cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2533091/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-ai-to-see-who-gets-to-keep-their-job
There it is. The last straw. My Tuta migration is complete.
Imagine filling this in, in the improvements suggestions spreadsheet. “Who entered this row? I said WHO ENTERED THIS ROW.”
Welcome to Tuta btw. The apps are pretty garbage but it’s home.
;)
Oh and by the by, I rather like the way they tie mail,calendar together in the same app, “tabbed” style, sort of. Give me a year and I might have some complaints, but for right now my only complaint so far is it seems the “Revolutionary” level subscription isn’t “high-falutin’” enough to be allowed to import old mail. Just prompts me to upgrade my account.
Their youtube channel has a year old video about importing that says “all paid tiers in the future” but I guess we’re not at that future yet.
I believe “one click import” or something similar was a recently new feature, or something like that? Like importing, or moving from, other providers. I might misremember though.
Yes sadly it appears that’s the feature that just opens a prompt to upgrade my sub. I’m fine with a local archive of my other account, so for me that’s fine, for others it might not be. Thank you though!
Ah, the “one click” thing was for exporting from Tuta rather than importing, my mistake.
Either way, I found this:
We’re thrilled to be able to offer email import (in beta) currently to Legend and Unlimited users. In the future, email import will become available for all new paid plans but as we have just released it in test mode, it’s temporarily necessary to limit the number of users importing.
What worries me a little bit is the “will become available for all [NEW] paid plans” part, as if old paid accounts won’t be getting this new feature. But I hope that’s just a phrasing mistake/interpretation error.
I’m currently on Legend because they had some deal a while ago where you could get on that plan for the same price as Revolutionary, but I don’t see import in the mobile app. I could check the desktop app later!
Edit: yeah, when I’m using the desktop app, I see the import option, and clicking it does not prompt me to upgrade my subscription. (It just shows me the screen to import email as you’d expect.) Again, this is on Legendary for the time being. We’ll see what happens in March when I have to downgrade to Revolutionary, if clicking Import prompts me to upgrade. I hope not.
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 bog 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.
Imagine still carrying water for a corporation.
Imagine being so disillusioned with the world that you assume that no one can have an opinion and think critically about two opposing views without it necessarily being some corporate brand fanboy bullshit.
Here, let me help you. Proton doesn’t give a fuck about you.
Yeah, was that supposed to be profound or something?
As the 1% that actually pays, I’m invested in them succeeding and not enshittifying so I don’t have to take the time to move my email hosting. End of story. I have my own email domain, so I can kick them to the curb any day I like. And expect to have to one day.
Did you need to complain about it some more? Does baby need a Binky? Or did you only ever use the free thing and it didn’t meet your expectations of what free things should be? Sorry your free thing wasn’t spectacular enough :(
Knew it!
Knew what? That someone doesn’t want the thing they pay for to get enshittified? That it’s smart to make plans to not let any company control how you communicate?
Wow. Such insight.
That you were a paying customer hence your rabid defense of a garbage company. Every time I get massive pushback it is always someone that has bought into the security theatre corporate solution that they sell.
I am sorry you continue to give them money. Take care!
Aren’t they a foundation?
No, they have a for profit company and a nonprofit entity that is a major shareholder. They operated just like a corporation with all the typical warts.
Yuck, they really make it seem like they are just a non profit.
They are definitely gross, but so is every corporation. The real lesson is stop giving companies money.
How about don’t use AI to begin with so you won’t have to weed anyone out due to “potential slop”.
If you haven’t used it professionally, LLMs can and do provide huge help. Making this a specially all or nothing argument only highlights a knowledge and experience gap on the part of someone making that argument.
Buuuuut, only an idiot asks for anything better than a starting point or a check of existing work. People relying on it to produce whole cloth work is for hobbyists and sloppers that don’t care or know any better.
You ask why they need to use LLMs at all, and they host their own, Lumo. What clear, financially solid argument can you make that LLMs are an objective net negative to every company? If they see benefits from a headstart on coding and ability to test their security, why demand they take that away when no human code is 100% perfect anyway?
I fear you may misunderstand their goal here- direct quote:
“We need people who can translate AI’s capabilities into better products, stronger execution, and new ways of working — and who approach this change with curiosity, judgment, and urgency,” the email reads.
They specifically want to “weed out” the ones who ARE NOT using AI
Welp, even worse. Fuck em.
NOW we agree. Fuck em hard.
I for one am not sticking around to find out.
Can someone just start a damn privacy-first email coop already?
Runbox is a Worker coop based in norway
Do you have more info on how the company is structured? Everything I can find on their site just says it’s “employee-owned”, but I don’t know what that means.
IMO, using AI to advise or guide you is the way to go, as it’s not actually touching the code.
But AI doing the work is a disaster that will lead to epic amounts of technical debt because it is impossible for AI to utilize judgement or taste.
I have been using AI more and more lately to just advise, to find, to make me aware of other options. I still do 100% of the work. So while AI hasn’t made me faster, it has made me more flexible by kicking me out of ruts and making me aware of alternative paths to reaching an objective.
I will not let AI touch my code until/unless it acquires judgement and taste. But until then, it’s turning out to be one hell of a gopher and rubber ducky.
What you’re saying is you’re happy to pay a subscription fee to use an electricity burning earth destroyer run by an evil tech oligarch rather than put a 59 cent rubber ducky on your desk to reason things through with?
May the flying spaghetti monster have mercy on your soulless husk.
Why should I pay a subscription fee? The AI is not touching my code, not generating any of it. I use the free versions to ask questions or give it snippets as examples, and go from there.
Sure, I’m beginning to bump into Claude’s free ceiling, but there are so many other options out there that I just partition my questions to the most appropriate model for that question.
There may come a time when I actually sign up for a paid tier, but it hasn’t happened yet. Until then, I will continue to exploit the parasites that fund this largesse.
And honestly, I won’t be upset if it all crashes and burns – it’s only a tool for me, not a crutch like with so many other devs as of late. Almost all of them will have regressed all the way back to junior-level skills if they had to hand-code all over again. It’s actually kind of sad to see such skills erosion and dumbing down that’s happening IRL.
Every technology you touch hurts the environment Could say the same about electricity
The device you are using right now to write here is with 99℅ certainty created by exploitation of people - why is it OK for you to usw that devicd but not for other people to use ai ?
Every technology you touch hurts the environment
All life causes pain and suffering to other life.
Therefore, the logical end-stage conclusion is to trigger a false vacuum decay event that erases all of existence throughout the universe and so relieves all suffering.
Until then, I will continue to exploit the parasites that fund this largesse.
Did you miss the part where you’re also exploiting all the people hurt and the environment polluted in the process of building and operating power lines, power plants and data centers?
Or the part where the crash would come down on the neck of taxpayers? The parasites will be fine when the dust settles, chip and cloud resource vendors will have made a pretty penny, the executives’ salaries will have built a wonderful cushion to land on. But if people lose their savings or pension funds need bailing out, that’s a textbook example of the “socialise the losses” part of capitalism.
Or that they might actually get away with racking up the prices far enough to become profitable and stabilise the bubble, which would most certainly also come at terrible cost to the individual worker, whether or not they personally used or endorsed these tools?
Nothing about this should be cheered on, neither the possibility of the bubble stabilising the prospect of its crash. The only winners in this farce of a gold rush will be the ones selling the tools for everyone else’s misfortune.
The sooner it pops, the lesser the damage, but damage it has done and will do.
Use it, if you must, and hope that you won’t find your own skills having rotted away after all, but don’t delude yourself that it’s some noble act of sticking it to the rich.
I agree. If I use AI is isn’t to write a report. I write the report and then have AI review it to see if it catches anything I might have missed like repititions or something, and make suggestions like make something more formal or scientific or something.
If I need an excel formula I will make it and if it doesn’t work exactly as I want it to I will ask AI to give feedback on the formula and see why it might not work.
If you’ve got to prep for a job interview either way, then you might as well do a few more.
I use Lumo all the time as it’s the only LLM that respects privacy right now. It’s not a top model but still has web search and is very reasonable for small private issues. From Proton replies seems like this is overblown and they’re looking for internal people to work more on AI stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I didn’t mean to suggest that it was easy, simple, or even a good idea. Just that we live in hell.
Hasn’t been my experience with a correct DKIM & DMARC setup.
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.
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.
Non paywall in German: https://stadt-bremerhaven.de/proton-nachinterviews-zum-thema-ki-sorgen-fuer-unruhe/
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
Well the admin pick is even worse lol
We need to ensure you’re compliant with the competency solvent credibility chipper, place your nostrils around the ice pick blades.
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.
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.
Wow proton give it at least a decade before you start to enshit… Oh wait. Right on schedule it seems. Unfortunate.
