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.
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.
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.
Mine isn’t currently, but I’m working on it. The main complexity is that my wife and I share some passwords, and I want to make sure I do it properly so that transition is as smooth as possible. Vaultwarden is what you’d use to self-host.
But as others have said, I’m really not worried about it. Passwords are cached locally and only touch the server when syncing to the server. I want to self-host to protect against breaches, not because I’m worried about connectivity loss.
You can always backup your passwords (there’s an export feature) if you’re worried about it. I haven’t done it, but I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to have a KeePass backup or something that you update manually every so often.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
