kadu

a justifiable explanation for why the licensing exists in the first place.

“because people doing it wrong would make it look bad” is a terrible reason. I’m fairly certain I can buy an OLED TV and mess with the settings and make the picture look horrendous - time to create a restrictive license on who gets to buy TVs?

Users paying for the Unlimited or even the lifetime subscriptions, that were sold under the promise of all access to their services, now need an extra subscription to use their new LLM chat box, Lumo. Which is just a very bad wrapper around Mistral, messing up simple tasks like properly rendering Markdown for mathematical formulas.

Linux users, despite being a very important part of their user base, have zero official tools for Proton Drive syncing. No problem, because Proton Drive supports Rclone, right? Well, support was removed for no good reason and with no official explanation, leaving Linux users limited to the very problematic and slow web UI.

Proton Mail users frequently have their accounts locked for no reason whatsoever, other than vague statements about the ToS.

More examples needed?

Fair enough, I can’t prove that it would be different so my argument isn’t a hard argument at all.

But personally, I do strongly suspect Proton’s reaction would be very different, or at least very variable. If you look at their subreddit, half of the time people report they do an amazing job and help them… and half of the time they do incredibly user hostile things. A coin toss, basically.

Everything related to privacy and security requires as a fundamental premise that you select your threat model. Who are you? What data do you want to protect? From whom, and how bad would it be to fail?

Most people skip this step, and then keep acting either surprised or over/under reacting to any given news. There are people out there that can’t use email - regardless of who hosts what. There are people out there that would be fine with Gmail.

They were temporarily suspended, and reinstated after investigation.

Would this sequence of events have happenned if it was an average joe nobody cared about, rather than a public outcry?

There are ways you can both make your emails adhere to certain standards that make them look better and “warm” your account so Gmail and Outlook decide to trust it.

I won’t directly mention how in this thread because SEO agencies LOVE abusing this to self host massive link building spam networks to save a buck on buying Gsuite accounts, but it’s indeed possible.

I was happy with Proton. Until I was not. Tuta might be fine today… what happens in two years?

For email, honestly, it’s a major fucking pain in the ass, but simply buy your own domain and learn how to host it in an agnostic way you can migrate if needed. But just to emphasize: yes, self hosting email sucks tremendously, I know.

Advertising has no place period.

One of the single greatest tragedies of modern life is that we accepted ads invading our personal and public spaces. Going outside for a walk and having to see a large outdoor, literally an advert on the sky, should be a crime against humanity.

Of course they are. Coincidentally, newer devices being bought in 2025 are increasingly shipping with fully locked UEFI that prevents you from installing anything but Windows.

They’re not limiting it because they’re worried about performance or drivers.

They’re limiting it because they want to force people into SecureBoot, TPM, and CPUs with several remote control management firmware, because this way they’re one stop closer to a fully closed down chain from boot to OS which allows for aggressive DRM and no escape from their ecosystem. Just like at how iOS works and the path Android has been going for the last five years.

The fact the PC ecosystem is open is a left over from the origins in the era before capitalism realized that trapping people into their digital landscapes was profitable, and they have been trying everything to make this go away. Microsoft’s wet dream is your PC becoming the same as your smart TV: a data harvesting, ad filled generic piece of hardware that can only display what they want you to see.

deleted by creator

as long as certain jobs and tasks can be done easier, and searches can be done faster

I’m still waiting for somebody to prove any of these statements are true. And I say that as somebody working in a company that demands that several employees use AI - all I see is that they now take extra time manually fixing whatever bad output the LLM produced, and slowly losing their ability to communicate without first consulting ChatGPT, which is both slow and concerning.

Gemini will also attempt to provide you with a help line, though it’s very easy to talk your way through that. Lumo, Proton’s LLM, will straight up halt any conversation even remotely adjacent to topics like that.

That’s what people (and many articles about LLMs “learning how to bribe others” and similar) fail to understand about LLMs:

They do not understand their internal state. ChatGPT does not know it’s got a creator, an administrator, a relationship to OpenAI, an user, a system prompt. It only replies with the most likely answer based on the training set.

When it says “I’m sorry, my programming prevents me from replying that” you feel like it calculated an answer, then put it through some sort of built in filtering, then decided not to reply. That’s not the case. The training is carefully manipulated to make “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that” the perceived most likely answer to that query. As far as ChatGPT is concerned, “I can’t reply that” is the same as “cheese is made out of milk”, both are just words likely to be stringed together given the context.

So getting to your question: sure, you can make ChatGPT reply with the training’s set vision of “what’s the most likely order of words and tone a LLM would use if it roleplayed the user as some sort of owner” but that changes fundamentally nothing about the capabilities and limitations, except it will likely be even more sycophantic.

Users make abhorrent weird workarounds for that, like running a PC software that uses a free temporary developer license to re-license an app on your phone, that then uses that license to resign other apps ““automatically””

Haven’t really run into any issues with them

This has been changed if you’re lucky enough to have a recent Android version, but not long ago any gallery app sideloaded from external sources couldn’t be set as the system gallery, meaning managing pictures was really annoying because any changes required a pop up confirmation.

If Google is sad, I’m happy

The FSF (and RMS himself) wanted an alternative for online payments for ages, without crypto. An anonymous buffer layer between your payment method, like a credit card, and the vendor. I believe something was eventually released but it never took off, because unlike something like a NFC Wallet, vendors would have to natively support GNU’s version.

I wouldn’t mind not having a native Linux drive client if they didn’t block rsync, which used to work, and now does not. What a stupid decision.

Yep, it’s a great idea