cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology@piefed.social/p/2533091/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-ai-to-see-who-gets-to-keep-their-job
I already stopped giving a shit about Proton after the CEO praised Trump, members of Trump’s cabinet, and the Republican party. Then claimed to still be “politically neutral”
Did he actually praise trump directly? If I recall correctly it was his admin pick that was praised
He did praise Trump directly on the admin pick.
Well the admin pick is even worse lol
It was worse, he thought Trump was going to regulate big IT business. Basically he believed Trump would fuck over Google so Proton could get more market share. Yes, a total piece of shit corporate tool who had no clue about US politics talking out his ass hoping it might benefit him.
The AI stuff is so frustrating. I’m terrified to really talk about how I feel about it, because my opinions are too nuanced to be shared in a bullet point in a performance review. Everywhere I’ve been lately, it’s been about how much you use something, not about your output.
What is the computer equivalent of “walk fast and always carrying something”
This looks too l33t. I fear if I had this going, typing like a maniac, everyone in the office would gather around and start reading the code.
“Everyone look busy”
There it is. The last straw. My Tuta migration is complete.
They’ve been replying on Reddit and it hasn’t made them look better. They say they aren’t firing people and are just looking for people who can accelerate their work with LLMs. Like, sure buddy.
If you’ve got to prep for a job interview either way, then you might as well do a few more.
If you read the Proton response to this article, it actually does seem like trying to figure out what’s going on with business process in a big picture way. Senior managers are interviewing, too. Not all staff are interviewing.
Personally, I think it’s just as much about seeing who can’t QC the slop out off their code as anything else. Maybe. Or maybe I’m wrong, I dunno.
Wow proton give it at least a decade before you start to enshit… Oh wait. Right on schedule it seems. Unfortunate.
Dammit.
Oh cmon, now which email provider do i use?
Any EU/Swiss-based provider that takes their job seriously, really. Here’s a starting point.
Proton’s encryption has always been more a publicity stunt than anything. A service that’s really committed to privacy shows it in their values and the way they act, not with technological gimmicks.
All that Proton’s encryption has really accomplished is that their services are one step away from complete customer lock-in: if they discontinue their “bridge” connectors tomorrow and force you to use their website and mobile app, and you haven’t backed up your email elsewhere, you’re fucked.
Migrating your email service to another provider should normally take one hour, provided you use your own domain(s) and back up your mailboxes regularly over IMAP to your own storage. Then it’s just a matter of changing some DNS records and waiting for them to propagate.
So call me paranoid but I’ll never use a provider that doesn’t offer standard IMAP and SMTP access to the mailbox.
Start with buying your own domain.
If you are interested, self hosting email has an outdated bad reputation, I have had much more problems with google blocking microsoft email from custom domains than from self hosted emails.
That said, it is still a lot of work. For a hands off system, find a national provider that can use your domain, so you can switch later while retaining your address.
Start with buying your own domain.
As we have seen with eg.: Austistici,
buyingrenting a domain gets you nothing. It can be pulled right from under you with no recourse. If you have to pay someone else to “host” your identity, then it’s not actually your identity.Not to mention, your own domain makes you trivially identifiable and filterable.
Yeah, self-host … then you end up on a VPS with a bad spam/RBL reputation because they have other customers being spammy dickheads, and their entire IP allocation is listed. This covers far too many VPS providers. So, when you’re trying to simply get things done, you end up randomly having to troubleshoot your emails not going through or ending up in remote spam folders.
Its a mess. Email sucks. Wouldn’t suggest self-hosting if you have low patience or are busy.
Should be easily solvable with something like a co-op owned SMTP relay. That way, every member has a patent investment in the reputation of the relay.
I think the best option for self-hosters who don’t want too much headache from their email is to host the email yourself, but send your emails through a relay other providers actually trust. It sucks to get so close to full control and give it up, but if you’re like me, you send almost no email, so there’s almost nothing at all to see for the relay, and all your received mail still comes straight to your server.
then you end up on a VPS with a bad spam/RBL reputation because they have other customers being spammy dickheads, and their entire IP allocation is listed.
Sure, if you don’t do your own research and legwork, first.
In fact, there are a shitton more bad corners you can paint yourself into if you are too fucking lazy to do some trivially basic research ahead of time, from hosts to software chosen to how you configure things.
Hell, a lot of these bad corners also involve turnkey solutions hosted by others. So simply having someone else do all the work can hose you just as badly. Sure, Azure/O365 or AWS Workmail or Google Workspace solutions are usually not that kind of corner, but unless you are willing to pay out the nose for minimal needs, you’re usually going to go for something a lot smaller and possibly more sketchy.
Ain’t no such thing as “buying domain”.
Only renting.Good point. Though you are of course right, and it will cost money in perpetuity, I think it is important to distinguish between locations and which top level domain one buys under. At least where I live, I have government guaranteed rights regarding switching registrars and keeping my domain, and a court is needed (or lack of payment) to force me to abandon my domains. That way I avoid the problem of vendor lockinn.
At least where I live, I have government guaranteed rights regarding switching registrars and keeping my domain, and a court is needed (or lack of payment) to force me to abandon my domains.
What do you want to bet that Trump’s frown (or Putin’s, or Nazinyahu’s) is not sufficient to pull the domain from under you, your country’s regulations be damned?
The one thing that rubbed me the wrong way is that it treats the underlying host as “disposable”, in that it intentionally does not support in-place OS upgrades. As in, if you want to jump from an older LTS to the most recent, you need to explicitly spin up a blank, new LTS host, run the installation script from scratch, and then restore the data from an overnight backup.
I can understand an immutable container/binary with external data storage and config settings, but flipping the script and locking down the underlying OS? Yeah, that seems excessively unnecessary.
Do you have a spare desktop I can borrow to self-host with?
Self-host if you care about privacy and tech ethics, otherwise whatever seems most stable.
Self hosting an email service is a pain in the ass since most providers will block your email or show it as spam
Hasn’t been my experience with a correct DKIM & DMARC setup.
I didn’t mean to suggest that it was easy, simple, or even a good idea. Just that we live in hell.
Can someone just start a damn privacy-first email coop already?
This came up in my financial news feed. If you’re a publicly traded company you want to be a growth company and not a mature company. The latter group are stable and provide steady dividends. The former have shares that become more valuable and increase your worth.
This is how we get people pivoting from sparkling water to AI.
And it’s how we get software companies that have a solid product suddenly deciding to ruin it by adding AI.
from sparkling water to AI
The AI is all around you.
my work has also been ramping up AI rhetoric too. forcing training on how to use it and automated meeting invitations to feedback groups. this last week they sent at least 20 invites.
I’ll keep declining them and refusing to use it until it’s a requirement for employment. then I’ll break out the “AI goes against my religion” card.
Mine got past that phase and now we’re in the being selective about who gets the AI subscription, and lowering token budgets phase.
Next up, more layoffs!
It is almost like adding an enormous cost to the budget with no real way to recoup the costs was a bad idea.
We need to ensure you’re compliant with the competency solvent credibility chipper, place your nostrils around the ice pick blades.
introducing this ai stuff without giving proper Linux support and attention it deserves says a lot. What a shame.
Or good calendar integrations and a good calendar widget on android.
I mean, using LLMs for development could make Linux support economically viable. I know it’s the glazers favourite excuse, but with coding it really, truly depends on how you use the tool.
We’ve all seen how well top-down interviews pays off. Workers bees are the grist of corporations. Pay grades above them decide what happens with all resources - generally without input from they who turn the crank. Bottom-up should be the direction. How to create a product is important to those in sales and marketing.
Bottom-up should be the direction.
But- but- but- that’s communism.
Workers taking control of the means of production is heresy in capitalism.
Non paywall in German: https://stadt-bremerhaven.de/proton-nachinterviews-zum-thema-ki-sorgen-fuer-unruhe/
