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.

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

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.

"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.

"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

There are plenty of alternatives, including Posteo.de and Mailbox.org.

Is buying my own domain and paying for tuta the move guys?

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 predicted this and argued with so many people about Proton being a shitty company. I am not even happy about this, just sad that so many people wasted their time and money.

I switched over to Tuta. Not sure I can escape developers using AI, but I can escape a CEO with a giant ego.

they gave some hints when their ceo started praising fascists.

I gotta say I’m getting real tired of having to change my email on every service over and over and over.

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.

Keep up the public pressure, if it worked to make microsoft stop mandating recall, it will work on proton

It is disappointing. They are non-profit. As long as the company is financially stable they shouldn't need to expand so aggressively like Google. Unfortunately I paid for another year a month ago, but this will be the last year proton gets money from me.

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.

Thank God, i was thinking it was the Proton compatibility layer for Linux...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

In case anyone needed proof that even CERN PhDs can be total dumbasses (or more likely, evil liars)