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Proton Spam and the AI Consent Problem (dbushell.com)
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File under "some business bro had this classified in the wrong newsletter". I don't see the big deal and I don't extrapolate this into some systemic disease with marketing emails.
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> Proton for Business newsletter AFAIK you are legally allowed to spam businesses, but not individuals. A handy get-out clause for marketeers.
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Odd, I didn't even know Proton had an AI feature until I read this article. Didn't get an email or tooltip while using the app. Didn't previously explicitly opt-out either, and when I check my notification settings, Lumo product updates is set to disabled. Maybe someone's feature gate isn't working as intended? I did get the Github Copilot spam email today though.
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I have a Proton mailbox I specifically keep around to serve as a honeypot, for tracking when one of the many annoying little services will inevitably mishandle the contact address I hand them. Over the years, the only spam I ever received there was from Proton. Quite the way to recalibrate my expectations, eh?
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Lumo will likely be the thing that moves me away from Proton. I've been pretty happy with it, ever since they made the photo's app actually have shareable libraries it's been just as good as any other Google Mail/Photos/Files thing I've used. The password manager plugin for firefox isn't as good as bitwarden, but when you're paying it's part of the package so... If I have to encrypt my files before I use the drive, and they continue to build their AI spy into everything, though, then what is the point really? Anyway, it is sort of hilarious to report Proton as spam to Proton.
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I saw a Mastodon tweet a while ago, which went something like: Do tech companies understand consent?: - [ ] Yes - [ ] Ask me again in a few days
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I have often found proton’s intrusive marketing campaigns annoying. I use them for email and that’s all I want. Every time they market some new product to me, I get closer to moving to a new provider.
This is not an AI problem, it's an "data privacy + lack of consequences problem". It happens everywhere. I mean, have you ever tried making an airline company to stop sending their shitty miles newsletters? Only way to stop is to start fining these companies.
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Not sure where you live, but inside the EU / UK this is rarely a problem because the companies do get fined. If youre having problems like this report them to your relevant authority. But as another commentor noted, AI bubble makes paying spam fines more worthwhile than bubble popping.
> Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech. It’s unfathomable to them that some of us aren’t interested. The entire AI industry is built upon a common principle of non-consent. I can't help but see the spam as more circumstantial evidence of a bubble, where top-down "pump those numbers" priorities overrides regular process.
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Agree. The number of services i use where the apps continually add new marketing preferences which are defaulted to ‘enabled’ despite the fact that all other preferences are disabled is disgusting and clearly used by some companies to ignore people’s actual preferences. LinkedIn is one of the worst offenders.
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Have you noticed certain financial providers sending blatant marketing emails with no unsubscribe option and a comment along the lines of "these emails are not marketing"
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This is illegal practice in the EU
Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking (philipotoole.com)
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>The more I do this, the better I get at noticing what I actually think. Which reminds me of a quote from E.M Forster: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
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I agree with the authors observations here. I think rather than it being purely language related, there's a link to the practice of 'rubber ducking', where when you start to explain your problem to someone else it forces you to step through the problem as you start to explain the context, the steps you've tried and where you're stuck. I think LLMs can be that other person for us sometimes, except that other person has a great broad range of expertise.
I find talking to LLMs both amazing and frustrating, a computer that can understand my plain text ramblings is incredible, but it's inability to learn is frustrating. A good example, with junior developers I create thorough specs first and as I saw their skills and reasoning abilities progress my thoroughness drops as my trust in them grows. You just can't do that with LLMs
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You can write an agent.md file and gradually add to it as you develop the project. The reason junior developers get better is that the context goes from low to high over the time you spend working with them. Yes, "learning". I've found that maintaining a file that is designed to increase the LLM's awareness of how I want to approach problems, how I build / test / ship code etc, leads to the LLM making fewer annoying assumptions. Almost all of the annoying assumptions that the LLM makes are "ok, but not how I want it done". I've gotten into the habit of keeping track of these in a file. Like the 10 commandments for LLMs. Now, whenever I'm starting a new context I drop in an agent.md and tell it to read that before starting. Fella like watching Trinity learn how to fly a helicopter before getting into it. It's still not perfect, but I'm doing waaaay more work now to get annoyed by the LLM's inability to "automatically learn" without my help.
No one is arguing that thinking doesn’t improve thinking. But expressing thoughts precisely by formulating them into the formalized system of the written word adds a layer of metacognition and effort to the thinking process that simply isn’t there when 'just' thinking in your head. It’s a much more rigorous form of thinking with more depth - which improves deeper, more effortful thinking.
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Exactly. As distributed systems legend Leslie Lamport puts it: “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” (He added: “Mathematics is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your writing is.”) I still have a lot of my best ideas in the shower, no paper and pen, no LLM to talk to. But writing them down is the only way to iron out all the ambiguity and sort out what’s really going to work and what isn’t. LLMs are a step up from that because they give you a ready-made critical audience for your writing that can challenge your assumptions and call out gaps and fuzziness (although as I said in my other comment, make sure you tell them to be critical!) Thinking is great. I love it. And there are advantages to not involving LLMs too early in your process. But it’s just a first step and you need to write your ideas down and submit them to external scrutiny. Best of all for that is another person who you trust to give you a careful and honest reading, but those people are busy and hard to find. LLMs are a reasonable substitute.
In my experience LLMs offer two advantages over private thinking: 1) They have access to a vast array of extremely well indexed knowledge and can tell me about things that I'd never have found before. 2) They are able to respond instantly and engagingly, while working on any topic, which helps fight fatigue, at least for me. I do not know how universal this effect is, but using them often means that I can focus for longer. I can also make them do drudgery, like refactoring 500 functions in mostly the same way that is just a little bit too complicated for deterministic tools to do, which also helps with fatigue. Ideally, they'd also give you a more unique perspective or push-back when appropriate, but they are yes-men too much right now for that to be the case. Lastly, I am not arguing to not do private thinking too. My argument is that LLM-involved thinking is useful as its own thing.
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Anybody who still believes this bullshit after asking an LLM whether Oregon is entirely North of New York City is an absolute irredeemable.
You are in for a rude awakening when you realize that those answers tend to be subtly to blatently wrong especially when the questions are tricky and non-obvious. Once that blind initial trust is shattered and you stary to question the accuracy of what AI gives you back, you see the BS everywhere.
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Of course due diligence and validation is needed if you intend to use the information for something, but if your aim is just to satisfy your curiosity with questions you don't have anyone else to ask, it's a great medium.
Enjoyable analogy. > Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. This makes it sound like buying brewed coffee is the budget option. But the real budget option I've seen is to brew at home. Almost any household will have an appliance to boil water. Then add instant coffee. I don't understand why, but in my experience instant coffee seems to be the baseline even in coffee-producing countries.
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I think the idea is that there are higher startup costs to brew at home. Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner, in the same way that a computer that can run a local LLM is going to cost more than a bunch of API calls to a commercial model. Eventually, those diner coffees add up, but you’re stuck with them if you can’t afford the coffee machine.
The lost art of XML (marcosmagueta.com)
XML was a product of its time, when after almost 20 years of CPUs rapidly getting quicker, we contemplated that the size of data wouldn't matter, and data types won't matter (hence XML doesn't have them, but after that JSON got them back) -- we expected languages with weak type systems to dominate forever, and that we would be working and thinking levels above all this, abstractly, and so on. I remember XML proponents back then argued that it allows semantics -- although, it was never clear how a non-human would understand it and process. The funny thing about namespaces is that the prefix, by the XML docs, should be meaningless -- instead you should look at the URL of the namespace. It's like if we read a doc with snake:front-left-paw, and ask how come does a snake have paws? -- Because it's actually a bear -- see the definition of snake in the URL! It feels like mathematical concepts -- coordinate spaces, numeric spaces with different number 1 and base space vectors -- applied to HTML. It may be useful in rare cases. But few can wrap their heads around it, and right from the start, most tools worked only with exactly named prefixes, and everyone had to follow this way.
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> data types won't matter (hence XML doesn't have them, but after that JSON got them back) JSON does not have very much or very good data types either, but (unlike XML) at least JSON has data types. ASN.1 has more data types (although standard ASN.1 lacks one data type that JSON has (key/value list), ASN.1X includes it), and if DER or another BER-related format is used then all types use the same framing, unlike JSON. One thing JSON lacks is octet string type, so instead you must use hex or base64, and must be converted after it has been read rather than during reading because it is not a proper binary data type. > The funny thing about namespaces is that the prefix, by the XML docs, should be meaningless -- instead you should look at the URL of the namespace. It's like if we read a doc with snake:front-left-paw, and ask how come does a snake have paws? -- Because it's actually a bear -- see the definition of snake in the URL! This is true of any format that you can import with your own names though, and since the names might otherwise conflict, it can also be necessary. This issue is not only XML (and JSON does not have namespaces at all, although some application formats that use it try to add them in some ways).
The <article> command in HTML can be useful, even if most implementations do not do much with it. For example, a browser could offer the possibility to print or display only the contents of a single <article> block, or to display marks in the scrollbar for which positions in the scrollbar correspond to the contents of the <article> block. It would also be true of <time>; although many implementations do not do much with it, they could do stuff with it. And, also of <h1>, <h2>, etc; although browsers have built-in styles for them, allowing the end user to customize them is helpful, and so is the possibility of using them to automatically display the table of contents in a separate menu. None of these behaviours should need to be standardized; they can be by the implementation and by the end user configuration etc; only the meaning of the commands will be standardized, not their behaviour.
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"Meaning" has a rather vague meaning, but behavior is exact. If I know the behavior, it becomes a tool I can employ. If I only know supposed behavior, I cannot really use that. E.g. why we have so much SEO slop and so little "semantic" HTML? Because the behavior of search engines is real and thus usable, even when it is not documented much.
I think XML for documents lost to markdown. Between markdown and HTML, there is no need for XML in that domain anymore either.
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There's also HTML, LaTeX and Typst for documents. I don't think that there is a clear winner here.
> This is insanity masquerading as pragmatism. > This is not engineering. This is fashion masquerading as technical judgment. The boring explanation is that AI wrote this. The more interesting theory is that folks are beginning to adopt the writing quirks of AI en masse.
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I feel more like AI have adopted some preexisting disagreeable writing styles from the beginning and now we associate these with AI.
Bugs Apple Loves (bugsappleloves.com)
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Good list. WTF happened to iOS text selection? It's a shitshow now. First Apple decided that the cursor shouldn't snap to characters. WHY? Why would I want to start a selection in the middle of a character? Oh yeah: I never would, and can't anyway. So why does the cursor go there? Then there's the fact that if you press and hold and release, the "select all" option (and others) doesn't appear anymore. Try again. Try again. And then after the fifth? Seventh? try, suddenly you get the floating menu. And then there's the now-often-useless magnifying glass, which frequently appears offscreen or behind the stupid notch. And the window resizing. Ugh. It wasn't until what, the mid-2000s that you could resize an Apple window by anything other than THE LOWER-RIGHT CORNER. No other corners, and no edges. The sheer stupidity of this was galling. When Apple finally "fixed" that, they did so in typical Apple fashion: grudgingly. They refuse to put frames on windows, so there's no clear area in which the cursor should become the resizing cursor. Is it any wonder that the resizing behavior is flaky as hell? And now it's even worse.
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All of those would be so much better if there was at least some way to get a proper error message or status message.
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Something I’ve noticed recently is that I press notifications by accident a lot more frequently. They just always pop in right when I’m trying to do something else. I suspect it’s because of the smart widget UI at the top of the screen that shows now playing, sports scores, direction etc. We didn’t used to interact with anything up there! But it’s extremely annoying to open a 300+ unread messages chat when I didn’t want to!
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This is satire, but it is so real that it hurts. I have encountered all of those bugs and more. The worst part is the delusional Apple fanboys who will pretend it always works for them because they have associated their ego with the ownership of Apple devices. Google might be bad, but at least it works most of the time. And hilariously, Microsoft, well-known for bugs galore, actually manages to make softwares that are less infuriating in the long run.
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I’m not sure it it’s a bug but I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it: When you use apple maps and your phone is locked and you want to unlock your phone, for some reason it takes like 5 seconds or something to unlock the phone which feels like forever. The ui feeling insanely unresponsive and weird, you have to swipe further than usual and it takes way longer. It feels like the phone is fighting you! How dare I want to use my phone while navigating! (Even when walking) I think what’s happening is that face ID doesn’t activate until you stop swiping, where usually it would start when you look at the phone or pick it up? Presumably because you’re going to be looking at the phone a lot when using maps. God I hate it so much. I didn’t use apple maps for years because of it but then I switched to apple maps because of some egregious privacy violation by google maps that I can no longer remember. Also applies to other apps that work when your phone is locked like phone calls.
The AirDrop randomly not working one is really manifesting at the most inconvenient times. Apple simply won't fix it.
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I'm always dumbfounded by people constantly praising AirDrop. It hasn't worked properly more often than it did. And that's not talking about the times when you send something, it gets accepted, and it just ends up in a void, not to be found anywhere. At the end of the day, in most cases, it would be preferable to just connect the damn thing with a cable and send things that way. If you send a large file, it takes a while, and having to redo the process because of some bug kills any benefit from the convenience of not having to use a cable.
Mine “favorite” bug is the auto-replace of I->O on iOs. O think that’s a real strange one, and really wonder whether anybody ever uses “O think” in English.
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Are you sure it's the auto-replace and not the dynamic keyboard doing its dark magic?
I've got one. When iPhone alarm goes off, the screen doesn't wake up, so I press the power button. Which snoozes the alarm. Not only did I not want to snooze the alarm, I hoped that the alarm would wake the phone up so I can click 'stop'. I assume that's a bug rather than a holding-it-wrong?
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I’ll note that looking at the screen deadens the alarm. I’ve had it a couple of times where I’ve looked at the alarm on my nightstand, the alarm quietens down to nearly nothing and I fall back to sleep. My partner missed a flight due to this.
Sometimes the bugs are features, I.e, natural scrolling different and inconsistent between mouse and mousepad without third party extensions. Thanks Apple!
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I recently discovered that for some reason, macOS doesn't want to work with a mouse with a traditional scroll wheel. It just jumps erratically all over the place. I tried using it because I forgot to charge my dumb magic mouse. I'm sure it can be fixed in some ways, but I really shouldn't have to. The mouse works just fine when plugged into a Windows PC.
My god I cancelled my isp because I’m moving. Thought hot spot would be fine for a few months. Every single day I have to restart my MacBook Air for hot spot to work. Multiple times every day I have to turn hot spot off and on even though it’s in discoverable but won’t connect. Multiple times every day hot spot is just off and can’t be turned on in control center. And this is with iPhone 17 and m2 on most recent updates. I can’t imagine on older hardware.
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With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS. Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer. It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.
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I've had this experience too. One thing I've found that can sometimes help with laptops failing to connect is renaming your iPhone in the settings (which in turn renames the hotspot name)
Trying to type this comment on an iPhone and that very last issue, text selection, is so so real. It’s probably the single biggest thing I hate about this phone that makes me consider switching back to Android (I was on Android for 12 years before trying out an iPhone for 3 years atm, and in general, on average, I can’t tell the difference… they both have strengths and flaws. Text selection is a pretty massive flaw on iPhone.)
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I submitted this YouTube video (not mine) a while ago here that demonstrates typing issues that I also encountered on several iPhones: [It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken]( https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo )
How? I know you can move the cursor by holding space and dragging but how do you start the selection?
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I do it by double-tapping a word and then dragging the handles… does that work for you?
touch the keyboard area with another finger :)
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“Intuitive!”
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I have an Apple hand, with only one finger.
The bugs are not real (inter alia, Mail app search does, in fact, work). Your being pedantic is my being reality-based.
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All of the things on this website have affected my experience of macOS and iOS for a long, long time. On Hacker News, of all websites, giving yourself the "Works on My Machine" badge is not a worthy contribution.
And yet Apple CREATED the multiple-accounts problem for millions of people by implementing their idiotic "Apple ID must be an E-mail address" policy. So of course people thought that when they changed jobs, cable companies, or whatever... they needed to create a new Apple ID with their new E-mail address. This was reinforced when Apple further stupidified their policy by requiring your ID to be a WORKING E-mail address (originally it didn't actually have to work). After the outcry over people's App Store and other purchases being scattered across multiple IDs, Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts. The moral: Don't force people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs. It's stupid on several levels.
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> Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts. They somewhat changed that. It now is possible to move purchases between accounts. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/117294 . Looks quite cumbersome to do, and will not apply to everybody (“If an Apple Account is only used for making purchases, those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple Account to consolidate them.”, “This feature isn’t available to users in India.”)
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Interesting. But WTF is a "primary" Apple account? My original Apple ID isn't an E-mail address, so they forced me (and others in that situation) to create another one for iCloud because that one inexplicably has to be an E-mail address. I use both for quite a few things. Which one is "primary?"
I couldn't actually get past this websites terrible UI.
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The terrible UI of a straight-forward document separated into distinct blocks, paragraphs and charts that are easily read, that scrolls from from top-to-bottom? Yeah, awful.
Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020) (leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
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I love the line drawings. They immediately seem more real than current games. Just the land use aspect alone (buildings vs farmed land). Modern sims never get that right, either, with coal power plants the same size as a high school. And so many other things out of proportion.
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I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering - not an 8 hour day by any means. Two points: this was normal, but of course their numbers were controlled by inconsistent weather. The feast and famine cycle over the year mean even that 10 was not evenly distributed. The people are also of course nomadic, but not as much as you might think in that the procession follows a 'route' which looks much like the seasons in agricultural society. I suspect medieval society also partied hard, and bitched about their love life mostly, with the local brute squad creaming off most of the men for their wars, or disease or crop failure decimating the population every few generations.
Bret Devereaux, an historian blogger, has a long, detailed look at the economics of premodern peasant farmers and their households, called Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, starting at https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ It begins: “This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”
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> discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families I find the idea that every pre-modern peasant in every society had the same basic contours of life extremely silly. Maybe he means British or French peasants? That's what people usually mean by "peasants". Even within Europe the very basic ideas on when and how you marry and how you treat land ownership were wildly different.
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He mentions in the post that his focus is on Roman history, and that his discussion on peasants will be most applicable to the late Mediterranean antiquity
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Sometimes you just need to read the sources that were linked to you: > So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. They’ll also be pretty applicable to the European/Mediterranean Middle Ages and some parts – particularly mortality patterns – are going to apply universally to all pre-modern agrarian societies. I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive (meaning they differ place-to-place or period-to-period) and to the degree I can say, how they vary. But our ‘anchor point’ is going to be the Romans, operating in the (broadly defined) iron age, at the tail end of antiquity. https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/
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> What we can do, however is uncover the lives of these peasant households through modeling. > So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. > I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive The author addresses this in the first paragraphs before getting in to the meat of it.
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> Maybe he means British or French peasants? He's a professional historian who ... unthinkable i know ... cites his sources in every article.
Historical inaccuracies aside, when making a game it is essential to frequently stop and ask, “does this make the game more fun?” A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.
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Never let realism get in the way of game play :) Incidentally, when I last played Banished there was a loophole in its simulation and you could just build a few modules consisting of like 3 or 4 basic buildings and that solved all your survival problems with no need for later intervention. Gamers gonna optimize.
I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money? I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games. Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"
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It really depends on the audience though. I personally way prefer more realistic simulation like games, for example BeamNG. NFS has a broad appeal and is fun to play but it doesn’t feel anything like driving a real car. No offence though, I grew up with NFS underground 2 and it largely inspired my love of modified cars! Edit: as a kid my friends and I dreamed of the day car games would have realistic and dynamic crash physics and well BeamNG gets pretty close.
People certainly also play milsim like arma, but that's definitely a minority. Meanwhile in Minecraft I'm carrying around 2000 cubic metres of gold in my pockets.
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You don't have to go to milsim to not be able to carry an entire armoury of RPG-actually-full-blown-missile-launcher, grenade launcher, assault rifle, sniper rifle, DMR, submachine gun, multiple sidearms, plus various other alien weaponry, each complete with enough ammunition to fill an 18-wheeler trailer if desired to be stored with any sort of safety. It was fine when I was playing Doom ][ but that's something that started bothering the hell out of me back when Half-Life came out with its believable sci-fi setting, as it kept breaking my suspension of disbelief. "Can carry only two, maybe three tops with sidearm" seems to be the rule these days.
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