Proton

Reddit just sells bot access to advertisers. The whole thing now is instead of seo is ai search optimization. Which in reality is just a bunch of Israeli companies who use ai to AstroTurf posts for other companies many of which are political, or for PR companies. They also do product placement type stuff but that's less interesting.

Basically if there's a unique sentence on the internet and you Google something close to that sentence google will present it as fact, also google prefers to show latest search results so the idea is you just constantly flood the internet with similarly worded ai written articles, reddit bots, etc and you own the search result. They did it with the whole open ai hacked huggingface controversy, that was ran by a Israeli ad company that just shits out ai articles in mass to manipulate our search algorithms.

And you cant talk out against it, reddit, tiktok, etc all owned by Israel interest now so you get censored.

Basically GW from mgs

Proton have marketed themselves exceptionally well, comments suggesting they are not what they seem have always been met with a lot of downvotes. They marketed themselves into a brand receiving the same blind adoration as a sporting tam.

Stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use ai more

Maybe they're using AI to write their damage control strategy lol

If you are choosing to use "AI" right now, that is proof enough you do not have "concern for safety": https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/

There are no ethical commercial models. IBM Granite is the closest you'll get, and the last model that claimed training data set that allowed the output to be freely redistributed failed the first time someone independent looked.

Even training your own is suspect. Distillation of a commercial model means using it. I'm not sure about the ecological impact of training your own model, but I know commercial training has set back sustainability goals at multiple companies by more than a decade.

Oh no. I have been dragging my feet on leaving Proton. This means I need to make it a priority before they fuck things up irreparably.

Dude is the majority share holder and he's on the board of the controlling non-profit. It sucks to say it but he's not going anywhere.

If they change the ceo, they are not going to fire most of his hires; company is ruined long term

It blows my mind how stupid their leadership is.

No comms professional would approve of them doing this, and no professional wrote that script. I'd put money on this coming direct from Yen or another executive.

Go piecemeal. Proton is a good deal if you actually use all their services, otherwise it's overpriced.

For mail, mailbox.org, posteo.de, and fastmail.net seem to have good reputations. They'll all allow you to bring your own domain (edit: not Posteo, my mistake), which I highly recommend so that it'll be easy to switch providers again when whichever one you choose turns to shit (yes, I say when, not if, because I am just that jaded at this point).

For passwords, there are a lot of choices, but the most future-proof is probably to keep a local Keepass DB and sync it across devices any damn way you want. Bitwarden used to be good but I don't know anymore. They've backed away from open source a bit recently, and I can't even tell at a glance what their free plan offers anymore. Maybe look at https://vaultwarden.com/ instead.

For VPN and storage...I dunno. There are a lot, and most of them seem kind of shady tbh. I'd be interested in hearing others' advice on this since I'm not sure what's good these days.

Edit: I'd REALLY like to hear recommendations for Docs and especially Sheets. Everything else I've used is a UX nightmare, particularly on mobile.