I’ll skip discussions about my persona. But most certainly golf courses or video games have orders of magnitude lower impact on electricity and watee than worldwide LLMs (mostly in datacenters).

Your access to a popular and commercial fork might be non-existent. You would maybe not even mind that they’re selling your code - possibly just wanting to tune it a bit, since you know how it used to work. But the fork can decide they’re proprietary and they won’t give you any source code.

Currently, LLMs impact on electricity usage and fresh water usage across the world is HUGE.

The painful part to me is the choice on where to put the stress. Which areas to highlight and talk about.

Yes some weak LLMs can use comparatively little electricity. Yes some other industries use electricity, generate CO2 and consume fresh water, too. But the existence of other problems, to me, does not mean that eco impact of LLMs should be swept under the rug.

There are other questions

Not sure if that’s really _acknowledging_ the problem.

Do you know that Apple’s macOS is historically a FreeBSD fork? (They have copied big parts.)

I find it notable that FreeBSD is struggling to stay alive, and Apple’s 1000000000000s of dollars in incomes does not help them at all.

Or from the other side, GPL would guarantee that you yourself (and your project’s contributors) would still have access even if a good fork emerges.

Things happen over years or decades.

Absolutely. IDK why me or you are getting downvotes tho. Did they claim to be agai st as the original commenter said? No. Did they distance themselves and clearly separate themselves? Yes.

True. But they did not say that they are _against_ the donation.

The original comment should simply be reworded to “and Mullvad says it has nothing to do with the donation and wasn’t aware of it” or something like that. Remove “claim to be against”.

I ideally want full sync of course. “Well at least they have an export function” I thought, and found out it’s paid.

Anyway, I think we understand each other - just re-wording the information differently. Proton’s offering in that regard is clear.

There are no open email or calendar standards that handle encryption.

That would be a nice sounding argument, but actually, if you pay them, then all of a sudden calendar exporting becomes possible:

“Share calendar
Upgrade to a Mail paid plan to share your calendar.”

To confirm, click https://calendar.proton.me/u/0/ then click on the cog near your calendar on the right -> Click again the cog Settings button on the right for your calendar -> Share calendar

I couldn’t get K9mail to work with proton. Do you run that “bridge” server to have it work on the computer?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but, regarding the first point, in what way are the calendar clients proprietary?

When I say that “their calendar will NOT work with open technologies from F-Droid and such”, I mean that their calendar system does not support webdav or similar sync-ing technologies. Actually no single app from F-Droid is compatible with their unpaid service, and their own app is not on F-Droid either. If you pay, it all of a sudden becomes possible, but… see the points above.

Same thing if I want to integrate a calendar from Proton into any other calendar or set of calendars by the way. Which is my use case. In the end, I open some calendars natively in my system, and just that one Proton calendar in a browser - separately, detached from the rest of the world.

The email system not working with Thunderbird etc. out-of-the-box is true but that is kind of understandable

I see your point. Though I could imagine at least some form of IMAP access working. For example, there’s an *already-existing* technology to automatically encrypt incoming emails with a person’s provided public key. This is compatible with the standard IMAP protocol - just encrypt it server-side upon receiving the email.

disroot.org is recommendable. Notable points:

• They rely fully on open technologies. Everything that they do you can reproduce locally. A big part of donations towards them (I’ve participated) automatically go to the technologies they use.

• They have a history and reputation. I’ve “visited” their community (digitally) and have a feeling of trust that they are who they claim to be. Their work aligns with their intentions.

• They simply provide many of the components that I need. E.g. email, nextcloud (which enables calendars, MoneyBuster/iHateMoney), two fediverse servers, etc.

• Objective downside is that their services are sometimes down, e.g. for a full hour. This is NOT very fun when you just want to sync your calendar right now. They also have a thing about their registration form which I never understood, and that is that they only allow registering on weekdays. Like WTF? IDK if it’s more funny or absurd. But I can tolerate this part, and since the other parts are great, in total I love their work and their services.

I’ve recently needed a “shared” new account and I’ve tried Proton. I regret it.

• Their calendar will NOT work with open technologies from F-Droid and such. They require the use of their proprietary app, or their web version, or paying. Paying is actually generally fine for me, but not when I have a feeling that I’m just paying for more of their proprietary development.
• Their email system will NOT work with open technologies. Same as above, you won’t get it to work with Thunderbird or K9mail out-of-the-box.
• As an implication of the above, paying them will NOT, in any way, help open standards and open technologies. You’ll be only helping their business.

On the plus side, they have at least not requested my phone number upon registration. That was the only plus for me.

In total, if you want true ownership, open technologies, distributed technologies where the power and infrastructure is split across great many parties, then you should be against Proton. I personally chose disroot for now.

There are still situations where Proton makes more sense to recommend, such as to a political activist. I believe this group is niche though, as 99% of people really want ownership, freedom to share and less money to pay I think. It’s not a business need, it’s a human thing.

Grok this grok that…
I’m sorry, but ***k grok. Stop posting about it.