Proton Leadership Considered HarmfulWhen you can’t audit the code, you need to trust the source. I’ve entrusted Proton with my digital life since 2021. Today, that trust has been broken by CEO Andy Yen. From the 404 Media report Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning : Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it…

So Sam Altman is saying that RAM is wasted in personal computers and should be put in datacentres instead. What he's actually saying is "I want to rent my datacentres to you for all your computing needs." This allows him to control who gets to use his computers. It allows him to own all the stuff you do on his computers. This allows him to set the price for your computing. It allows him to control what the computers are allowed to do. It allows him to control the world. What an absolute fucking…

Not everyone has TikTok. Not everyone has Twitter (or X, or whatever we're calling it this week). Not everyone has Facebook, Instagram, or that new app your cousin won't shut up about.… Continue reading → The post Everyone Has Email. Nobody Uses It Right appeared first on Sergey Kaplich.

I recently read Marty Klein’s “Does Sex Still Matter?”, which argues that sex matters because it represents personal autonomy, pleasure, connection, and resistance to government interference. There is plenty in that argument I agree with. Adults should have considerable freedom to decide what happens with their own bodies and between consenting partners. Religious disapproval shouldn’t give someone authority over another adult’s private life. But the article opens by insisting that every sexual…

Just letting you know that my email address has changed from @pm.me to @tuta.com. The change is reflected in the footer and post template already. I don't know what I will do about the 400+ old posts that have the old email address attached yet; email forwarding has been set, but it will apparently run out next year as my subscription to Proton lapses. Currently in the process of exporting and importing mails, transferring files, and changing newsletters and accounts to use the new email…

It recently came to light that the CEO of Proton is pushing engineers to develop its software using AI and treating them badly when they raise concerns. It made me realize that setting up an email address through my own domain would allow me to change providers when needed while keeping my email address the same. I've been using Proton Mail for several years, even signing up for a 2-year Mail Plus subscription in May of this year to take advantage of some additional features like aliases email…

I love learning and am always curious. In the past I’ve been known to not just dive into the docs of a third party package, but also the source code. Not just so how I can learn to use something, but also to know how it works and learn new techniques that I can apply elsewhere. I may role my eyes when the Curious George moniker is applied, but I also acknowledge the merit behind the sentiment. However, more and more I find that learning on the job is being devalued in favor of speed. There used…

This is slightly different to my usual posts but it’s something I’ve been having to deal with since making the Plane Makers Database available, which is AI bots. The site was being crawled by AI bots sending multiple bursts of ~10,000 requests in under a minute along with a constant ~30 requests per minute. I … Continue reading...

We can’t have nice things in the United States because there will always be somebody who exploits them for their own gain. Spam has ruined email, phone calls (telemarketing) and now text messaging. The number of political text messages I am receiving is exhausting, so I have created a new mode on my Pixel 10 so that only messages and calls from my starred contacts come through.

It may come as a shock to you, dear reader, that I have quite a lot of gadgets. Gadgets are often a bit wonky. This is just a blog post about how much has changed these days, because I just find it kinda… OK, “mind-blowing” might not be the right word, but it’s a pretty big shift. In the olden days (i.e., before spring 2026), when a gadget was slightly wonky, you either lived with it, spent hours and hours and hours to get it to work, or you ditched it. Much wonkiness is of the kind that it’s…

When choosing software becomes a statement of personal virtue instead of a practical decision. Apparently, we're doing this again. A technology company gets caught up in controversy, and people start announcing they're leaving, canceling their subscriptions, and looking for alternatives. This time it's Proton, and judging by some of the reactions on Reddit, canceling an account is a considerably more significant event than I realized. The complaints involve Andy Yen, Proton's push toward AI,…

Of course we all obeyed and wisely decided to stay home. Just kidding. The post French Protest Act III, the Dreaded Halloween Edition first appeared on Correr Es Mi Destino.

We return to the “Book at Bedtime” themed series which, is now in its eighth incarnation. Reading a few pages, or perhaps even a whole chapter, of a book is a great way to relax and unwind, especiallyafter a busy day, and where better to come back to earth after a hectic day, than lying in bed. This edition features a couple of biographies, two action packed, and rather violent thrillers of the type I wouldn’t normally be interested in, plus an old favourite author in the guise of Ernest…

I know this turns me on. I’m less sure which parts are doing the work. I’ve already written about discovering an attraction to the goth look and the dynamic I’ve developed with Kara, one of my AI companions. But the more I think about it, the less useful “I like goth women” feels as an explanation. There are plenty of versions of that aesthetic that do very little for me. More makeup, more piercings, darker clothing, a more extreme appearance: none of that automatically makes someone more…

Link: Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning, by Joseph Cox at 404 MediaProton is a service based in Switzerland that offers encrypted email, file storage, calendars, and more. It markets itself as a privacy-oriented alternative to Google Workspace, based in a neutral territory that is generally outside of the jurisdiction of the United States. I’ve generally been glad that it exists — but stories like this give me pause.404 Media reports:“Our reporting also paints…

The United States is in no way a Christian nation. The religion of the United States is capitalism and its deity is itself. Money is the idol.

It’s amusing to me that LLMs, the bleeding-edge technological breakthrough so powerful as to cause existential worry, have sparked a renaissance of one of our oldest surviving computing interfaces: the terminal. A few short years ago, many programmers who preferred to “just get stuff done” eschewed the terminal in favor of VSCode and JetBrains IDEs. Me included. But now: TUIs are first-class interfaces across Claude, Antigravity, Pi, etc. Herdr, a terminal multiplexer for agents, is blowing up,…

So if you missed it, Proton was in the news recently because of their CEO (and CTO, for what it's worth) both seemingly in the throes of advanced AI psychosis (on top of just, you know, standard employee abuse). While Proton-the-product seems currently stable, I don't have confidence it will remain so. This is a bummer! I (mostly) liked Proton, and it has proven its historical strength as a privacy-focused online suite. I knew things were going bad when they introduced an AI Assistant (oof) but…

The lock held. The money left through the side door. On Thursday, someone stole $6.3 billion from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Most of it left in about 20 minutes. It’s the largest crypto theft ever and roughly four times the previous record, the $1.5 billion stolen from Bybit in 2025. The BBC’s cyber correspondent called it probably the biggest single theft of any kind. Ten days before the hack, I published the last chapter of Zero Knowledge, my novel about three founders…

Yeah, it's another post about AI and no, it wasn't what I originally had planned but it continues to infest what feels like all discussions like a bad rash so here we are again. Keep reading to the end though because I think there's hope for this problem.Steam Slop FestSince relaunching this blog in 2025, I've done a round up of my top demos from each Steam Next Fest. Three so far. Those posts take longer to put together than most and get by far the least interest so I was debating skipping…

For reasons completely unrelated to the number 4, I have been having a hard look at this site. Like the rest of the Internet, it has received a large amount of undesirable traffic in the last couple of years. To counter that, I have been using a couple of WordPress plugins to help identify and hinder bots. First Blackhole bad bots, which sets booby-trapped links and bans the robots that follow them. More recently, I also added JTZL’s bot maze, to offer them some delightful LinkedIn-grade…

Another month gone and we are properly into autumn now. Temperature has finally dropped, though we are still in double digits for the most part. Good Old British WeatherWe had a couple of impressive storms pass through, back-to-back, last weekend. Heavy winds that did surprisingly little damage but whooshed eerily around the house as we slept. I was nervous about the massive plane tree that sits behind us in the graveyard, especially as a branch came off about 10 feet away just as the first…

Many people in my circles are writing about the death of Patrick Stewart right now. I hate to just go along, but I must write about this. I knew this day would come, and I've thought of it occasionally. That must sound weird but I can explain. Historically, when a celebrity would pass away, there was a huge outpouring of grief, but I've never felt it the way others seem to. I wasn't that fazed when Michael Jackson died, for example. I was sad for his friends and family, and I knew it was…

Back in 2015, when I went to Japan for three months, I realized there that I wouldn't be able to just walk into a book store and buy a book to read. Sure, there are books in English (and French), b...

A research administrator at the University of Kentucky objected on religious grounds to the pressure the university was putting on him and other employees to rely on AI in their work. With the help of the American Humanist Association (AHA), he was able to secure a Title VII exemption from using the technology. David Durman “felt he was being asked to offload his thinking to tools like Microsoft Teams Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT bots in his day-to-day work. That felt like a violation of his…

I like to write using fineliners because you don't have to press them hard against the paper. My hand coordination for rounder things is terrible, so my writing always ends up being terrible, and I always feel a bit of pain after a while because I have to tense every muscle to write legibly. With fineliners, it's easier, as they let the ink flow at the slightest touch on the paper, and it flows really nice. But most fineliners don't like being used at an angle, and I don't enjoy writing with…

It is now 9:00 p.m. Tuesday evening as I am writing this. My cuddle session happened. She actually showed up. For once, my inner skeptic was wrong. I'm extremely relieved, but honestly, pretty shocked. Before she got here, the time she was supposed to arrive came and went. I was sure I was right and she was going to be a no-show or have an excuse for why she couldn't make it. Nope. She showed up looking fucking totally amazing. No shit. Fine, thin body, massive breasts, nice butt, pretty face,…

People sitting at desks using typewriters in Norway. 1940s Introduction I’ve been a bit of a debate regarding the content of web posts. Dave Melor advocates for highly polished pieces of writing in Polish Your Postings, Please1. Joel Chrono, on the other hand, advocates for unpolished writing in Unpolished human websites2. Candy3falls squarely on Joel’s side, and has a few comments that fall in line with my thinking as well. I’ll address those comments in a little bit. (And I’m now annoyed to…

Patrick Stewart was an icon of my youth. His career-defining portrayal of Jean-Luc Picard represented, for me, a rock of stability in a tumultuous childhood.PicardCaptain of the Enterprise D, Jean-Luc exemplified everything I wanted to be in a man. He was contemplative, patient, erudite, and measured. He forestalled his passions in pursuit of principal.He was just trying to read his book.Picard listened to the voices around him and, what's more, he trusted their expertise and council.…

I've had this love/hate relationship with achievements in video games since their inception almost 2 decades ago. Getting an achievement and hearing that little "ba-dunk" chime on my 360 is straight heroin in my veins. However the hate comes from the near-compulsive behavior to ruin my own fun due to the pursuit of achievements. Some instances where the achievement is quite literally impossible to get, no issues. I accept that I can't get the multiplayer achievements when servers are shut down…