- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
In an effort to stem the bleeding from the backlash about their AI usage and their CEO’s meltdown, they decide to do the exact opposite and go all in.
…I’m tired, boss.
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What’s the best way for us to all tell Proton, loud and clear, that if they don’t value real humans, then we’re out?
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. You are also (hopefully) much less prone to hallucination and being mislead by bad or malicious inputs, and are accountable to yourself, your teammates, and to Proton in a way a model can never be. Together you can do far more, far faster than either can do alone.
Just one teeny tiny question, sir. Who tf is going to train your “IA” if no one learns to code because “IA” does “everything by itself”?
Fine, you want to go only by seniors who already knows how to write good code, cut the juniors. Then what? Just hope that “IA” is smart enough (spoiler: it won’t) to never need any kind of correction or fixing? And just for what? Going “faster”?
You can always go fast, but you really shouldn’t. Unless you want to crash faster I guess.
If you’re looking for an email service that isn’t written with AI, I made one:
“AI needs to be able to work autonomously and continuously with less and less human babysitting. Your job is to identify problems that the LLM cannot solve on its own and help them not only solve them this time but be able to better solve them next time, not just for you but for everyone: repository-level context files, shared skills and prompts, and habit of ensuring that repeated failures trigger an investigation and a fix. 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.”
Forgot to add “so that we can fire you in a couple of years.” to the end.
If only someone would’ve told people he was a lunatic before this when he said some stupid shit last time.
The real tell here is when Yen berated an engineer who voiced concerns about security, saying “stop finding ways to be slow, start finding ways to be faster”. He’s a C-suite baby who wants what he wants RIGHT NOW!
When the suits start acting like engineers who care about best practices are being obstacles instead of valuable stewards of quality, you know you’re dealing with losers who can’t be trusted to not run things into the ground. Any walking back that Yen does now, you know he’s just biding his time to ride out the kerfuffle, and he’s just going to low-key abuse his employees at a slightly slower pace, but he’s going to get what he wants.
Canceled my sub, moved my mail.
I may have to migrate too. I’m cautious with leaving proton, but they have had plenty of time to muzzle this guy and they haven’t so it’s time to move on. I own my domain and and the aliases will all follow me either way, though that’s going to be an absolute bear to migrate.
This. Although not enthused with the all in use of AI tools, I dont have a problem with it being used to generate code. So long as a human is responsible for the PRs that go into the project. The bigger issue is the push around sacrificing proper security posture and process. As I’ve said else where, for a company that sold me and many based on their security and privacy stance, its an odd position to take, and probably why I will be moving on closer to my subscription end
CTO too.
Well, they just have AI Psychosis. Seems like a straightforward case.
The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
Emphasis theirs 🤮
The dumb thing about that quote is that it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Engineers want to solve these problems by nature; if there were no voices from the top, we’d be getting AI to help us write better code, and trying to make AI write better code fast. For whatever reason the C-suites can’t just let things follow their natural course which would already result in wins for them, they have to spew the narrative that our jobs are completely changing so they can justify getting rid of them
I genuinely wonder what these executives have in their mind.
What do they think? That engineers are good enough for being hired but not good enough to decide which tools to use?
If I hire a plumber and I tell them what tool to use, the plumber would either comply and do a bad job or will tell me to get lost.
Why do they think this is different?
Do some engineers like LLM? Sure! And let it be Do some engineers don’t like LLM? Yes… and let it be.
If these tools are so miraculous the engineers that use them will provide such good results that will naturally prevail.
Why the executives need to thumb the scale?
They’re thinking that the chatbots are just a few weeks away from making hiring people obsolete so they can finally get infinite money forever.
So, not thinking at all.
What do they think? That engineers are good enough for being hired but not good enough to decide which tools to use?
Exactly. That’s the smell that stinks from miles away.
Soo stupid, their business model is reliant on people that move out of a free service based on principle.
good thing proton didnt look that good in the first place and i didnt switch to them
and their CEO’s meltdown, they decide to do the exact opposite and go all in.
I was INCHES away. They were going to be my de-google move. I had decided to pull the trigger but it was late and I know i would have been up all night dealing with it. I’d deal with it in the morning. A few more days slipped and he licked Trumps balls on twitter…
Whoopsies, not with someone elses’ 10 ft pole.
I use them for a vpn and had been planning to switch email and all to proton but had been putting it off. Now I’m so fucking glad I did. As soon as my subscription is up I’m switching to something else
“Luckily I didn’t treat my cancer, turns out you get a cold after the treatment”
They are still better compared to google. Am I pissed? Of course, am I better off than 10 years ago when I had everything on google? Of course.
Will I be switching? Probably (never gave them a cent tho)
I narrowly dodged that bullet
This asshole has no clue. Migrating is always a pain, but I’m glad I’m no longer vulnerable to his stupidity harming me directly.
This is the same bullshit AI arms race mentality that my company spews to us and every loser company takes up. Every company feels like they need to get faster. None do. Shockingly everyone still releases at the same pace. And even then no value gets added as 80% of the features are either dark patterns or garbage.
As a consumer you’ll never see the benefits of any of this madness. I certainly haven’t. It’s NFTs all over again where people insist I need a clumsy chatbot for reasons.
As an engineer my current reality of babysitting multiple LLM threads and acting as a go between between the llm i spun up and the llm reviewing the code is demoralizing. There’s no thought in this 80% of the time. The most challenging part is finding a way to keep up tech skills and make new ones when everyone has abandoned them.
What’s missing in a lot of these is that the executive ‘leadership’ emphasizes some abstract need to do faster, but never concretely what it is that they need to see done faster. Even worse they go to their customer base bragging about stuff the customer shouldn’t care about one way or another if it works: we are going to vibe code the software you get! Ok, but what do I get because of your shift to vibe coding that I didn’t have before? What is it that you actually are looking for me to buy?
They have zero vision and instead just signal affinity to AI thinking “job done” without ever actually having some concrete value based goal in mind.
When folks executing toward no particular goal fail to reach any particular goal, the response is to get more opinionated on how to do things and how the employees are obviously not doing things ight since they haven’t hit objectives and never actually circling back to actually defining objectives.
Studying CS right now
On the verge of giving up.
Got two more semesters but it doesn’t look like I will ever have a fulfilling job
Every company feels like they need to get faster.
Well yeah, they’re capitalist institutions. If they’re not growing exponentially, they’re failing.
That’s not a snarky mockery of the attitude of leadership, that’s the logic of capital.
Yes and no.
Yes every company wants to move faster. I’m not arguing that.
What I am saying, and I didn’t articulate well, is that each company thinks that LLMs are the secret sauce to moving at speeds beyond their wildest imagination. If they can crack the code they win.
Suffice to say none do. And everyone is moving at the same speed.
It’s not even guaranteed that moving faster is a good thing. The first to get somewhere will find out all the problems there, which the companies behind them will learn from, and avoid going there.
But even then you actually need a direction to grow that translates to cash inflow.
They generally don’t actually have an end specified, and get obsessed over the means which don’t translate to money.
This is so frustrating because I started degoogling exactly a year ago, and had finally managed to get completely free of Google mostly thanks to the proton ecosystem… But it took a whole year! I am just settling. I am a mom of two under-10yo boys in my forties. I don’t have time for this shit. I thought I was gonna die a proton user. Fucking hell.
Enshitification reaches all things. Even self hosted projects which are high quality.
Goal posts are always moving, incredibly frustrating. In a similar boat and I sympathize with you.
How can self-hosting be enshitified? I need to know if I am to spend shit ton of time, money and mind space on it😩
Look into the history of Plex haha. Not really open source but still, can happen to those projects too
Alisha moving
I had a giggle at this autocorrect
Fixed 🤣. Damn autocorrect!
Holy shit. I’ve spent more than a year and I’m a fucking nerd with no kids to worry about. Hats off to you lady.
Haha thanks, but I am a fucking nerd too and having kids is the biggest motivator for doing all you can for a better future. But yeah the time it takes to be able to go against the big-tech and surveillance state is NOT family friendly at all. Which is ironically why so many people become complicit in the system after having kids. It is by design.
Well, I’m proud of you for trying. I made an effort some years ago trying to set up a cloud for the extended family to use, but it is so much work to actually keep it all fast, safe and going at all times and I don’t want to be the reason that everybody loses their family photos. Maybe I’m overthinking it.
Sorry you’re having to worry about this.
For what it is worth, I think you’re still better off at Proton (where their AI idiocy could leak your private information) than at Gmail (where their user agreements seem to indicate they proactively sell it.)
Yeah, and mine just got renewed for a year a couple of months ago so I’m gonna stick with it for the time being, hoping they listen to their paying customers while exploring the self hosting options but I really am not sure that’s for me. I managed to do a lot of privacy related improvements in my digital life by just following github instructions blindly and such, but I think self hosting for email is the step that really goes above my pay grade. I tried doing jellyfin and high seas to stop paying for ellison’s hbo but it didn’t work out well and I’m back to paying for it begrudgingly. Ugh.
I hear that.
I’ve taken multiple runs at most of my digital freedoms.
I figure I can always take another run at whatever continues to bother me, given time.
And remember, you’re already protecting yourself better than most people manage.
Time to deproton
Unfortunately the best practice is likely to not let yourself get pulled into any ecosystem. Avoid having any single provider for multiple services, that way if one goes to shit you don’t have to move everything.
Another bit is to have things run locally whenever you can. SyncThing works well to syncronize services between multiple devices, especially KeePass (local password manager) and Aegis (local 2FA).
This doesn’t fix your current situation, but hopefully it helps you put together a new tech stack that’s more resilient
I really hate how much I enjoy being in an eco-system. I am a Mac user and it took forever to covince myself to stop using an iPhone and get a pixel with graphene on it. I love the proton email and calendar being in one app on my mac, makes my life so much easier and I mourn the idea of not having that anymore. But I know you get used to the small conveniences eventually so yeah, you’re right. Thanks for the recommendations, SyncThings look like would be very useful to me!
Yeah I convinced my family to move off of Gmail and now here we are. 😭
But that’s still a great accomplishment. Good job!!
Currently on day four of clearing out my Proton inbox. Moved my files off of Proton Drive, and cancelled my subscription. Next will be changing to a new email alias provider since SimpleLogin is a product of Proton.
Fuck em.
I am currently in the middle of moving to Tuta.
Andy Yen and Proton can get fucked.
Tuta left a comment on Mastodon a couple of days ago that they are researching using AI to automate repetitive tasks. I’ll try and find the comment.
Edit that didn’t take long https://infosec.exchange/@Tutanota@mastodon.social/117518313763499149
Isn’t… that a reasonable use of the tool? Freeing up people’s time from drone work to do more meaningful stuff?
Handwritten automation is possible with code, all they’d have to do is actually do the work to identify the repetitive tasks and write the code for future edit + reuse. They just want an excuse to get high on AI, to throw away their expertise. To risk the privacy of others to that end.
That’s why I switched to Posteo from Tuta, as they are desperate to be like every corpo scum and use AI. I also left a detailed message as to why I left, it was scathing.
Yeah, they sold themselves to the Big Tech interests and they don’t respect their users (nor their employees) anymore, if they did so in the past to start with. Just as Linus and its 90 billion from IBM (which received them from AI companies and it’s part of the AI bubble’s hype too)
I noticed Linus’s heel maneuver because…Of fucking course it is always the old men who sell out future generations for snake oil and bad corporate schemes. At least we have microkernels to microdose on to isolate the damage that can by a deranged group of open source idiots that soul their soul to corpo beasts.
Yes, but also that’s what regular programs are for. If it is a repetitive task that does not require any creative input, a program can achieve it, and a programmer can be paid for it. There are few tasks that can’t be automated using logic parameters.
I do agree with you that that is what AI should be used for, but I’d only support it if the AI was run locally. Commercial AI should not be centralized.
No. No AI use is acceptable.
Absolutes and sweeping statements are rarely true. I can’t think of a fault for using local AI for scientific pursuits, nor using local AI for recreational pursuits.
This isn’t any of them: this is a production context with real data of real users and the privacy and security of these at stake. This is one of those rare cases where they’re true, in fact.
But even in scientific or recreational contexts, it’s still bad by itself. First of all, it deskills you. Second of all, it still sums to the enviromental and energetic effects of AI. Third of all, “AI” is NOT reliable at all, as it’s inherently chaotic, stochastic and indeterminist. Fourth of all, “AI” is tainted and blood-stained chain of origin, encompassing the datasets used for training and the methods by which they are acquired, the materials and processes employed to manufacture and maintain the hardware and software involved, as well as the procedures used to categorize and clean the training data (that’s underpaid exploitative labor done by people of the Global South). Sixth of all, it perpetuates and amplifies biases by presenting itself as an objective, impartial, and detached entity to be trusted blindly—a dynamic that makes fake news more destructive than ever. Seventh, it is built upon the theft of works by millions of artists (of all kinds—not just painters and illustrators), scientists, philosophers, thinkers, and countless others, all without their consent, proper attribution, or fair compensation, thereby amplifying the phenomenon of enclosure. Eighth, it facilitates license laundering. Ninth, it has inextricable ties to both fascism and authoritarian tankie movements, as well as to war, numerous massacres, unjust imprisonments, and the intelligence and psychological or information warfare operations of governments worldwide.
Elaboration and sources are here.
Edit: Forgot to add that the “AI” that everyone talks about is not the actual AI that scientists use. They don’t use ChatGPT, StableDiffusion or anything like that to do research. They use purpose-specific machine learning models, created by them for their particular context and use case.
I’m on Mailbox.org to avoid being locked into a single email client. Apparently Tuta only works with their app, so no using Thunderbird or Outlook.
Also, Tuta’s E2EE only works when emailing other Tuta users due to them using proprietary encryption methods. But Mailbox.org, ProtonMail, and others use more common encryption standards
I’m in the process of doing the same thing. I’ve canceled but I’m half way through a two year plan. So I have some time to move to a different location. I hooked a lot of things to this email address.
Buying your own domain and then just pointing your mail records at a new host is the best way to handle email migrations. Once you get a new host with MX record support, which should be most of them, you just go update the record and all your mail is done being moved immediately.
You will have to hook things to yet neither address, but only one more time.
This is the way. Use providers which allow for catch all inboxes on your custom domain and you have your own email aliasing service, too.
A year ago I left a 2 year proton subscription when I was only 6 months in. I avoid subscriptions now.
FYI you can get unlimited aliases with duckduckgo mail (still need an email provider though)
https://duckduckgo.com/email/FYI, if you alias using someone else’s domain, you fall into the same trap all over again when, say, DDG goes full AI wackjob and now you need to transfer hundreds of email addresses.
when ddg goes
love that we just know all of them are going to do this, when not if.
let’s not forget they have a specific page so you never get in contact with ai slop: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
its not the default and it took user protest to add. opting in to that is identifying. they will turn to shit. it is inevitable.
i mean sure, the way i use aliases is mainly for things i want no direct connection to, so losing them wouldn’t be of any consequence to me. i feel like that’s the main way there were intended to be used as they can be disabled with the click of a button (from within the email even).
Is there no way to export/import between providers?
Sure is. Many ways. And if there aren’t build in ways, you can likely use migration tools like migrationwiz. There is also some open source tool I used once which I found in arch Linux’s AUR repo. It worked well enough also.
