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.
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.
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.
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”.
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
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
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Wow proton give it at least a decade before you start to enshit… Oh wait. Right on schedule it seems. Unfortunate.
We need to ensure you’re compliant with the competency solvent credibility chipper, place your nostrils around the ice pick blades.
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.
