self

do you get banned from twitter if you call him a fucking asshole?

I’m working on a more detailed reply on mastodon but to be honest, I’m pretty sure he didn’t read the original post

only one of the 8 computers I own (and I’m not being cheeky here and counting embedded or retro systems, just laptops and desktops) is physically capable of meeting the model’s minimum requirements, and that’s only if I install chromium on the Windows gaming VM my bigger GPU’s dedicated to and access protonmail from there. nothing else I do needs a GPU that big, professional or otherwise — that hardware exists for games and nothing else. compared with the integrated GPUs most people have, a 2060’s fucking massive.

do you see how these incredibly high system requirements (for a webmail client of all things), alongside them already treating the local model as strictly optional, can act as a funnel redirecting people towards the insecure cloud version of the feature? “this feature only works securely on one of the computers where you write mail, at best” feels like a dark pattern to me.

just a little violation of my trust for the company I pay for privacy and encryption services. as a treat.

alternatively, if the only version of this that doesn’t break Proton’s e2e security model is the local-only version, maybe don’t ship the cloud hosted version of the feature under any circumstances

I’d still hate the feature because the LLM model’s derived from plagiarized work and the labor of exploited workers from the global south, but this didn’t have to be a fucking privacy catastrophe

so, uh, you remember AskJeeves?

(alternative answer: the third buzzword in a row that’s supposed to make LLMs good, after multimodal and multiagent systems absolutely failed to do anything of note)

yep! that’s the game they’re playing. I really don’t give a fuck about Proton’s relatively tiny number of enterprise whales, but they make Proton a shitload of money in the short term.

the depressing part is, historically, online services that remain uncompromisingly user-focused tend to stick around roughly forever, while the ones that chase short-term gains and compromise everything else almost always enshittify and fizzle out pretty quick.

(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)

don’t feel bad for making the best choice you could with the information of the past. until we get a workable, interoperable, federated, encrypted communication/online services platform, the choice was to recommend one of the centralized e2e providers. we both chose to recommend Proton and they did this shit, but it could have just as easily been tutanota.

now my brain’s going “e2e encrypted federated email but it preferably uses activitypub as a transport and classic email as a fallback, is that anything”

I’ve posted at Proton on Mastodon about this with some details on why it’s real bad; no reply yet

Proton, who I use for mail and various other services, has gone against the wishes of the majority of their userbase as measured by their own survey and implemented an LLM writing assistant in protonmail, which is a real laugh given Proton’s main hook is its services are end-to-end encrypted

(supposedly this piece of shit will run locally if you meet these incredibly high system requirements including a high end GPU or recent, high end Apple M chipset and a privacy-violating Chromium-based browser. otherwise it breaks e2e by sending your emails unencrypted to Proton’s servers, and they do a lot to try to talk over that fact)

the example I was thinking of was the incredibly ill-conceived rejected patchset to implement d-bus inside the kernel but I don’t think they’ve really stopped trying since then

surprising absolutely nobody who’s been paying attention, Fedora has signaled its intent to use generative AI and an LLM in its packaging software

and I wouldn’t give a fuck what IBM’s pet distro does, but Red Hat’s developers have a high amount of control over what ends up in the userland… and bootloader… and pretty much every part of the system but the kernel cause they got told to fuck off, of every Linux distro but the obscure ones

speaking of technofascism, we’re at the stage where supposed Democrat billionaires like the Andreesen Horowitz fuckers suddenly come out in support of Trump:

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, says he’s been a Democrat most of his life. He says he has endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

However, he says he’s no longer loyal to the Democratic Party. In the 2024 presidential race, he is supporting and voting for former President Donald Trump. The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech, specifically for the startup ecosystem.

none of this should be surprising, but it should be called out every time it happens, and we’re gonna see it happen a lot in the days ahead. these fuckers finally feel secure in taking their masks off, and that’s not good.