A friend of mine and I have gotten used to using it during our conversations. We do fast fact-checking or find a good first opinion regarding silly topics. We often find it faster than digging through search-engine results and interpreting scattered information. We have used it for thought experiments, intuitive or ELI5 explanations of topics that we don’t really know about, finding peer-reviewed sources for whatever it is that we’re interested in, or asking questions that operationalizing into effective search engine prompts would be harder than asking with natural language. We always always ask for citations and links, so that we can discard hallucinations.

This was posted in “nonpolitical_memes”, but how is this not political? The definition of politics can depend, but let’s take it to be something like “deciding how political goods will be allocated”. Deciding how resources will be allocated is political. Evaluating how resources are allocated is political. The fact that someone considers something evidently political as not political is political (search for “depoliticization” online).

What does politics mean to you? What do you understand by depoliticization?

It seems like you’re passionate about emojis

Ok, so I just read upon Proton AG, the company behind Proton, and they don’t seem to owe investors money, because it was originally crowdfunded and now it finances itself with subscriptions. That sounds great! It is quite different to surveillance capitalism and enshittification (given that enshittification requires advertisers).

I am not advertising for Proton, by the way. To make that clear, I still wouldn’t use them because they seem to have very limited VPN functionality in their Linux clients. As a Linux user, I wouldn’t want that. However, if they fix that in the future, I could consider switching.

Edit: Similarly, I found this website https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/company-profile/tutao-gmbh summarizing its evaluation of Tutanota as ethical. It takes into consideration its ownership structure. Unfortunately, I cannot find details because there is a paywall for the information, but it could be the case that Tutanota does not owe money to investors and therefore is not seeking to maximize profits but rather provide a good service while compensating fairly its workers. I wish I could have more evidence.

I like that, if I only need mail with 20gb of storage, Tutanota is cheaper.

I don’t know what to do. I’ll have to think a bit longer.

Hence my question :) If there are investors waiting for returns, you bet (and, like, actually, you do in fact bet) they will get more expensive. If it’s a social enterprise, I wouldn’t worry as much.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply!

I have also chatted with Tutanota workers and I didn’t have the impression that they were not driven. In fact, I think about myself: if I was a good enough developer, experienced with their stack, I’d love to work with them just for what they stand up for regarding privacy and openness. It seems like a very gratifying way of spending my time.

As to the closed platforms, I totally agree with your criticism in purely abstract terms; I don’t like that I need to rely on Tutanota for encrypted email instead of a federated system like XMPP or Matrix. However, Matrix has been an aspirational platform in which only my closest friends, and the wokest or tech-savvy acquaintances join. For a good chunk of my daily life, if I want libre, metadata-reduced, and encrypted communication, I have to rely on Tutanota’s closed email system.

Do you think there’s a way of extending email (rather than “reinventing the wheel”) that’s also as simple as “give me your email and let’s agree on a password”?

I was thinking about incentives and motivations. Are they motivated by profits?

I was also thinking about how sometimes listening to everyone in a team can save them from failure. Do Proton and Tutanota listen to everyone?

Not necessarily :)

What VPN providers do you approve of?

What VPN providers do you approve of?

Thanks for the recommendation. I wonder if you’re confusing the DuckDuckGo browser with the DuckDuckGo search engine. I am assuming the post is about the search engine 🙃

What

Seeing this post again made me think, apart from my previous reply, about something else.

I think your “popularity of software” argument is great because it probably holds true, in that an investment in finding an exploit has larger returns if the exploitable software is widely used. But rather than thinking in terms of apps, we could think in terms of operating systems. What if the vector of infection is not an app and rather is an OS? This is perfectly possible and there are massive incentives to find such exploits since this is not app-dependent.

This means that merely using iOS or Android in any capacity (either through Lineage OS or perhaps even Replicant) could be enough for infection. And so far, not knowing what the vectors of infection are for Pegasus, this is perfectly possible.

Perhaps using Linux OS is a good idea, given it’s not as popular.