kadu

a justifiable explanation for why the licensing exists in the first place.

“because people doing it wrong would make it look bad” is a terrible reason. I’m fairly certain I can buy an OLED TV and mess with the settings and make the picture look horrendous - time to create a restrictive license on who gets to buy TVs?

Users paying for the Unlimited or even the lifetime subscriptions, that were sold under the promise of all access to their services, now need an extra subscription to use their new LLM chat box, Lumo. Which is just a very bad wrapper around Mistral, messing up simple tasks like properly rendering Markdown for mathematical formulas.

Linux users, despite being a very important part of their user base, have zero official tools for Proton Drive syncing. No problem, because Proton Drive supports Rclone, right? Well, support was removed for no good reason and with no official explanation, leaving Linux users limited to the very problematic and slow web UI.

Proton Mail users frequently have their accounts locked for no reason whatsoever, other than vague statements about the ToS.

More examples needed?

Fair enough, I can’t prove that it would be different so my argument isn’t a hard argument at all.

But personally, I do strongly suspect Proton’s reaction would be very different, or at least very variable. If you look at their subreddit, half of the time people report they do an amazing job and help them… and half of the time they do incredibly user hostile things. A coin toss, basically.

Everything related to privacy and security requires as a fundamental premise that you select your threat model. Who are you? What data do you want to protect? From whom, and how bad would it be to fail?

Most people skip this step, and then keep acting either surprised or over/under reacting to any given news. There are people out there that can’t use email - regardless of who hosts what. There are people out there that would be fine with Gmail.

They were temporarily suspended, and reinstated after investigation.

Would this sequence of events have happenned if it was an average joe nobody cared about, rather than a public outcry?

There are ways you can both make your emails adhere to certain standards that make them look better and “warm” your account so Gmail and Outlook decide to trust it.

I won’t directly mention how in this thread because SEO agencies LOVE abusing this to self host massive link building spam networks to save a buck on buying Gsuite accounts, but it’s indeed possible.

I was happy with Proton. Until I was not. Tuta might be fine today… what happens in two years?

For email, honestly, it’s a major fucking pain in the ass, but simply buy your own domain and learn how to host it in an agnostic way you can migrate if needed. But just to emphasize: yes, self hosting email sucks tremendously, I know.

Advertising has no place period.

One of the single greatest tragedies of modern life is that we accepted ads invading our personal and public spaces. Going outside for a walk and having to see a large outdoor, literally an advert on the sky, should be a crime against humanity.

Of course they are. Coincidentally, newer devices being bought in 2025 are increasingly shipping with fully locked UEFI that prevents you from installing anything but Windows.

They’re not limiting it because they’re worried about performance or drivers.

They’re limiting it because they want to force people into SecureBoot, TPM, and CPUs with several remote control management firmware, because this way they’re one stop closer to a fully closed down chain from boot to OS which allows for aggressive DRM and no escape from their ecosystem. Just like at how iOS works and the path Android has been going for the last five years.

The fact the PC ecosystem is open is a left over from the origins in the era before capitalism realized that trapping people into their digital landscapes was profitable, and they have been trying everything to make this go away. Microsoft’s wet dream is your PC becoming the same as your smart TV: a data harvesting, ad filled generic piece of hardware that can only display what they want you to see.

I found an old ipod 6th gen at a thrift store. Threw linux on it, and its such an easy device to work with.

They are amazing indeed, I just avoid them because everything from finding an used one to parts is 10x the price in my country, so I’d end up settling for a beat up unit with a bad battery and no real funds to upgrade it. But where this is not the case, they feel great in the hand and just work.

What kind of mp3 player did you get?

The first one I bought was an Innioasis Y1 - an iPod Classic clone. Super thin, USB-C, a simple OS that can be changed for Rockbox if you so desire, and a functional click wheel. Sounded good, synced just fine with the computer, and was nice and compact. But the screen is very very fragile, changing the SD card requires opening the unit and it never closes the same again, and behind the scenes it’s just a simple Mediatek Android phone without a modem. Tip for anybody buying this one: there’s a very hard to remove screen protector that makes the screen look very grainy… do NOT remove it even if you’re tempted to, the plastic behind the protector is the softest plastic I’ve ever seen and it will scratch if you look at it wrong.

I then tried the Snowsky Echo Mini, which has no click wheel so navigation is harder, but uses an even simpler and directly to the point OS, easy to swap microSD, super nice retro design, a leather case, and two very high quality DACs with both regular and balanced output. Sounds really good, on both headphones and speakers, so I kept this one and it’s my current daily driver.

Not an iPod (because you need to mod in a new battery, new connector, patch the firmware, play the lottery with local market places, etc)

But I’m back to a dedicated MP3 player with a headphone jack, SD card slot, FLAC files, and it beats streaming every single time.

I tested two modern (and cheap) models, picked my favorite, and found my favorite combo to acquire and sync music. After these initial days of getting everything setup… The experience is frictionless. Music sounds great, battery lasts forever.

LLMs are filtered and trained in a way that benefits their creators. But even if they weren’t, which they are, they’re being trained on hugely biased datasets like Reddit.

So yeah, never trust any LLM for anything.

I wish the left was 1% as active and mobilized as the right claims it is.

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