A case study in CEO AI psychosis.
Some choice quotes:
In a Slack channel dedicated to thanking people for their work, Yen jumped in. “Get it fixed,” he wrote, referring to Proton’s Reddit post announcing the feature. “Now Reddit is pissed and we look worse than Tuta,” he added, referring to a Proton competitor. When employees explained to Yen the nuances of the encryption and why that was not immediately possible, Yen wrote, “I find this whole thing stupid. You cannot announce this in this way.”
another employee pushed Yen for specifics on ensuring that AI-generated code was free of security issues. “AI won’t magically solve our problems, because security is low in our prioritization at present,” the engineer said. Yen didn’t respond directly, and went on to insult one of the other employees in front of the entire channel. The employee “is saying his usual bs of we can do it but we will be even slower than we are today and I’m saying only losers think like that,” Yen wrote, adding that workers should prompt “better.”
Initially, using AI was banned inside Proton, but the company has since approved AI for all sorts of use cases internally, including processing financial data, drafting customer-facing responses on Reddit and LinkedIn, and writing code […] Ninety percent of code at Proton in October was written by AI, the company’s CTO Bart Butler said in a meeting, according to audio 404 Media obtained. Much of that code is written with Anthropic’s Claude, multiple employees told 404 Media. And Yen tells employees in Slack chats to use Claude, too.
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If they are really using AI to write security critical encryption code then I need to ditch them yesterday.
Just use gpg like our forefathers
We are pretty far away from non-interactive key exchange being secure from quantum computers. Gpg might just be fundamentally fucked in addition to being practically fucked.
Anyone know and recommend any good co-op or unionized workforce email, address proxy, and VPN providers?
I don’t know, but I’ll share my experience.
I had to set up a mail server for matapacos.dog, so I’ve ended up using it for this alias as well (and I can spin up a couple disposable accounts as needed). This has its ups and downs. The architecture of e-mail in general is very cursed, due to its age. I run a purpose-built distribution called Mail In A Box which handles the nasty details, but it requires a dedicated VPS, as well as a domain (which in my case piggy-backs from matapacos.dog).
The requirements for the VPS are low, but there is problem where a lot of VPSes either get hacked or purchased for spam, so the IP ranges typically have a poor reputation in spam detection services (though this can be mostly offset by domain maturity, setting up DMARC, etc).
For my personal email, I am in the process of leaving Gmail for Tutanota. I have mixed feelings about this already and can’t vouch for them with confidence. Tuta is obviously much better than having Google literally feed all my correspondence into building an ad-tech / surveillance profile, but they do the same thing as Proton where they’re very gimmicky about security and have severe NIH syndrome. For example, they do not provide (and have no plans to) POP3 or IMAP access, and they have a vendetta against PGP (in favor of their in-house crypto-system). Everything has to be done through their apps, whether through webmail, or the clients they provide.
The clients they provide are GPL3 licensed - you can get the Android app in F-Droid, for example, but this is still fucking stupid. I am currently looking into this third-party IMAP proxy, but I am not sold on it yet and would need to make some changes to the source code before deploying it. It seems too advanced for a project with only 3 reported issues. Almost certainly slop, though it lacks the most obvious tells.
tl;dr: I hope someone else has some better ideas.
Tutanota update: https://mas.to/@zzt/117526295436699436
lol. lmao. Fuck me I just subscribed yesterday.
The fact that the slop wave is becoming unavoidable also means that the slop wave will soon break and recede.
The only thing these companies have left is free samples.
Perhaps it’s time to emotionally divest from FOSS. For most people who lack the technical skills to contribute to AI-free projects, I think this is a “quietly step away from FOSS and pick up other hobbies or go touch grass until this whole LLM craze blows over if it hasn’t caused irreparable harm to FOSS” moment. Otherwise, it’s going to be repeated cycles of jumping onto the next thing that’s AI-free only to realize they changed their minds or they were never truly AI-free. I think at this point, at long as you’re not using proprietary software and aren’t using FOSS with maintainers suffering from AI psychosis, it should be good enough.
And do what exactly? Tell the people who are looking for alternatives to software and platforms owned by evil corporations to go fuck themselves?
I think at this point, at long as you’re not using proprietary software and aren’t using FOSS with maintainers suffering from AI psychosis, it should be good enough.
vendetta against PGP
Fair tbh.
Thanks. Getting into self-hosting, the advice about email is always a resounding “don’t.” Mail In A Box seems promising though and setting up a VPS with that and something like https://www.aliasvault.com/ could be cost effective for my family vs. paying a provider run by AI chuds who treat their employees like shit and could sell out at a moments notice. I really, really, really don’t want to have to resort to something like this though.
The consequences of email not working can just be really bad. And it can be entirely outside of your control.
The amount of official communications making their through email is often alarming to me
I hope this email finds you well. And doesn’t end up undelivered or in the spam folder.
I’m using Italian-based AirVPN for IP spoofing and torrenting (since they’re one of the few that still offer port fowarding). They’re having a Halloween sale right now on bulk orders and they allow paying with crypto and not needing an email.
For email I’m using posteo as their 4 GB plan is extremely cheap and they’re based in the EU. They have options like E2EE on emails if you use only their web interface and offer email aliases.
Ironically, Proton uses Claude and NOT Lumo (Mistral or Apertus)
Paywalled article.
