self

yep! that’s the game they’re playing. I really don’t give a fuck about Proton’s relatively tiny number of enterprise whales, but they make Proton a shitload of money in the short term.

the depressing part is, historically, online services that remain uncompromisingly user-focused tend to stick around roughly forever, while the ones that chase short-term gains and compromise everything else almost always enshittify and fizzle out pretty quick.

(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)

don’t feel bad for making the best choice you could with the information of the past. until we get a workable, interoperable, federated, encrypted communication/online services platform, the choice was to recommend one of the centralized e2e providers. we both chose to recommend Proton and they did this shit, but it could have just as easily been tutanota.

now my brain’s going “e2e encrypted federated email but it preferably uses activitypub as a transport and classic email as a fallback, is that anything”

I’ve posted at Proton on Mastodon about this with some details on why it’s real bad; no reply yet

Proton, who I use for mail and various other services, has gone against the wishes of the majority of their userbase as measured by their own survey and implemented an LLM writing assistant in protonmail, which is a real laugh given Proton’s main hook is its services are end-to-end encrypted

(supposedly this piece of shit will run locally if you meet these incredibly high system requirements including a high end GPU or recent, high end Apple M chipset and a privacy-violating Chromium-based browser. otherwise it breaks e2e by sending your emails unencrypted to Proton’s servers, and they do a lot to try to talk over that fact)

the example I was thinking of was the incredibly ill-conceived rejected patchset to implement d-bus inside the kernel but I don’t think they’ve really stopped trying since then

surprising absolutely nobody who’s been paying attention, Fedora has signaled its intent to use generative AI and an LLM in its packaging software

and I wouldn’t give a fuck what IBM’s pet distro does, but Red Hat’s developers have a high amount of control over what ends up in the userland… and bootloader… and pretty much every part of the system but the kernel cause they got told to fuck off, of every Linux distro but the obscure ones

speaking of technofascism, we’re at the stage where supposed Democrat billionaires like the Andreesen Horowitz fuckers suddenly come out in support of Trump:

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, says he’s been a Democrat most of his life. He says he has endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

However, he says he’s no longer loyal to the Democratic Party. In the 2024 presidential race, he is supporting and voting for former President Donald Trump. The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech, specifically for the startup ecosystem.

none of this should be surprising, but it should be called out every time it happens, and we’re gonna see it happen a lot in the days ahead. these fuckers finally feel secure in taking their masks off, and that’s not good.

awesome! these are going straight to the list of things I should be reading

nah all good! our writing community isn’t meant to be containment, it’s just a different category with different expectations (mainly that feedback should be constructive, since MoreWrite is for writers posting their own work)

I’ve never watched the show or owned any of the toys (we have gobots at home and they’re the knockoffs you can’t figure out how to transform, and when you finally do a piece breaks off) but the theme song from the commercial’s been stuck in my head for 23 hours

I have an extremely rough draft up on our writing community MoreWrite: here it is. it very much deserves to be restructured and expanded; I wrote this first draft in a hurry, and since then I’ve both gotten some very solid recommendations for prior work in the area to read and cite from @dgerard@awful.systems and I’ve experienced more instances where technofascist methods were used to take control over open source projects away from their communities.

I really should write more about technofascism while I still have electricity, clean water, a relatively unfractured global information network, and there aren’t too many gunshots outside