Slamming the “cute” button

The thing that pisses me off the most is that they are disingenuous almost to the point of lying in interpreting that survey’s results. They say that 75% of users are interested in GenAI, when actually what they asked is whether people have used any GenAI at all in the recent past. And that still doesn’t mean they want GenAI in Proton. That’s a pretty significant sleight of hand. The more relevant question would have been the first one on what service people want the most. In that case only 29% asked for a writing assistant, which is still not the same thing as a full LLM. The most likely answer to “how many Proton customers want an LLM in Proton Mail” seems to be “few”.

This is old drama at this point. I’ll repeat what’s been said the previous times this was posted.

Proton did what they were legally required to do in the jurisdiction where they operate as a legitimate business. As an encrypted email provider they offer privacy but not necessarily anonymity, and they’re open about that. They even have multiple blogposts about how to use their service more anonymously. If you thought that by using ProtonMail you were getting full anonymity that’s your mistake.

In both the cases mentioned the users made OpSec mistakes: not using a VPN in one and linking their personal Apple email as a recovery email in the other. In the first case Proton wasn’t even logging the user’s IP until the police forced them to.

I had high hopes when I tried it out but frankly it’s been almost unusable for me. Terrible performance, laggy UI, plenty of bugs, long loading times for songs…

I don’t know if something in my mobile environment was messing with it but I use quite a few indie FOSS apps still in beta and none of them worked as badly as Spotube did. I’d love to go back to it if it improves, but for now it’s just not worth the UX pain.

Edit: forgot to mention. The idea of sourcing tracks from YouTube is cool but causes loads od trouble in practice. I’ve found remixed versions streamed as the original, tracks with the intro from the music video, tracks with sound effects from the music video, and tracks that just cannot be streamed cause they aren’t on YouTube. I know there’s a feature to pick which version to stream, but it’s quite a bit of UX friction and it didn’t work often enough to be a showstopper.

Bold of an English speaker to accuse any other language of unpredictable spelling…

Funnily, Italian is almost completely phonemic, meaning it’s trivial to both spell and read words if you know the rules. English can only dream of that.