to generate a lot of things that are fully functional. Ai isn’t magic. It’s a fancy bit of software. As long as the parameters are built well, and the people building it aren’t chasing profits instead of safe, quality results, it will eventually get to the point that it’s so much faster than and as capable as a human code expert. It isn’t there yet, but at some point it will be.
Since resources are being hogged up by capitalist driven ai, I don’t see it happening in a weedy that’s acceptable without a radical reconstruction of human society. Hence my original comment.
I also disagree with your statement that the goal of proton users is security only. O would even disagree that it’s security as a primary want. I would argue that privacy, when compared to companies like Google/alphabet is the predominant goal of users. Protonmail by itself isn’t that secure. It can’t be because it’s not able to magically make recipients able to read their encrypted email. You can’t mail from proton to gmail encrypted currently. That’s inherently insecure. It is, however, more private so long as you only email people that don’t use privacy hating providers.
Their other products, yeah, I can see those being chosen because they’re more secure. Calendars, data storage, VPN, and password management can all be done in a way that’s more secure than capitalist driven options. I would argue that whether or not proton can be considered secure should determined by their least secure, and most used services. VPN and email are those two, or were last I checked ( back when bitwarden began its flirtation with enshittification, so not long ago overall).
The VPN is up to standard overall. The email is no more or less secure than any other provider that can’t ensure recipients can decrypt messages. That’s the standard I believe is most useful in determining if “secure” is a valid adjective for proton as a company.
Since more people use them for email than anything else, if users really believe they’re more secure, and that’s why they signed up, well, I can’t do anything about that, but I would still disagree that it means the average user “want security”.
Ai was always inevitable. So long as computer science existed, it was going to happen because the entire point of computers is doing things for humans. We built them to crunch numbers faster and more reliably. ENIAC was rudimentary artificial intelligence in the broadest sense of the term. Everything since has been developing to where we are now in terms of the fundamental technology. Pong was rudimentary ai when you played against the computer. So were all the enemies in Mario brothers. So are the mobs in your preferred crpg.
Generative ai was always coming. It’s only going to go away if it is utterly wiped out, in all forms, in a way that prevents humans from being able to start over. Best we can hope for is enough of a revolution to oust the capitalists using it to fuck over everyone else.
That’s a lot of text that doesn’t address my core question of: why can’t Proton just not use the slop box?
Literally nobody is making them . Their CEO could toss their silly manifesto. There’s no guaranteed payout from this, and if anything it’s hurting their brand. “Because capitalism” doesn’t mean anything either, that’s just a completely dead-end cliche. Slavery was part of capitalism too. Surely you’d not argue in favor of using it because it was inevitable.
You can have an opinion all day about inevitability, but I hope it’s not just a baseless one.
You can clean up shit. But you can’t cram it back in the dog’s ass. Well, hypothetically, but you’ll be covered in shit and have a very upset dog.
Best thing I’ve read this year, thank you.
All we could do is rebuild it better. Less abusive, more regulations and controls, better planning. And I’m all for that, but it isn’t as simple as your bad analogy makes it seem
Nothing in human history has ever proved this to be true.
We are in late stage capitalism. What you propose is as likely as cramming shit back into the dog.
Thankyou for coming to my ted talk.
If you go back to my initial comment, you may note that it contains the only path to that ending I see as realistic.
it’s just the last drop in the bucket but, tbh, this shouldn’t come as a surprise from Andy seeing his past behaviour. Although I must admit that reading that manifesto from the CTO did make me puke so hard. As a developer myself (and yes, one that does use a mix of hand-written code and LLMs to some degree), seeing a CTO writing a manifesto like that one would basically mean to me: right, fuck these guys, time for a new job.
I’m glad that I’ve been this whole year transitioning all my important accounts to use a custom domain as their main email and seeing all this clusterfuck was the reminder I needed to cancel my Proton account.
My new provider is ForwardEmail, I was unsure between them or Mailbox.org but then went with the former as, since I self-host a lot of my services, I don’t need all the extra bloat. Tuta may be an option for some but for me was out of the options, I want to use Email client without the need of having to install an intermediary local proxy.
Regardless of what you choose to use now, highly recommend you get a custom domain. After that switching provider is as simple and changing DNS entries in your DNS registrar.
There are plenty of alternatives, including Posteo.de and Mailbox.org.
Both of which support every client via IMAP and SMTP instead of inventing their own protocol for no fucking reason.
My friend likes posteo. I hear good things but never tried it.
