They should stop adding more and more services and instead focus on making existing services better or - in some cases - feature complete first.

I’ve been pretty happy with my swap to Proton lately, but this makes me nervous.

Not that I hate AI or crypto, but their mail app, the thing they’re known for, is not feature complete on all platforms. I still cannot set or edit filters on mobile, for example.

If your flagship app is missing basic features that users have reported for months but you just keep rolling out new shit, it starts to feel like too much like Google, yakno?

I expected more from them, even more so when they turned into a non profit.

I have no interest in it, but Bitcoin wallets aren’t necessarily private, and they say the LLM is also private. Given that pretty much everything is trying to mine as much data as possible from your digital interactions, this seems on brand for them.

I still have no interest in Proton Unlimited, but maybe enough of their customers want these features (or they think they will).

Oh wow, they’re hitting all the shitty gimmicks in one fell swoop!

The wallet is not, I think, surprising. Proton Mail is billed as a trusted holder of email that you want private. In the US, there are specifically some people who want an out-of-country provider of email service. A lot of use of cryptocurrency is from people who want private financial transactions. I will bet that there is overlap in userbase.

I also don’t know how they’re billing their LLM service, but a thing that some people don’t like about LLM services – and I am among those – is that what you write can be data-mined. If they’re selling this as a service where they charge a fee not to do that, that might make a lot of sense in terms of their privacy company reputation.

I use Kagi as my search engine. They do the “we don’t log or mine your data, but rather charge a subscription fee” thing too – though unlike Proton, they’re not overseas for US users – so they’re gonna be selling to a market of people who are willing to pay something for privacy. And they also just started providing LLM service. I bet that they have the same rationale.

You can get your own hardware and run latent diffusion software locally. I have. But that’s expensive.

It saves a lot of money, if you only need the hardware computing N% of the time, to buy the hardware and share it with other people, both in compute capacity and cost. Then you only need to pay N% plus a bit for the service provider to make a return.

I suspect that a lot of companies have done the math, figured out that the economics work, and are aiming for that market – people who want to use latent diffusion software, want privacy for use, but don’t need them hot 100% of the time, and don’t want to pay to get their own hardware at home.

It used to be common, when all computers were more expensive, for all computing access to be sold like this, on time-sharing systems. Nobody (or very few people!) could afford a computer of their own, but you could afford to buy some compute time on one. Some of this is probably temporary, because right now, Nvidia has a significant lead and can (and does) charge a fat premium; I assume that if AMD or someone else can get parity for compute acceleration, then that’ll force Nvidia’s pricing down. But it may be that there’s a whole new world of interesting applications that can only be done with very large models that require very large hardware, in which case we might see, on an ongoing basis and for parallel compute applications, a world that looks more like the 1960s for computers, where there are a limited number of computers in datacenters, and instead of owning your own, you buy slices of time on them.

EDIT: Yeah, I haven’t looked at Proton recently, but look at their main page. They’re selling a whole suite of online services, and the whole thing that they’re billing themselves as on the thing is providing privacy, and they specifically emphasize that they’re in Switzerland. The slogan that they’re using is “Proton: Privacy by default”. My guess is that basically, their aim is to build a reputation of someone who is neither data-mining people’s data nor is readily-accessible to law enforcement (well, if you’re in the US…things might be different if you’re Swiss!), and then to sell services with that aspect as a selling point.

Crypto and AI, they went all out…

Maybe my flashlight app can do it next.

Bitcoin isn’t private, you can see how much BTC a sender or recipient is holding and what transactions they’ve made. I’d argue that without privacy mitigations such as a mixing service it’s even less private than credit cards. They should have gone with Monero instead.

I expected more from them, even more so when they turned into a non profit.

Two points to make:

1. What did they do wrong here?
2. Isn’t it better for these products to be provided by a nonprofit?

It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.

I feel like some people just hear “crypto” or “ai” and start screeching and clawing at the air.

Not every feature needs to be for you specifically, these features are optional and don’t compromise or even impact their other products. They seem to be on-brand in being more privacy-focused alternatives to some of the existing market options while remaining accessible, and keeps Proton in the game depending on how the landscape develops.

I don’t use Proton (yet) but I generally like what they’re doing and hope they succeed, and I don’t see any of these developments as negatives, just more competition.

Checking with proton themself, the main reason seems to be to further resistance in case another instance of a issue they had in initial funding, where paypal blocked all payments to them. A wallet was also heavily requested by business users, and proton is using randomization to reduce tracking detailed on their site. So long as they next work on environmental impact to balance out this stuff, proton is fine still. Here is the code for the wallet: https://github.com/ProtonWallet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scTjHvot3Uo To those who downvote, haven’t you learned that centralisation of services always ends horribly, remember Reddit, twitter, Google, remember why do we go to lemmy, why do we use Linux and self host services, because we wanted decentralised system that won’t enshitify as a whole, even if something goes bad, like meta’s threads, you can isolate it, yes? But if everything was centralised like in Facebook and others, could you do the same thing? Of course not, never forget folks, centralisation never goes well in the long run, but in short term it’s gonna be great if course

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So much for my plan of looking into a Proton mail account.