It's like applying DRM law to all media ever. And we know the problems with DRM already, as exemplified 2 decades ago by Cory Doctorow in his talk at Microsoft to convince them not to endorse and use it.

I would like it if it actually did something for me, (like automatically doing x, y, or z to my account on the backend based on my request) but instead it just feels like every one of the "AI-Powered" support bots is designed to try and make it as hard as possible for me to actually get anything done.

I haven't had any problems myself.

In fact, I regularly use their anonymized LLM Chat tab to help out with restructuring data, summarizing some more complex topics, or finding some info that doesn't readily appear near the top of search. It's made my search experience (again, specifically in my circumstance) much better than before.

If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.

I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it's out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I've tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I've used in years.

This simply isn't really possible.

Even if they published open-source code for their backend, it wouldn't prove that it's actually what their systems are running.

And when you are storing your data on their servers, and decrypting it by sending over your password, there's no way you can actually truly prevent them from accessing your data, if they were to modify how their systems function overall. (this is true for every company)

Even if they were using zero-knowledge proofs to verify and prove to you the computation done on the server matched what would be expected from published open-source code, then either their very own systems (and by extension, their administrators), or a different company's proprietary TPM module, would be the root of trust for those ZK proofs, and would still have the same underlying trust assumptions of at least 1 company having the ability to potentially steal your information.

If you want to rail against Proton for this, you have to be against every single cloud-based instance of code that hosts encrypted data, by any company, for any user.

Saying Proton acts just like Microsoft is a laughable comparison to make in order to justify claiming a lack of privacy or security on Proton's part.

Why? Is it because they're both companies that offer online services? Guess what, loads of companies do that. But you know what Proton doesn't do? Give away the contents of people's files, like Microsoft states they do in their own transparency reports, that they conveniently stopped publishing in 2022. Microsoft handed over the content (not just IP, email, etc, but actual docs, communications, stored files, etc) of thousands of people's accounts to law enforcement. Proton hasn't given out content once.

And this doesn't even consider the fact that Proton's business model is privacy. For Microsoft, their users will keep using their services regardless of their privacy, but for Proton, if it comes out that their services are no longer private, nobody will use them anymore, because nobody who got them for privacy would need them at that point.

I haven't had a single issue with crashes, noise, heat, display, etc.

The positioning/gaps of the spacers are extremely tiny, and barely noticeable, and the only issue I've had so far has been my laptop not turning off fully when I shut it down, but that's fixed by just holding down the power button.

Oh, and I'm running an unsupported linux distro, (NixOS) so it's not like I'm starting from any advantaged position in terms of software integration.

Performance is great, cooling is great, games run well and it boots up quickly. Nothing much else to say other than it's a good laptop.

If you use a reputable adblocker, especially a well known FOSS one like uBlock Origin, you're not the product. The way they block ads is by downloading static filter lists, not live checking by sending your queries to their servers.

I'm not saying all adblockers won't track you, but acting as if people are "Adblock's product" by using adblockers is simply a misinformed view of how most adblockers operate. (I do agree that marketing adblock as a solution for a legitimate issue doesn't negate the initial problem or its critics, though.)

It's generally not an accurate statement to say that piracy drives down sales, at least when you look at overall measurements. You're definitely correct in assuming pirates want to support developers (and media creators in general) that they enjoy the works of, because pirates are by far the largest purchasers of content compared to traditional content purchasers

Gotta love this quote from the article: "piracy doesn't mean a lost sale if the person pirating the game couldn't afford it in the first place."

I've seen this happen time and time again with people I know who simply couldn't pay even a single dollar for a game, and had no other options available. They deserve to experience culture and entertainment just as much as the rest of us.

The best (worst) part is that they almost always just point you to the ways that you can already request your credit report and monitoring for free from the credit bureaus. 🥲

What's sad is the fact that the whole concept of a fiduciary duty to shareholders is overused in traditional corporate culture, and they don't even need to enshittify this much in search of profit under any laws or legal contracts! For a better explainer: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits

True that. We have the means to fix so many problems, we just have a very very very small few that reeeeally don't like to do anything good with their money, and instead choose to hoard it, at the expense of everyone else.