You’d be surprised at how many people on Lemmy have decided Proton is lying to people and secretly sharing all your data with US authorities because of the handful of times they have been ordered to by law hand over metadata that does not include the content of their data.
These people then say to ditch Proton and use Tutanota instead as if they they somehow won’t be compelled to do the exact same thing.
I have never bought into the Proton hate seen on Lemmy, as most if not all of it came from a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology works. And if anything, this report confirms that the employees inside Proton really do seem to care about the product.
But ultimately, if the CEO is this hostile internally, those employees will leave and the product will just enshittify at an exponential rate. This is actually some very damning insight into the future of Proton.
Proton has a couple competitors that are viable to switch to, if not somewhat half baked next to Proton. But it’s important to understand for the people who have been berating Proton for handing over metadata to authorities and similar things, that Tutanota and other competitors will have all the same problems. Tuta is based in Germany which is a member of 14 eyes, and will if anything be more susceptible to the whims of the US government than Proton was.
As an American, who is entirely against the current administrations hostile behavior towards its allies, I’m glad that this debacle has at least spurred other nations to into separating themselves from America’s BigTech grasp. GDPR was only ever going to be a half measure as long as foreign governments continued to rely on American controlled infrastructure, and American made software and cloud services.
This is the kind of thing that should happen regardless of the temperature of diplomatic relations with the U.S.
From the article (And OPs title)
“there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth.”
Mine got past that phase and now we’re in the being selective about who gets the AI subscription, and lowering token budgets phase.
It was expensive, sure. But not entirely nonviable across the board like we see today with AI. It’s not even close.
Those “Big companies that could afford to negotiate Bandwidth prices” don’t even exist in the AI context of today. They’re still speculative. If the bubble pops before that speculative future comes to fruition, the development of the technology towards that end stops.
The companies operating frontier models and AI as a viable technology on the scale it exists today are inseparable. If the big players died tomorrow you’d still have that vastly inferior local model that would be good enough for light work for awhile, but without all the eye-popping amounts of money to continue training and scraping data on unprecedented scale, its usefulness would fade over time. Most companies today would not feasibly be able to host and train their own models to be used in the ways they use frontier models today.
LLMs would still exist as a niche solution for some things but what AI fundamentally is, and how it could be used would be entirely different in very short order.
Depending on when the bubble bursts, It would effectively be. AI needs this continuous terminal upwards velocity of investment with no profit to show for it in order to keep improving despite the diminishing returns we’ve been seeing. It’s viability as a long term technology is uniquely dependent on it reaching a state of efficiency or otherwise capability that doesn’t yet exist.
I really wonder why it is that the pro-ai fanatics are so sure it will stick around just as it is today without anyway to actually pay for it.
Websites aren’t also incredibly resource heavy money holes with no proven path to viable profitability.
What use AI has doesn’t matter if it’s untenable to continue to operate long term. Whether or not AI is here to stay is entirely reliant on its ability to turn a profit.
Holy shit computer hardware road pirates in the year of our lord 2026. What a wacky world we live in
Actually what’s funny is now that companies are using Active Directory and on prem infrastructure like file servers and whatnot less and less, I’ve seen a big resurgence in MacBooks in the enterprise space.
You need a DMARC policy, and then dkim or and spf record set up. Without these a lot of email providers will just assume your emails are spam.
As an American I have no doubt that our relationship with our allies will improve once we restore some sanity to the White House, but we’ve forced our allies to diversify their trade to brunt the impact of our tariffs and now that they’ve done so I don’t see any sane reason why they would undo that.
Andy Yen’s political afilliations are one thing, but this does indicate an imminent decline in the function of the product.