91 karma · joined March 28, 2017
I also believe, like others here, that Bun future is also not safe, Anthropic might decide to kill it as soon as they believe it doesn't bring in any more value.
That sounds like an awefully low bar, especially with the current administration, e.g. it currently score as 64th in the freedom of press index [0].
I agree the "e2e-encrypted email" bit is mostly marketing until GMail keeps its dominion on the market, which might be still for a very long time, but that's entirely up to us. I have some contacts who use Proton and some not, in the same way I have contacts who use Signal and some who don't. It doesn't have to be a full victory for me to make the switch worth it, even if just a minority of the users, the ones that I care about, do jump on the wagon I consider that a full personal victory.
I really haven't felt the Proton marketing push either... actually quite the opposite! I found out they have now a Meet application by chance even after so many years being a paying customer. Not sure what "bridge" you're talking about, unless you refer to accessing encrypted mails via IMAP, which I don't do so I don't care, webapp or `brew install protonmail` or installing the iOS apps do the trick for me and I don't see how that can be a win for GMail, it's just a different app which looks similar, no? AFAIK you can use all Proton applications from any browser, the ones I use (mail, calendar and meet) definitely work on Firefox for me.
About the domain ragpull fear... that sounds very unlikely? I mean, unless you choose a very esoteric TLD the probability of Google automatically banning your account seems to be a much much higher one? but still, if you switch to another provider you don't really need to setup a fancy domain, you can still setup GMail forward etc to the new @pm.me address or else. By the way, the "receive wildcard domain emails" is also an opt-in in Protonmail, you don't get it enabled automatically, so shouldn't be a blocker in itself.
Probably I'm a much simpler minded person, my heuristic goes somehow like "do I hate the company? yes -> is there a decent alternative? -> yes -> use it"
You are still missing my point: I didn't like Google Search, I tried an alternative (DDG) which works perfectly fine for me, if that doesn't do for you maybe you might want to try other alternatives that I know exist but I don't have any need to try out myself because I'm perfectly happy with the alternative I already have.
> It seems like when you have very weak arguments you go ad hominem and make up motivations.
I think you're still misunderstanding here. I'm not putting any judgment neither in my article nor in my comments to you. I don't have the pretention to target all readers on the planet, it's expected that some are not targeted by my article(s), if you are happy with one specific solution you're most probably not whining about it being enshittified in the first place, hence my article isn't targeting you. I don't understand how nor why you interpret that as avoiding a critique, it's just stating the facts from my point of view.
I flip your last comment then: it seems to me that you're focussing on a very specific point made in the article (some alternatives for Search I didn't try myself) while glossing over the 99.9% of it. If your argument is "your examples suck" I accept it, I thank you for bringing in your experience in this discussion, and I'll try to do better next time... or maybe not, I'm still imperfect and lazy most of the time so shouldn't make any such promise!
That's my point, though: it doesn't need to be perfect to be worth the switch.
> Have you actually tested it, though, and found better results, or is that a conceptual value add?
I did at the beginning and, as also written in the article, I did fall back on GSearch results once in a while, but that faded away in time and never felt the need anymore. I like DDG results page almost perfectly: it returns good results, I guess Google might be better sometimes (and other worse) but I don't mind. I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make: there are alternatives that are good enough and, if you are not happy with the product (I was not with Google, and I'm still not and actually it even got worse, e.g. the stuffing of AI down my throat is honestly depressing) try another one.
To be clear, I'm not stating here that DDG has absolute better results, I'm saying it has an overall much better experience compared to GSearch in my case. I don't get the AI first crap, I don't get irrelevant ads results (or at least not that I notice), I get nice perks like keyboard navigation, at least less invasion of my privacy, and a better UX overall.
It seems like you're perfectly happy with Google Search and Alphabet's spying practices, and by all means that's all right as long as you are ok with it, just notice though that the article is not targeted to you.
Since long I just don't see any reason to try out another search, I just get the results I want in a single shot. Another thing I like with DDG is that it doesn't seem to return different results depending on the profile it has on you, like Google does, so the same search tend to be deterministic, and that's a value added for me, might not be what you want though.
> So even worse? At least try them before recommending!
Fair, instead of complaining about my ineptitude though you could enrich this conversation saying why you find them worse than Google. I still stand by it though: Google Search is the biggest evil by far so whatever is not that is worth a try in my opinion, can't hurt for sure.
That said, I already tend to disagree with the title, for e.g. buying an electrical vehicle or a photovoltaic system for your home IS political, it sends a message that you're choosing a particular kind of technology which is arguably more sustainable, etc.
It's probably more relevant for content, e.g. the massive amount of (good) content present in YouTube (and YT music) is the reason I'm willing to pay the premium price even if I have close to zero sympathy for Alphabet as a company. But for services like email, or products like a browser, I really don't care about scale at all, I just want it to work well and possibly don't spy on me to sell my data.
I acknowledge is hard, but everything worth in life seems to be, so fighting against what they try to shove down our throats seems to be the only meaningful way.
If I may give you a suggestion for how to get rid of GMail:
1. register your domain 2. either have the registrar redirect your emails to e.g. your Pronton address, or pay Pronto the 3$/month premium to host your domain emails directly. Nice benefit: you now have unlimited aliases for your @domain.tld domain 3. setup a redirect for all the other GMail / etc mailboxes to your new Proton account
In this way you won't lose any email and will start to advertise your own email address, which is also allegedly giving a more professional feeling that <something.something>@gmail.com for who's receiving it.
I've not been using Google Search and ditched it in favour of DuckDuckGo years ago and never looked back. Not that DDG is perfect but generally it serves me very well and has a much better UI... I mean, just the fact I can't select entries pressing J|K on the keyboard now makes we want to throw Search out of the window.
For one thing I've re-built my personal website with it (mostly via GH issues from GH iOS app) and also added a section to talk about how I use AI in general: https://a.l3x.in/ai
I also maintain a couple of other Pi-related projects:
- https://awesome-pi.site/ - https://github.com/shaftoe/pi-coding-agent-action
So yeah, I still love the tool and use it pretty much every day, either as TUI sessions or inside CI/CD workflows.
Long live Pi!
About what Pi/Earendil is going for, I can't really say but a while ago they created quite a stir in the Pi community for adding a trust system[0] which for many (me included) went against the loudly advertized "yolo" phylosophy, at that time I speculated it was a move to make it more palatable for the general population (whatever that actually means), so I'll stay optimist for ACP adoption for now.
[0]: https://pi.dev/docs/latest/security#understand-project-trust
I hope they'll do the same and eventually add native support for ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/introduction) which, on the contrary, I use quite.
More in general, the feel you get as an European visiting the US is that either you're in, or completly out of the society. There's not much of a grey area, more like a quantum leap.
The numbers seem to say it's the same in theory, in practice my experience is that it very much doesn't _feel_ the same.
From my point of view is as awful as it can get: stark inequality, literally hundreds of thousands of homeless people roaming, no basic health care, but to be honest just the number of guns pro capita is enough to keep me and most of other Europeans away for good, it's just insane for what we're accustomed to. And I'm not even referring to the dystopian situation worsened daily by the current administration.
Unless you're the kind of person who confuses absolute numbers (e.g. money you can spend per month) for actual wealth / quality of life / freedoms / rights protection / etc. Then perhaps USA is the right place, I guess?
By the way, if you check out the repository's README it already shows the SSH use case, but why not to have WireGuard available too? with it there's no need to manually setup any application to use/not use SOCKS, it's as simple as click "Connect" in the WireGuard client and all the traffic including ICMP and what not is tunneled through the server. It can even be installed at the router level so to have all the LAN traffic tunneled automatically, can't easily do that with SSH.
Different use cases, not saying SSH isn't valid, I just prefer WireGuard UX.
Personally that's actually another good reason to boycott Anthropic: beside the fact I perceive their models as (at best) marginally better than the ones I'm used to (Z.ai glm-5.3-flash, DeepSeek Flash v4.1), they even force me to use their bloated harness. They are not even open weights and iirc they're even encrypting chain of thoughts now? Litterally, from my perspective there seems to be no reason whatsoever to choose any of the leading US providers, they're not even competing on price.
Personally I've been using https://pi.dev for long and never looked back.