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That’s refreshing to see in a world of ever increasing enshittification. Wish more companies move in this direction.
Yeah, kinda makes you wonder as to why proton is adding A.I. features though.
I think it might be because AI (aka LLMs) is genuinely useful when used properly.
I use AI all the time to write emails. I give the LLM the email thread along with instructions like “I can’t make it Tuesday ask if they can do Wednesday at 2pm”
The AI will write out an email that’s polite and relevant in context. Totally worth it.
I think the problem is people/companies trying to shove LLMs where they don’t make sense.
I am not a fan of this. I see it all the time at work and it’s very obvious when someone has chatGPT write an email for them (it’s always such a sterile and yet overcomplicated writing style). If it’s a direct email to me, I tend to feel insulted that they couldn’t be bothered to write those 4 paragraphs themselves - it would have taken them 2 mins. There is a definite human disconnect going on in society at the moment, and its worrying.
I agree. I actually think it’s a net negative as well for friendships. As in the case of OP, I would rather get an original email from the sender saying they couldn’t make it, so let’s meet the next day, but instead I have to read thru several paragraphs of boilerplate and AI crap instead, which wastes my time, and I know the sender did it, so I’m mad at them for being impersonal. At some point, we’re just going to have people’s AI responding to each other without any person actually reading it.
We’re only doing this because every company doesn’t want to be left behind so they go all in. It feels like Ian Malcolm said it best in Jurassic Park
“Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should”
In bureaucratic situations, you’re expected to have a bunch of polite boilerplate. Or at least that’s how my dad keeps telling me to write emails.
Which it seems you’re missing the point of.
what does this mean lol
I can understand that. I don’t actually use chatGPT to be fair. I use a locally run open source LLM. This all being said I do think it’s important to fine tune any LLM you use to match your writing style. Else you end up with chatGPT generic style writing.
I would argue that not fine tuning a LLM to match tone and style counts as either misuse or hobbyist use.
I use a locally run open source LLM.
How? GPT4All + Llama or something else? I just started dipping my toe in locally run open source LLM.
not fine tuning a LLM to match tone and style counts as either misuse or hobbyist use
You’ve hit the nail on the head with this one. I think the other commenters are right, that a lot of people will misuse the tool, but nonetheless it is an issue with the users, not the tool itself.
My main workstation runs Linux and I use Llama.cpp. I used it with mistral’s latest largest model but I have used others in the past.
I appreciate your thoughts here. Lemmy I think, in general, has an indistinguishing anti LLM bias.
Agreed. People are so bad at writing that they struggle to put a few sentences together for an email. Even their prompts lack clear instructions /message. It’s astounding when you think about it for a minute.
Why not just write “I can’t make it Tuesday, can you do Wednesday at 2pm?”
Otherwise we just end up in this world.
You’re not wrong but at least my emails will be taken seriously by some 60 year old company exec that’s still mad his secretary stopped printing his emails for him.
You’re trying to please a boomer that’s still angry that email exists in the first place.
In some cases literally yes. But at least for me I have to meet my customers where they are. If I try to force them to do things my way they just don’t use my services.
Then just write that.
I don’t understand why we’re having AIs verboseify simple information?
Why do many word if few word do trick.
How long until we start using LLMs to summarize messages over-verbalized by LLMs?
And offloading the accounting for context WILL bite you in the ass. If you can’t remember what a discussion was about and what needs considering, you’re no longer doing the thinking.
Because in my experience some business clients feel offended or upset that you aren’t being formal with them. American businesses seem to care less I noticed but outside of the USA (particularly in Germany) I noticed that formality serves better. Also the LLM uses the thread history to add context. Stuff like “I know we agreed on meeting on Tuesday at last meeting but unfortunately I can’t do that…” this stuff matters to clients.
I don’t offload because I don’t remember. I offload because it saves me time. Of course I read what is written before I send it out.
Being formal and considerate does not require being that much more verbose.
Do you really save time running messages through an LLM vs just writing them as you think of what to say?
It’s the equivalent of when I got assigned papers with minimum word counts as a kid. Despite the fact that the prompt doesn’t warrant 5000 words and it would take massive deviation off of the prompt to get anywhere close to it, people have this weird impression that more words shows more “care” than just communicating clearly. I struggled a lot with a lot of assignments (to the point of not turning some in) because all the filler they’d need to reach the word counts hurt my soul lol.
(I do tend to prefer 500+ page books, but it’s because the authors I engage with the most use that space to build out better plots or develop better characters or whatever. It’s not padded out.)
Is it?
I once told a teacher I’d write ten times the number of required words as long as I could pick a subject that actually warranted it. And I followed through.
The rare times I got prompts that were actually good, I would run out of paper on which to express everything I wanted expressed. (Yes, I’ve done writing assignments writing by hand.)
Outside academia no-one is enforcing a word-count. Which means you can just write good prose. Using a lot of words to say very little, is not good prose.
Unless you’re dealing with people that don’t actually read what you write and instead just look at net weight of the word-salad you threw at them, the content of the text is what matters.
Who takes offence at only a single paragraph, if it addresses their every concern and insecurity, and they are left feeling seen as they reach the final word?
Only people who don’t actually read things, or have no reading comprehension, needing the same thing said three time in different ways in one message.
Also, teachers are typically smart enough to probably themselves understand the word-count problem. Which is why I was able to make deals with many of my teachers to change the assignments given such that writing something good was actually possible.
Hence why it’s not the same. The people you are talking about aren’t worth the effort of dealing with. A writing teacher that gives you high marks for saying nothing with a lot of words, is not a good writing teacher.
The LLM responses are more verbose but not a crazy amount so. It’s mostly adding polite social padding that some people appreciate.
As for time totally. It’s faster to write “can’t go to meeting, suggest rescheduling it for Thursday.” And proofread than to write a full boomer style letter.
I feel like we might write at very different WPMs. For me, proofreading and fixing AI slop takes longer than just writing things myself.
And another difference might be that to me and everyone I work with, writing in full on “boomer” is considered an insulting waste of everyone’s time.
Which it is.
Abs Japan. Oh my.
Non-profit doesn’t mean that no one makes money. But it does mean they pay less taxes. If the C suite is full of funders, you can pay them in bonuses.
https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages-of-1-million-or-more
It does mean that there are no shareholders and you have to be “limited in powers”.
This was a disappointing realisation about "Open"AI.
They have two divisions and only one is “open”
Maybe to keep pace with trends, and be able to put a check in that box amongst competitors
I’m happy to see this announcement. However, just transitioning to a non-profit does not make an organization good. They can still be greedy and take advantage of their user base. That being said, it seems Proton’s mission statement resonates with a non-profit type structure. When you are accountable to the shareholders, they become the priority.
“don’t let perfect get in the way of good” or whatever that saying is. One step at a time, yeah?
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
Bad, also, is the enemy of good…
I think maybe good walked into the wrong damn neighborhood.
Generally you’d want to strive for perfection, but not go crazy over it and mantain a balance in all things, risk vs. benefit, that sort of thing, hence the saying
If I remember right, OpenAi started with this model too, and they do lots of shady stuff. Not that this is the plan for Proton, but I completely agree that simply creating a nonprofit that owns the for profit brand doesn’t guarantee good behavior.
Yes Mozilla is a good example. They’re run like any other Silicon Valley company and spend more in C-suite develop their damn product.
Bad example. There are plenty of non-profit FOSS services that do well and serve the community.
This is what made me finally completely switch my email and docs to proton. I’m so close to being able to delete my google account now.
Well this and the docs live collaboration feature they recently added.
Switched mail and I’ll switch VPN once my old sub expires.
I thought it’ll take many more years until the acquired Standard Notes
90 a year though? That’s taking the piss. Notesnook has all their features and more for 49.99 And that’s on top of Proton’s main fee. That’s one option I won’t be taking.
Is this the standalone annual price? I see 120$/y for all of proton’s premium products
That 90 for Standard Notes is on top of the plan you are on. 90 per year for somethings that is available elsewhere for half that is a non starter for me. I’m on unlimited now, not putting another 90 onto it.
Oh I wasn’t advocating for getting anything else besides proton unlimited. There’s only Docs now but I’m guessing more products will get integrated soon
Ya know, you may have just helped me finally make the full switch. Thank you
I wish it worked in the (iOS) app or had its own. A browser only experience isn’t good enough for me to use it.
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Cool. I switched to Tuta because it fits my use case better (2 domains, one for my personal email and one for everything else). I don’t need any of the bells and whistles Proton has, and I also don’t want to pay extra to get more domains. The Tuta app kinda sucks, but it gets the job done. I’m hoping my wife and kids will be interested in private email, but they don’t seem to care, and I don’t think they’d like the tradeoffs.
Now, if Proton revises their tiers, I might be interested. Give me something like the Tuta tiers, and I’ll probably switch to it. I prefer the UX of Proton, but $10/month is a bit steep for me, especially since I’m not going to use the other stuff they’re bundling in (I use Bitwarden for PW manager, have my own NAS, and I prefer Mullvad over Proton for VPN).
That said, it’s super cool that they’re going non-profit. When that’s done, I’ll give it another look.
They also have mail-only tier at 4.99.
Yup, but only one custom domain. I really want at least two domains, one with tons of aliases for various accounts, and the other for personal communications. I could use a proton.me address for it, but then it becomes a huge pain to switch to another service should I need to.
Does that include the IMAP bridge and multiple addresses?
I don’t know, you’ll have to check yourself. Multiple addresses yes, though, 10 of them.
Problem with Tuta for me is its too closed off.
Proton at least offers an IMAP bridge, Tuta utterly refuses to let you use your email outside their apps, which makes it more of a messaging app. And the fact there’s no way to export everything easily or even forward messages rubs me the wrong way. I tried them and have been using them for about 2 years but I’d definitely love to get away from it.
I’m tired of these walled gardens. I don’t give a damn how secure it is, if I can’t leave it with my shit, then no thanks.
Yeah, it’s annoying, but I honestly don’t use any email clients anyway. So whether I use the Tuta or Proton app/website is essentially the same for me.
But you can export your email (select all then click “Download”), but unfortunately forwarding isn’t a thing. That does put a bit of a wrinkle into my longer-term use of it, so if Proton can become price-competitive for my use-case (and no, I’m not paying $10/month for email), I’ll probably switch. But since I can export them in some way, it’s not a deal breaker.
You say you use Bitwarden. Is that self hosted by any chance? If so, how do you handle the potential for an outage or server failure, where you’d presumably need some of the passwords to fix the problem in the first place.
The Bitwarden client has all the data cached, so the server can be down and you still get access to the passwords (same for internet connection).
Thanks for the reply! That makes sense. I’m still weary of the client somehow losing the cache while the server is down (two holes in the Swiss cheese lining up) but that is overly paranoid I know that
You should definitely be! I take backups every 6h for my self hosted vaultwarden (easier to manage and to backup, but not official, YMMV). You can also restore each backup automatically and have a “second service” you can run elsewhere (a standby basically), which will also ensure the backup works fine.
I have been running bit/vaultwarden now for I think 6 years, for my whole family and I have never needed to do anything, despite having had a few hiccups with the server.
Don’t take my word for it, but the clients (browser plugin, desktop app, mobile app) are designed to keep data locally I think. So the term cache might be misleading here because it suggests some temporary storage used just to save web requests, with a relatively quick expiration. In this case I think the plugin etc. can work potentially indefinitely without server - something to double-check, but I believe it’s the design.
Yes, I figured the word “cache” was used loosely in this case. But you know, the server is down and/or irrecoverable for a while, and then one’s phone gets swiped. Not inconceivable. So I think I’ll follow some of the advice here about a backup service or password stash
I also self host vault warden, it’s pretty straight forward. Like the other person said, it caches locally.
Thanks!
The local cache solves this problem mainly. Mine also replicates to one of my other servers occasionally.
How do you set up local caching? For non-phones?
Edit: TIL there are windows, Mac, and Linux apps for it. Sheesh.
Yep, the browser extensions also have an encrypted cache, although it is less consistent imo. I’ve had times where my server was down and the extension just completely logged out then couldn’t authenticate so I couldn’t access the cache.
There is a setting now (in all types of client I think) to log out when you close down the browser. Your comment makes me realize that I probably want to NOT set that on at least one machine. I set that on the machines that are out and about.
Also TIL about the browser extensions!
