Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
remember all the fucking rubes saying Protonās LLM wasnāt a problem cause only business and visionary accounts had access to it? well, only one month later of fucking course they went back on that and now itās included with duo and family accounts, and my soon to be cancelled unlimited account just popped an ad for it on the compose window trying to get me to opt into the free trial for the fucking thing (and also the buttonās purple just as a last dark pattern to try and fool users into clicking it)
Why do I get the feeling weāre gonna see a colossal tech crash
is this the bad place?
Yes.
@self I wonder what āpopular demandā and āoverwhelming number of requestsā. Are there actually a lot of people asking for this? Are there more than there are people begging them not to? Maybe I just live in an anti-AI bubble, because I sure donāt encounter a lot of pro-AI views.
itās not just you ā I can dig up the posts if youāre curious, but Proton wrote their last user survey so it was impossible to say no to this LLM crap directly, and they still got caught massively fudging the numbers to make this needless bullshit look popular. I can promise you itās just the same people doing that again, except this time thereās no publicly accessible numbers they can be called out over
@self I can understand Microsoft and Google chasing this fad, but I would expect most of Protonās users to be exactly the type of person whoās against this. But of course itās easy to fudge with numbers.
thatās very true! unfortunately, weāve discovered that a lot of the foundational members of Protonās board and engineering team are huge LLM fans (and gigantic Bitcoin fans too ā thatās why Proton released a Bitcoin wallet, of all things, almost simultaneously with this LLM bullshit)
weāre not sure if something changed that suddenly made them go all in on their bad ideas, but the initial communication around Scribe was how much Protonās business users wanted it ā and the survey was very much crafted to get what looked like a pro-LLM response from that demographic. Proton has essentially admitted that theyāre doing this for their tiny number of enterprise whales rather than their normal privacy-conscious users; itās a shame theyāre willing to burn their business down for that kind of short-term gain. I can only imagine them enabling the LLM for all their paid accounts this quickly is either a desperation move because the feature didnāt do the numbers they hoped for, or itās a sign that Protonās otherwise compromised.
@self Itās probably the same folks who wanted the Bitcoin wallet.
@self @zogwarg
Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.
Who isnāt huffing this nonsense?
Its worse for me - Iāve got a metric shitload of emails on Proton. Thankfully, Iām not using them for anything particularly important.
from the last time this came up, Tuta is of the few that arenāt, although thereās not really anyone with feature match on some of protonās features afaik
@froztbyte
I forgot Iām using their VPN too, and they accept bitcoin (not a big deal, but useful). I was aware of Tuta and fastmail when I chose Proton.
For now Iāll prioritize moving to a self managed domain to make swapping provider easier in future.
I agree; Tuta is the only real replacement, and theyāve promised (for what thatās worth) they donāt have any plans for AI features. I may migrate to Tuta myself, but I canāt truly recommend it ā as always, I have to point out that Tuta is still a single point of failure like Proton, and one day I hope weāre able to design a federated, e2e encrypted replacement for email (that crucially isnāt gpg or anything like it ā imagine teaching your grandma and your drug dealer (assuming theyāre not the same person) to use that kind of thing)
@self @john_chu *sigh* cross another one off the list
@self @zogwarg highly recommend migrating to posteo
wtf is a posteo
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@weirdwriter @froztbyte itās posteo.net
Posteo is from Germany and theyāre reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so itās not as batteries included as what Proton offered.
I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.
Another option like that is mailbox.org. Theyāre presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.
Thatās significantly less comforting than Protonās Switzerland. Itās in 14 Eyes after all.
Switzerland may not be in 14 Eyes, but itās still got its own surveillance apparatus and Swiss companies are still required to respond to lawful requests from the Usual Agencies. Itās also a signatory to various mutual aid treaties. So Iām not sure how much difference this actually makes in practice beyond āmarketingā.