I am Very Disappointed By Proton
(proton.me)
Kate
Privacy-
I didn't expected this kind of thing to show up today.
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I don't want to use a vibecode slop that isnt tested by real humans.
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I just want a secure and privacy respecting email not ai slop.
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Good Bye Proton I am Not Happy With You
Any Suggestion ?
- I want drive and calender support
- Made by humans not slop machine.
- FOSS
- May Be a Linux Client Support
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.
they gave some hints when their ceo started praising fascists.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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 were. I get paid to lobotomize a bit of myself every single day
Shitty human for years.
Tuta
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 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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Agree Its all because of their bad Leadership
I don't understand why this is a surprise to people? Didn't they openly support Trump? So the CEO is clearly lacking in the upstairs department. That was enough for me to never deal with them ever.
He supported Gail Slater, who has a track record of trying to break up big-tech monopolies. She was appointed by Trump. And he pointed out that the Democrats could have tried too, but when they were in power they didn't. Of course, when she actually tried to break up big-tech she was stopped, got into a fight with Pam Bondi, and quit her job in protest.
No, Andy Yen supported the entire Republican party, including praising JD Vance in particular.
And he used the official Proton Team account across multiple platforms to relay this information to people.
He also posted that repbulicans stand for the little guy. Andy showed who he is, and everyone should beleive him. I did, and left promptly after that. Proton will continue to be a dangerous place until Andy is gone.
"10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys. But today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin."
In retrospect, it was obvious that Trump would side with Big Tech in the end. And the quote is a bit kiss-ass-y. It's also noting that the Dems didn't do as much as the Republicans. That's critique against the Dems, and well earned. Personally, I think we all have a moral obligation to point out that Trump in total has made the world worse in so many ways, but I also don't think Andy is a fascist and all those things people write about him.
We can agree to disagree on Andy. Whilst I obviously didn't know specfically how Andy would end up crapping all over his company and customers, the reality is I did and its why I left. Simply because the old adage has never been proven wrong in my experience --- "When they show you who they are, believe them."
Let's watch this play out over time, this all gets far worse the longer Andy is around. Andy will continue to reveal his chameleon self, we've only seen the surface.
I also would like to see a CEO who is more on board with fighting big tech. I dislike that reddit is their go-to forum, that the linux drive client has taken forever, etc. Andy seems more interested in the business side and less the stated values of the foundation. I don't know how much of that is necessary vs detrimental
I don't understand why this is a surprise to people?
You really are surprised that not everyone knows the same things and also interprets them exactly as you do?
Idgaf about them using AI per se. It is out of the bag, and it ain't going back in unless everyone throws a revolution to kill the people in charge and destroy every bit of knowledge on how to create it again. That just isn't happening. And it is possible for good humans to use the technology to craft good programming.
What I do gaf about is the people in charge of proton being assholes, treatingboth their employees and customers like shit, and not even trying to hide their contempt.
I guess there's already dogshit all over the floor. It's out of the dog so it's not going back in. Guess we leave it how it is.
Poor analogy.
You can clean up shit. But you can't cram it back in the dog's ass. Well, hypothetically, but you'll be covered in shit and have a very upset dog.
What you can't clean up is knowledge, ideas. Where a technology to exists, and minds know if it, it can be recreated. Doesn't matter how hard you try, it's part of human comprehension. Ai in one form of another has been a goal for decades. You can't erase that.
All we could do is rebuild it better. Less abusive, more regulations and controls, better planning. And I'm all for that, but it isn't as simple as your bad analogy makes it seem
Honestly? That kind of shitty thinking is as much a problem as badly instituted ai is. You were so busy trying to pull a gotcha that you couldn't be bothered to talk to a fellow human being with respect and decency. You know, a very similar way of thinking that makes Sam Altman and Andy Yen such horrible stewards of otherwise good software.
You weren't talking about fixing anything. You gave a defeatist, false dichotomy of "accept this thing" or "total revolution".
The reason people chose Proton was with the expectation it could simply choose not to shove slop into its products , which is an option you omit.
The Orphan Crushing Machine isn't bad because it's helmed by Altman. It's an inherently bad thing, and it attracts bad people to it like flies.
Look, I'm not sure why you're responding here, unless you're an alt of the person I was responding to. There's some degree of connection, but it's a different main thrust.
Yeah, capitalism is the problem. But when it comes to ai, Altman is the poster boy. When it comes to Proton, Yen is literally the person running the company. It's perfectly okay you use them as specific examples.
As far as it being a false dichotomy, I disagree. It's the very fact of the "orphan crushing machine" that makes me believe the only way to get a do over is the forcible removal of the people in charge of said machine. Oligarchy don't give a fuck, and they're the ones in charge. It's not like a shift in dominant political party will be a magic wand either; Europe, the us, the uk, and canada are all under the thumb of oligarchs in their dominant parties (with varying degrees of boots on necks) Hell, I think Australia is too, but I'm less familiar with their main parties.
There's really nowhere in the world right now that isn't crushed by capitalist assholes. They rule by money, even when not in office themselves. That doesn't disappear by changing from Republicans to Democrats, or Tories to Labor, or whatever biggest parties are in power (usually entrenched in power because of that money). So I don't see any realistic scenario that results in corporate AI being eliminated that doesn't also eliminate the assholes doing the crushing.
Also, I'm not really obligated to cram every single facet of things into one offhand comment. I didn't talk about fixing things because you can't fix corporate AI. You have to start over, though from what I've been told some of the open source models would mean not having to start entirely from scratch. Since what I was talking about was that, why waste my time? I mean, beyond tangential conversations like this being very slightly less likely. And I say tangential because the comment you responded to was from someone else, and the context was shifted slightly because of their shitty and smug analogy.
For real, people seem to expect things to fit some predetermined format, like comment sections have to be essays or debates to be graded. I made an offhand comment that summed things up in a way that matched my level of interest. You didn't like, that, and that's okay. But I don't owe anyone jack shit. I don't have to talk about fixing things, nobody does.
It's not a false dichotomy? Proton couldn't help but use the Orphan Crushing Machine?
Why?
People want security from their product, not slop. There is literally nothing "inevitable" about using it. They can just choose to not.
For a false dichotomy to be a false dichotomy, one has to believe that there's are more than two alternate, opposing (at least partially) possibilities.
As previously stated , I disagree that there are more than two options regarding the state of ai as it currently exists. Ergo, I don't agree they it is a false dichotomy. It's just a dichotomy.
You're free to disagree, that's okay. However, based on apparent tone, and what seems to be a misunderstanding of intent, I very much doubt that you feel the same way. It would seem I am not free to disagree with your premise. Restating that premise won't change my mind about my original statement, or the ways I've rephrased it so far. Nor will repetition of "orphan crushing machine". Which, again, you do you, but I ain't typing that out again and will just refer to it as capitalism, assuming we keep chatting casually. Once shit gets heated, I'm out though, I got too much shit going on in meatspace for that to be even remotely the way I'll spend my lemmy time.
Proton, being a product run by a capitalist, absolutely would not have taken a different path. It could have, but the non profit that owns a majority of proton chose their CEO, and neither stopped him, nor removed him since. So, back to the would not. They might still reverse course, engage with less problematic standpoints regarding ai (and, again repeating myself, my issue isn't with ai per se, it's how it's being used and mandated by proton leadership). I very seriously doubt that will happen. It isn't impossible, just very unlikely in light of the CEO still being in place after two different events where he put a giant piece of his foot in his mouth.
Now, regarding ai itself, it doesn't have to produce slop. Really, it doesn't. A sufficiently built model will be able to generate a lot of things that are fully functional. Ai isn't magic. It's a fancy bit of software. As long as the parameters are built well, and the people building it aren't chasing profits instead of safe, quality results, it will eventually get to the point that it's so much faster than and as capable as a human code expert. It isn't there yet, but at some point it will be.
Since resources are being hogged up by capitalist driven ai, I don't see it happening in a weedy that's acceptable without a radical reconstruction of human society. Hence my original comment.
I also disagree with your statement that the goal of proton users is security only. O would even disagree that it's security as a primary want. I would argue that privacy, when compared to companies like Google/alphabet is the predominant goal of users. Protonmail by itself isn't that secure. It can't be because it's not able to magically make recipients able to read their encrypted email. You can't mail from proton to gmail encrypted currently. That's inherently insecure. It is, however, more private so long as you only email people that don't use privacy hating providers.
Their other products, yeah, I can see those being chosen because they're more secure. Calendars, data storage, VPN, and password management can all be done in a way that's more secure than capitalist driven options. I would argue that whether or not proton can be considered secure should determined by their least secure, and most used services. VPN and email are those two, or were last I checked ( back when bitwarden began its flirtation with enshittification, so not long ago overall).
The VPN is up to standard overall. The email is no more or less secure than any other provider that can't ensure recipients can decrypt messages. That's the standard I believe is most useful in determining if "secure" is a valid adjective for proton as a company.
Since more people use them for email than anything else, if users really believe they're more secure, and that's why they signed up, well, I can't do anything about that, but I would still disagree that it means the average user "want security".
Ai was always inevitable. So long as computer science existed, it was going to happen because the entire point of computers is doing things for humans. We built them to crunch numbers faster and more reliably. ENIAC was rudimentary artificial intelligence in the broadest sense of the term. Everything since has been developing to where we are now in terms of the fundamental technology. Pong was rudimentary ai when you played against the computer. So were all the enemies in Mario brothers. So are the mobs in your preferred crpg.
Generative ai was always coming. It's only going to go away if it is utterly wiped out, in all forms, in a way that prevents humans from being able to start over. Best we can hope for is enough of a revolution to oust the capitalists using it to fuck over everyone else.
That's a lot of text that doesn't address my core question of: why can't Proton just not use the slop box?
Literally nobody is making them . Their CEO could toss their silly manifesto. There's no guaranteed payout from this, and if anything it's hurting their brand. "Because capitalism" doesn't mean anything either, that's just a completely dead-end cliche. Slavery was part of capitalism too. Surely you'd not argue in favor of using it because it was inevitable.
You can have an opinion all day about inevitability, but I hope it's not just a baseless one.
Yeah like imagine free and open language models trained from the ground up on data sources from people who willingly want to contribute to it, rather than ripped from everywhere and anywhere by companies desperate to make themselves valuable before the VC cash runs out.
You can clean up shit. But you can't cram it back in the dog's ass. Well, hypothetically, but you'll be covered in shit and have a very upset dog.
Best thing I've read this year, thank you.
All we could do is rebuild it better. Less abusive, more regulations and controls, better planning. And I'm all for that, but it isn't as simple as your bad analogy makes it seem
Nothing in human history has ever proved this to be true.
We are in late stage capitalism. What you propose is as likely as cramming shit back into the dog.
Thankyou for coming to my ted talk.
If you go back to my initial comment, you may note that it contains the only path to that ending I see as realistic.
Wow, Proton keeps disappointing... Time to leave for me as well! I'm looking at Posteo as I'm worried Tuta will turn into the next Proton. Not only that, I'm sick of being stuck with the apps made by the providers, I'll use Thunderbird thank you!
I've been happy with Posteo + Thunderbird
Yes getting away from locked-in products is the best option. Buy a domain name + standard IMAP provider means you can very easily switch to another email provider if needed.
Yes, the old faithful promises that this is not the end for you, but that you are moving on to something better.
Sounds very much like a eulogy for the deceased.
Tutanoa
Tuta is looking into using AI in development.
Wouldn't recommend since they don't support IMAP/SMTP, making moving to another provider impossible or at least extremely difficult in the future.
They do at least support custom domain names, which is good as that should be a requirement for any email provider, otherwise moving in the future is even more difficult.
You can export your emails, although I admit I haven't tried it.
Tuta-nope-a*
There's no PGP support, so it kinda defeats the whole purpose of having encrypted mail (unless you literally only want to mail other people on tuta)
Tutanota*
drive isnt here yet, but on the way
I like filen.io for a drive alternative
I'll be real with you: if you don't want to use software written using AI, pretty soon you won't be using any software at all.
People like you saying stuff like this is exactly why that's happening, btw. Stop manufacturing consent for AI.
😂 people so fucking deluded here.
- All I want is a software that works as intended and tested well.
- Dont want anything Vibecoded And I am verymuch disappointed to see this this trend of company pushing slop machines code untested.
- If this continues then we will be doomed when slop machine turns against us and it will be a chaotic mess.
- So what I am saying is that I don't like vibecoded software and slop machine influence to creative coding.
I love handcrafting code and I think Coding is a form of art.
::: spoiler note I think the word "ai" is a sware so I refer it as "slop machine" :::
All I want is a software that works as intended and tested well.
Don't want anything Vibecoded
Can AI code not be tested well to ensure it works as intended?
I'm not sure using AI is synonymous with "vibecodeing" or "slop".
I mean I don't like devs pushing code that they don't truely understand
Do you have evidence of that happening at Proton?
The Proton CEO literally said that waiting a few days to pentest a feature before pushing it live was "bullshit and loser thinking." That is not the kind of careful testing culture that I demand from a secure product.
Agreed. That would be terrible. Terrible with or without AI coding. And the statement oddly goes against everything they've done up till now, with Andy at the helm the whole time. That's why I'm not certain it means what most here assume it does.
As far as I'm concerned the article is an allegation, not a conviction. It's like the prosecution making their argument to a grand jury without any opposing arguments. I agree there's more than enough in the article to have a trial. So far the defence has managed to poke a few holes in the prosecutor's case. The haven't obviously destroyed it, forcing 404 to make a retraction or anything; And they probably won't. We'll have to see in the next weeks and months how much more of 404's story they can cast reasonable doubt upon.
I know we can't prove if they know what they are doing atleast they can provide a hand written documentation so we can verify, is it a good idea ?
That's not bad.
When the release new updated source it coild be flagged or documented.
It depends on the definition of "AI".
If you mean "artificial intelligence, then you're completely wrong because it doesn't exist.
But, if you mean the vague group of technologies currently lumped together under the grift called "AI", then yes they're probably here to stay - although it's hard to generalize about an imaginary marketing category.
