Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?
I have NOT heard of a company whose productivity increased dramatically though (but the quality goes down, I wonder why).
There are startups that are getting PoCs faster, but thats about it.
they gave some hints when their ceo started praising fascists.
Yeah. I know thats when I canceled business with them.
In case anyone needed proof that even CERN PhDs can be total dumbasses (or more likely, evil liars)
Well, that's it, I'm never touching Proton again.
As for suggestions: I haven't used Tuta, but I've only heard good things about them. Personally I use mailbox. They have drive and calendar, they're German, and they do/support a lot of cool stuff regarding FOSS. I'm not sure about slop, but from a quick glance I couldn't find a single mention about AI on their website, not even in their job listings. I don't think they have official clients, but they support open standards like SMTP/IMAP, WebDAV etc.
I haven't used their drive and calendar though, only email, since I self-host Nextcloud (if you're into self-hosting, I highly recommend it).
Also, side note: Regardless of where you switch to, get your own domain! I cannot stress this enough. If you ever need to switch providers (which you'll eventually need to), you're gonna have a much easier time if your email is me@mydomain.tld, just pointing DNS at your new provider, bulk transfer/export all previous emails, and voila.
100%. I've had the same email going on 20 years. It's been hosted in a dozen different places. It was on proton for a while, it's on mailbox.org now. I can move again in an hour.
Tuta honestly is the way to go unless there are other options available. Plus if your into cloud services they just partnered up with Nextcloud so they are growing as a platform. Their calander on mobile and PC sucks though, not really the best.
Move drive and calendar to Nextcloud, (selfhosted service) there's no reason for anyone to have access to those but you and who you want.
Mail is rough, Tuta is good for people, but features/price is ehh, i don't have a better option than them though.
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!
This is why I self-host, with my own domain 😁
True
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.
Nowhere in the manifesto did they mention that security is still a priority and not an afterthought despite wanting to move faster and faster with AI. That is the problem. I guess that’s why he’s a CTO and not a CISO. But you would think a company that sells security and privacy as its product would have security-centric folks all the way to top management.
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.
Currently the situation at where I work. I get paid to lobotomize a bit of myself every single day
why be disappointed in Proton? every bad headline about them in the past year has been about Andy, the employees don't like him any more than you do.
Because Andy is the CEO, which means he gets to make a lot of the important decisions, not the people who don't like him.
The linked article isn't from Andy though...
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 all 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
Tuta
Have a look at mailbox.org, it's a German provider of email/drive/calendar/office/conferencing. They've been around for a few decades and they use Linux and FOSS.
https://mailbox.org/en/about-us/
May Be a Linux Client Support
You can use any email client you want because they use standard IMAP and SMTP, and their non-mail services are used in the browser.
I am also happy there. Their non-mail services also support open standards, so you can use them In software that supports it. The Contacts and calendar support Cal/CardDav and the files WebDav.
My only minor gripe with them is no Jmap support, but almost no providers do.
Shitty human for years.
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.
Ironically, the only thing worth automating with ai is leadership.
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.
AI can used responsibly
That's why we're after their policy.
Attack their BS leadership.
Already there
AI can used responsibly
Not with that policy :)
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.
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.