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Proton spam and the AI consent problem

dbushell.com

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Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, it's the same attitude that they used to create the AI in the first place by using content which they don't own, without permission. Regardless of how useful it may be, the companies creating it and including it have demonstrated time and again that they do not care about consent.

> the same attitude that they used to create the AI in the first place by using content which they don't own, without permission This was a massive "white pill" for me. When the needs of emerging technology ran head first into the old established norms of ""intellectual property"" it blew straight through like a battle tank, technology didn't even bother to slow down and try to negotiate. This has alleviated much of…

For big corps yes.

For everyone else, chains.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does?? > I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics. The lure of big tech profits.

Genuinely: What profits!?! The only company profiting from AI has been nVidia. Every indicator we've received for this entire alleged industry is companies buying hundreds of millions of dollars in graphics cards that then either sit in warehouses depreciating in value or, worse, are plugged in and immediately start losing money. The tech industry has coasted on it's hypergrowth story for decades, a story laden with…

Right on. You might like the Better Offline podcast by Ed Zitron, although the two of you seem to be so closely aligned that you might not learn anything new.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#403

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many…

> It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one. Having gone through the Proton hiring process was an eye opener for me: despite its stated mission, the company isn't special when it comes to its management, it's as bad as any other.

To be fair, they are working to stay in business. None of my business, but did they treat you unfairly?

I am developing a severe anti huge corporation bias, and I try to do business with smaller companies.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#404

I've been using proton for a year after migrating from Rackspace and I'm done. Not because of this article, but I might as well pile on: 1. I use a custom domain. Turns out that there are two competing features, not-at-all documented. If you use a catch-all, like I do, AND use specific addresses for sending, the two are incompatible to some degree. Which is bonkers. Example: with a catchall I can create any address I…

Absolutely you give up a lot of convenience of searching email content. After using it twice, I stopped using their Bridge and instead on my laptop set search to download and index locally. On mobile I live with just searching metadata, like subject lines.

The good news is that you use your own domain and there are a lot of good alternatives that support search of content for you where you can use your domain, like Apple Mail, FastMail, etc.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really strange thing is that so much of it doesn't work. Like I get that the SOTA models perform some tasks quite well and have some real value. But the AI being implemented in every corner creates a lot of really bad results. The Shopify code assistant will completely wreck your site and basically gets nothing correct. It will write 100 lines to change a color of a single DIV. The Amazon product Q&A will give yo…

It's a desperate attempt at staying relevant, even if most of those companies don't realize it yet. Because of its general-purpose nature, AI subsumes products . Most software products that try to "implement AI in every corner" would, from the user's POV, be more useful if they became tools for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. People's goals are rarely limited to just one software product, and products are basically defined as…

I have been enjoying reading this thread, but with some irony: sure the email spams pushing their Lumo LLM private chatbot were a mistake, and I bet they stop doing that fast.

The irony is that Lumo is a separate product, not really tied to the rest of their products except for a common login. Lumo works fine for the simple quality of life search and question answering stuff.

Off topic, but have you tried avoiding the big corporate LLM providers and run local models? The small models just keep getting better and I find it fun and satisfying to do as much as I can locally.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the same attitude that they used to create the AI in the first place by using content which they don't own, without permission This was a massive "white pill" for me. When the needs of emerging technology ran head first into the old established norms of ""intellectual property"" it blew straight through like a battle tank, technology didn't even bother to slow down and try to negotiate. This has alleviated much of…

For big corps yes. For everyone else, chains.

You haven't taken to the high seas?

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox. This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer, even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. If anything, it should be applied more broadly. When…

> This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer Or you got hacked by a spammer. > even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. And also a bad thing. E.g. for the user losing a critical legit email. > if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone. Sorry absolutely not for everyone. To me, receiving legit PayPa…

Sure, you can manually unmark them as spam, and gmail should respect that preference as well. But for the rest of us, it would be an improvement if Paypal was sent to spam by default until they were forced to stop sending spam.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if said company first spammed you and you marked them as spam, then it is on them. No different than if someone sent you a bunch of unwanted letters and you threw them out, but one of them happened to be relevant. It's on the organization sending you junk.

This is not you marking them as spam. This is "all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam".

Right, and I think that if they send spam, all email providers (especially gmail, the largest provider) should mark all their emails as spam by default. They are doing what is described above at a large scale, so large-scale reactions are needed.

Of course, if you manually mark them as not-spam, then gmail should respect your choice as a user.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox. This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer, even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. If anything, it should be applied more broadly. When…

> This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer Or you got hacked by a spammer. > even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. And also a bad thing. E.g. for the user losing a critical legit email. > if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone. Sorry absolutely not for everyone. To me, receiving legit PayPa…

Google relies on ad-revenue.

And it uses automated mechanisms to read every Gmail email, so it can train its AI LLMs and to serve more focused ads to its users.

So if a user receives PayPal emails and doesn't mark them as Spam or block them, I'm pretty sure Google interprets that as a user who uses eCommerce websites, and a good target for ada related to that market.

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