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
There it is. The last straw. My Tuta migration is complete.
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.
I for one am not sticking around to find out.
Imagine still carrying water for a corporation.
How about don’t use AI to begin with so you won’t have to weed anyone out due to “potential slop”.
Edit: this is in response to the parent comment, not to Proton…
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.
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.
Very interesting and reasonably priced! Thanks!
If you’ve got to prep for a job interview either way, then you might as well do a few more.
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.
Do you have a spare desktop I can borrow to self-host with?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Well the admin pick is even worse lol
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.
“Everyone look busy”
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.
I don’t want your ai, make your email and calendar better
Executives: “But how do we do that without the incredible investment of AI?!”
Developer, sitting in the corner, arms crossed and covered in cobwebs: “Harumph”
As a developer, our executives and stakeholders have really losed focus. It seems like 10-20 years ago we were being asked to solve tightly scoped problems. Now we get massive sprawling edicts, tons of how I want it, and the result is a very unpolished product. No one seems to care about basics or details anymore. This predates our current AI mess and the AI boom has only made things worse.
Decades ago we had engineers and devs rise up through the ranks to become a part of steering committees.
Now they’re all MBA/BPM/PMBOK people with either zero or superficial tech/dev knowledge.
You cannot “tightly scope” that which you cannot understand.
That gave me a good chuckle
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.
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.
Wow proton give it at least a decade before you start to enshit… Oh wait. Right on schedule it seems. Unfortunate.
Dammit.
AI policies are so dumb. You don’t evaluate people’s perfs on how much they use a tool. So what’s the damn end goal of such evaluation??
"Hey! I did nothing useful this year, but all with AI! -You’re promoted!!
I fixed hundreds of bugs and developed 3 new features all cheered by users! -With AI? -Err… not much -You’re fired!!"
The policy my company has implemented is the opposite. AI use is allowed, but no confidential client information is to be sent to any cloud AI service. Logic is that if we don’t have an actual NDA with OpenAI (or whoever), their privacy policy is not robust enough for us to take on that liability.
Interested in your thoughts on that!
Edit: we’re not a software company. We design medical devices, so nearly all data we have is confidential.
no confidential client information is to be sent to any cloud AI service
If the code has been crafted correctly, none should be.
Client info should be 100% data, and remain 100% in production. If you have any dev-side data to test and debug with, it should be 100% procedurally-generated pseudo-data that only imitates client data in terms of gross patterns, and not specific points of data.
Like customer names. Those names should be broadly representative of what is found in the regions the software operates in, in order to demonstrate acceptable data input validation and effective storage compatibility with those names. For example, you don’t want to be storing European names in a DB field that is not UTF-8 compliant, or validating those names by restricting characters to US-ASCII. But any one generated name that just so happens to match an IRL name should be a statistical occurance, and any extended data attached to that entry should (generally) not match any other IRL data for any IRL occurance of that name…
Absolutely, sorry for misleading - we’re not a software company. We do engineer for medical devices so confidential information in this case covers most everything we deal with. It might be actual IP, which is less of a concern, but it might also be trade secrets which as much more sensitive!
For the LLMs killer feature, software development, you don’t really need confidential information 99% of the time.
It continues to annoy me how both haters and glazers will over-simplify the topic by calling everything AI. There’s a giant difference in usefulness, ethics, and quality between LLMs that produce code guided by an experienced developer, and “art” slopped out for greed by some random schmo.
For the LLMs killer feature, software development,
Oof.
Multiple companies have that approach, I’m not denying there ARE companies doing things right (or at least better).
I work in a company using multiple agents. One of them is supposed to be off Internet, and even with that one we’re not to share sensitive IP.
But Proton is not an isolated case. I bet some execs have invested and promised so much they need to report some good numbers on usage, and you can’t make up productivity improvement if there are people left getting as much done without AI.
So if I’m reading this right, Proton is re-interviewing their entire staff, focusing on how they’ve integrated AI into their workflow, and if they aren’t using AI as much as management wants they’re likely to lose their jobs?
That is extremely disappointing.
Posteo is suddenly looking very shiny.
Tuta is good. Waiting on their drive.
Tuta cancelled my free account because their automated system detected fraud. This occurred after 24 hours of updating my contacts within Tuta and signing up for some services. I appealed and they only apologized for the inconvenience but kept the account closed.
Other people have posted similar stories but after a YEAR of use their email randomly because inaccessible. So Tuta isn’t a viable alternative for me as a Proton user.
Damn, second negative response. I guess I am leaving them but I just do t want proton - they give me the ick of wannabe big tech.
I just want a drive, calendar and email that is private.
Posteo seems like the only good option there… Sadly they don’t allow custom domains because of some hand-wavy “privacy” crap that boils down mostly to vendor lock-in like tuta.
There is a new belgian co-op company Nubo trying to break into the market, but they are tiny and running a nextcloud instance on-prem for storage. Performance is likely to not be great.
I’ve been using Startmail for a while now. I’m not sure if it has a drive function because I never looked for that, but it does let you create an unlimited number of semipermanent and temporary ‘alias’ email addresses, and you can use a custom domain, if you set one up
Apparently Tuta sucks, which really sucks as I was halfway through migrating my email to them. Now I have to start over with Posteo and wait for them to do something stupid
TIL about tuta, aside from my shitty experience with their mobile app now.
Give it 5 years and that shiny will ware off. That’s the damn problem. Nothing last forever and everything goes to shit eventually.
At some point you just gotta settle for the devil you know.
If you still have the energy to most posteo is fantastic from what I have heard tho.
I’m just tired man, I just want to stop having to think about politics in my fucking email.
Does posteo support custom domains yet?
No and they don’t plan on it, as far as I know.
Ok yeah, and I understand why that is. I just need a custom domain or I’d be right there.
If all you need is solid email hosting, I can vouch for Migadu. I’ve been using them for years with my own domains. Been perfectly reliable at reasonable costs.
+1 They’re great and their customer support is the best I’ve ever used, since it just connects you to their engineers.
istg these imbeciles are going to get me to self host my own email server.
white hairs here i fucking come.
Damn, this mofo still has hair
I’m looking to migrate to Tuta.
Tuta
I just did. My only slight annoyance is their desktop app doesn’t import old mail the way I’d like it to. The rest of the switch- domain DNS on my own domain name, etc- less than 15 minutes. Completely painless.
I’ve done that and learned a lot. Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail) won’t accept your email without paying them, or forwarding through someone who does (proton?).
i’m surprisingly ok with microslop not accepting my email actually
Thanks for making me realize that I literally don’t even need to be able to deliver to MS and I can just use my mailserver 😭
As am I. i don’t forward through anyone. All working well, but the learning process did, as you alluded to, give me white hairs.
noted, thank you.
while we’re here, any other tips i should keep in mind? what’s your stack (if you don’t mind sharing)?
Postfix, Dovecot, MySQL (MariaDB), postgrey, spamassasin.
Tips:
- once you get it running, keep close control and be prepared to shut down when the spam hounds find you.
- Do set up dmarc, dkim, and spf
- Put your server on spamhaus.org
- Don’t start if you’re feeling lazy, this will take a lot of mental attention.
I did mine before LLM’s, so I can’t comment how useful this will be, but I worry one might not understand the decisions made.
Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail) won’t accept your email without paying them, or forwarding through someone who does
That’s absolutely not true. They sometimes bork some messages and signatures internally, but aside from that, delivery to MS stuff (and that includes a lot of business behind their “outlook protection” service) has been fine for years.
And, contrary to old beliefs, it has been mostly fine all around. Just properly setup DKIM, your DMARC and SPF records, and don’t actually send spam. The worst that could happen is if you’re trying to send through some residential IP, as large blocks can occasionally get blocked. But a cheap hosting anywhere (even in a spamfarm-ridden provider) is very likely to work fine.
Lol no
Maybe if you’ve got a 10 year old domain that’s been actively sending legit email everyday or something, but my email from my server goes straight to spam on outlook. Literally everywhere else is fine.
// yes my dmarc, dkim and spf are fine. No I’m not on any blocklists. No my IP is not a residential IP lol. The domain and server just turned 1 year old last week :]
Well, I must have imagined all the traffic being fine going out from an OVH server all this time then /shrug
Listen, I’m happy for you that your setup works, truly. I’m absolutely not trying to imply that it isn’t. It’s simply just not “fine all around”. It’s fine for you.
I just looked and they’ve blocked the whole IP range from the VPS provider (digital ocean in this case). I assume many vps’ have the same issue.
Sent a few messages to them so here’s hoping.
I’m sending through a vps and have properly set up all the things (dmarc, dkim, spf, et al).
It was years ago when I set up, but I spent some time trying to get the mail to go through (wife uses Hotmail). The rabbit hole led me to a service I could purchase that would allow the mail to go through. Many fora articles paralleled my own experiences.
I don’t send spam, and my “reputation” is good. I’ll look into it again.
I’m sorry, WHAT??? I use Proton!!! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DESTROY THEM, NOT JOIN THEM!
I truly hope we’re being overly dramatic here because Proton has been a good service for me. I do not feel like moving everything to another service. At least I have my own domains, though.
I believe they stopped being the good guys a while ago.
Yeah, Tuta are the good guys now.
For you know 5 or so years then also go to shit.
Like why can’t a company just decide to stay the good guys for like any real amount of time ;-;
Proton have been cunts for a long time my friend…
I’ve had my Proton for not even one year, & turns out they’re evil, same with Bluesky, I’ll move away, sometime, whenever I get the morale, it’s annoying, having to delete more old accounts, finding more even obscurer alternatives, the moving process as a whole is daunting, but I’ll keep going, because if I stop, how will I expect tomorrow to be different from today if I can’t bother to make change myself?
Keep fighting the good fight, my friend.
I host my own email on my own domain, and I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble.
Alas, when a company gets big it gets evil.
I’m prepared this time around, I use Protonmail with a custom domain, I’m ready to easily switch.
For the other stuff (Drive, Docs, Sheets, …) , I’m selfhosting.
Let me know how this goes…
I am also using my own custom domain, but I’m handling the aliases via simple login which I believe is also a product of proton.
Not sure how one migrates that layer as well…
Only manually.
I didn’t use that feature mainly to avoid this problem.
I used an email for each service (xyz-amazon@mydomain, xyz-ebay@mydomain,… Etc) and set up catch-all email for them. I was using the xyz+Amazon trick before, but some services don’t allow it, so I switched do dashes.
Just gotta migrate it manually, I suppose.
addy.io ftw
