- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2533091/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-ai-to-see-who-gets-to-keep-their-job
You must log in or register to comment.
Not a bad idea, only they are going to keep the wrong ones, the cheerleaders instead of the skeptics.
I kinda wonder about this because I get asked about ai at interviews and I tend to give sort of a balance perspective. Saying they have uses but have limitations and thier output has to be reviewed and checked. I keep wondering if that is sinking me for positions among my other buerocratic red flags.
It’s fairly likely that if they’re asking about “AI” hoping for a cheerleader response, they won’t be looking to pay you what the position is worth.
yeah I kinda feel that also.
I imagine it varies. I don’t ask about AI usage in interviews but if I did I would prefer a balanced answer.
Skepticism tells me you’re not going to try to vibe code something important or try to install unapproved models. Not being completely anti-AI in the interview tells me you’re not going to insult a manager when they’re being stupid.
Yeah I just wonder if they are looking for gung ho ai all the way responses. I got an interview today and its been ages since I actually had one that was not a head hunter meet and greet.
istg these imbeciles are going to get me to self host my own email server.
white hairs here i fucking come.
I’m looking to migrate to Tuta.
Tuta
I just did. My only slight annoyance is their desktop app doesn’t import old mail the way I’d like it to. The rest of the switch- domain DNS on my own domain name, etc- less than 15 minutes. Completely painless.
Damn, this mofo still has hair
I’ve done that and learned a lot. Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail) won’t accept your email without paying them, or forwarding through someone who does (proton?).
i’m surprisingly ok with microslop not accepting my email actually
As am I. i don’t forward through anyone. All working well, but the learning process did, as you alluded to, give me white hairs.
noted, thank you.
while we’re here, any other tips i should keep in mind? what’s your stack (if you don’t mind sharing)?
Postfix, Dovecot, MySQL (MariaDB), postgrey, spamassasin.
Tips:
- once you get it running, keep close control and be prepared to shut down when the spam hounds find you.
- Do set up dmarc, dkim, and spf
- Put your server on spamhaus.org
- Don’t start if you’re feeling lazy, this will take a lot of mental attention.
I did mine before LLM’s, so I can’t comment how useful this will be, but I worry one might not understand the decisions made.
Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail) won’t accept your email without paying them, or forwarding through someone who does
That’s absolutely not true. They sometimes bork some messages and signatures internally, but aside from that, delivery to MS stuff (and that includes a lot of business behind their “outlook protection” service) has been fine for years.
And, contrary to old beliefs, it has been mostly fine all around. Just properly setup DKIM, your DMARC and SPF records, and don’t actually send spam. The worst that could happen is if you’re trying to send through some residential IP, as large blocks can occasionally get blocked. But a cheap hosting anywhere (even in a spamfarm-ridden provider) is very likely to work fine.
I’m sending through a vps and have properly set up all the things (dmarc, dkim, spf, et al).
It was years ago when I set up, but I spent some time trying to get the mail to go through (wife uses Hotmail). The rabbit hole led me to a service I could purchase that would allow the mail to go through. Many fora articles paralleled my own experiences.
I don’t send spam, and my “reputation” is good. I’ll look into it again.
Lol no
Maybe if you’ve got a 10 year old domain that’s been actively sending legit email everyday or something, but my email from my server goes straight to spam on outlook. Literally everywhere else is fine.
// yes my dmarc, dkim and spf are fine. No I’m not on any blocklists. No my IP is not a residential IP lol. The domain and server just turned 1 year old last week :]
Well, I must have imagined all the traffic being fine going out from an OVH server all this time then /shrug
Listen, I’m happy for you that your setup works, truly. I’m absolutely not trying to imply that it isn’t. It’s simply just not “fine all around”. It’s fine for you.
Both work servers, my private server, and a handful of colleagues running the same setups, on various hosts…
Yes, I agree it is anecdotal evidences. But seriously, people going around saying “it’s impossible, you have to pay them for delivery to work” is not only disingenuous, it’s factually wrong.
Are you all on OVH, then? Maybe my IP is the just the problem. Or do you all perhaps have older domains? Did you do any IP warming? I’d love to know. The openness of email is important.
(And fwiw, I’m not the same person as who implied you’d have to pay. In fact, I’ve never heard of that before)
I just looked and they’ve blocked the whole IP range from the VPS provider (digital ocean in this case). I assume many vps’ have the same issue.
Sent a few messages to them so here’s hoping.
Well looks like I may need a new email and password manager soon.
that’s not the only company that does that - i’m doing a survey about employment in tech and there are a lot of complaints about management forcing to use AI tools or threatening employees with AI replacement if they object any stupid demands (among other things). And since lots of companies currently undergo restructuring and layoffs due to bad shit going on - reinterviews are basically a polite way to find an excuse to fire someone. I’ve seen internal reports about such interviews and they are not designed to find out better ways to implement new solutions.
Good note! I’ve been “invited” to a mandatory seminar on company policy on AI. And were looking at laying off teachers as well… I’ll better invent a “omg AI is going to save the world” persona for that seminar. Shouldn’t be too hard - I’m already casually using dashes
i’m more concerned with troubling tendency of “AI tools” being a front to launder money with some obviously cutout products no one actually uses but it takes a considerable spending nevertheless.
Doesn’t the story currently go “AI is so powerful it’ll destroy us all, and I want to take an active part in that?”
well, i don’t know about the world. it can seriously damage your sales pipeline though. i did four surveys about AI adoption over the last two years and that’s one of the major observations that keeps on coming up - anytime you let AI near leads - they’re gone. who knew?
“Thank you CUSTOMER for your interest in PRODUCT. You interest is not only smart but actually sets you on path to revolutionize MARKET SEGMENT.”
do you want to make more personable or more professional?
Wow proton give it at least a decade before you start to enshit… Oh wait. Right on schedule it seems. Unfortunate.
Lol wtf proton was supposed to be good and I was moving to them, ffs, smfh!
introducing this ai stuff without giving proper Linux support and attention it deserves says a lot. What a shame.
Or good calendar integrations and a good calendar widget on android.
AI policies are so dumb. You don’t evaluate people’s perfs on how much they use a tool. So what’s the damn end goal of such evaluation??
"Hey! I did nothing useful this year, but all with AI! -You’re promoted!!
I fixed hundreds of bugs and developed 3 new features all cheered by users! -With AI? -Err… not much -You’re fired!!"
The policy my company has implemented is the opposite. AI use is allowed, but no confidential client information is to be sent to any cloud AI service. Logic is that if we don’t have an actual NDA with OpenAI (or whoever), their privacy policy is not robust enough for us to take on that liability.
Interested in your thoughts on that!
For the LLMs killer feature, software development, you don’t really need confidential information 99% of the time.
It continues to annoy me how both haters and glazers will over-simplify the topic by calling everything AI. There’s a giant difference in usefulness, ethics, and quality between LLMs that produce code guided by an experienced developer, and “art” slopped out for greed by some random schmo.
For the LLMs killer feature, software development,
Oof.
Multiple companies have that approach, I’m not denying there ARE companies doing things right (or at least better).
I work in a company using multiple agents. One of them is supposed to be off Internet, and even with that one we’re not to share sensitive IP.
But Proton is not an isolated case. I bet some execs have invested and promised so much they need to report some good numbers on usage, and you can’t make up productivity improvement if there are people left getting as much done without AI.
no confidential client information is to be sent to any cloud AI service
If the code has been crafted correctly, none should be.
Client info should be 100% data, and remain 100% in production. If you have any dev-side data to test and debug with, it should be 100% procedurally-generated pseudo-data that only imitates client data in terms of gross patterns, and not specific points of data.
Like customer names. Those names should be broadly representative of what is found in the regions the software operates in, in order to demonstrate acceptable data input validation and effective storage compatibility with those names. For example, you don’t want to be storing European names in a DB field that is not UTF-8 compliant, or validating those names by restricting characters to US-ASCII. But any one generated name that just so happens to match an IRL name should be a statistical occurance, and any extended data attached to that entry should (generally) not match any other IRL data for any IRL occurance of that name…
There are some areas where I don’t want tokenmaxxing. Things like automotive and aircraft control systems. Computers that control rockets. Cryptography. You know, places like that.
We’ve all seen how well top-down interviews pays off. Workers bees are the grist of corporations. Pay grades above them decide what happens with all resources - generally without input from they who turn the crank. Bottom-up should be the direction. How to create a product is important to those in sales and marketing.
They’ve been replying on Reddit and it hasn’t made them look better. They say they aren’t firing people and are just looking for people who can accelerate their work with LLMs. Like, sure buddy.
Typical Proton L
Afaik, content on archive.is/today has a history of being manipulated and it‘s generally recommended to avoid it.
Mind linking an article? those are big accusations
Yeah, that would be major news.
Found something, definitely bad and worth skipping for archival reasons if true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5
In the case of paywall or annoyance bypass like above though I’m unsure of an alternative service to use.
Well that’s disappointing.
It was major news, but most people don’t give a shit.
If you read the Proton response to this article, it actually does seem like trying to figure out what’s going on with business process in a bog picture way. Senior managers are interviewing, too. Not all staff are interviewing.
Personally, I think it’s just as much about seeing who can’t QC the slop out off their code as anything else. Maybe. Or maybe I’m wrong, I dunno.
How about don’t use AI to begin with so you won’t have to weed anyone out due to “potential slop”.
I fear you may misunderstand their goal here- direct quote:
“We need people who can translate AI’s capabilities into better products, stronger execution, and new ways of working — and who approach this change with curiosity, judgment, and urgency,” the email reads.
They specifically want to “weed out” the ones who ARE NOT using AI
Welp, even worse. Fuck em.
NOW we agree. Fuck em hard.
If you haven’t used it professionally, LLMs can and do provide huge help. Making this a specially all or nothing argument only highlights a knowledge and experience gap on the part of someone making that argument.
Buuuuut, only an idiot asks for anything better than a starting point or a check of existing work. People relying on it to produce whole cloth work is for hobbyists and sloppers that don’t care or know any better.
You ask why they need to use LLMs at all, and they host their own, Lumo. What clear, financially solid argument can you make that LLMs are an objective net negative to every company? If they see benefits from a headstart on coding and ability to test their security, why demand they take that away when no human code is 100% perfect anyway?
I haven’t used it professionally, but I still know they provide huge help. It’s no secret. But my statement was simply following the logic of the previous commenter, who was saying that Proton are trying to weed out the people who aren’t able to QC out the slop. But if you are in need of QC to remove the slop, you are probably overdosing on agentic coding to begin with.
Anyway, “only an idiot asks for anything better than a starting point”, sure, definitely agree. But what percentage of being a professional developer at a company involves prototyping something new, and doing “starting points”? Most development is just tacking on new shit to old shit. Clamping shit together with other shit. I guess that’s the issue?, which causes people to still use AI because they are pretty much forced to, sometimes literally, and so actually do ask for more than just a starting point. And then here we are…
I’m coming back to this only because a relevant post came up elsewhere on Lemmy that’s maybe worth both of us seeing in the context of our own opinions.
Imagine still carrying water for a corporation.
Aren’t they a foundation?
No, they have a for profit company and a nonprofit entity that is a major shareholder. They operated just like a corporation with all the typical warts.
Yuck, they really make it seem like they are just a non profit.
They are definitely gross, but so is every corporation. The real lesson is stop giving companies money.
Imagine being so disillusioned with the world that you assume that no one can have an opinion and think critically about two opposing views without it necessarily being some corporate brand fanboy bullshit.
Here, let me help you. Proton doesn’t give a fuck about you.
Yeah, was that supposed to be profound or something?
As the 1% that actually pays, I’m invested in them succeeding and not enshittifying so I don’t have to take the time to move my email hosting. End of story. I have my own email domain, so I can kick them to the curb any day I like. And expect to have to one day.
Did you need to complain about it some more? Does baby need a Binky? Or did you only ever use the free thing and it didn’t meet your expectations of what free things should be? Sorry your free thing wasn’t spectacular enough :(
Knew it!
Knew what? That someone doesn’t want the thing they pay for to get enshittified? That it’s smart to make plans to not let any company control how you communicate?
Wow. Such insight.
That you were a paying customer hence your rabid defense of a garbage company. Every time I get massive pushback it is always someone that has bought into the security theatre corporate solution that they sell.
I am sorry you continue to give them money. Take care!
I for one am not sticking around to find out.
Oh cmon, now which email provider do i use?
Start with buying your own domain.
If you are interested, self hosting email has an outdated bad reputation, I have had much more problems with google blocking microsoft email from custom domains than from self hosted emails.
That said, it is still a lot of work. For a hands off system, find a national provider that can use your domain, so you can switch later while retaining your address.
The one thing that rubbed me the wrong way is that it treats the underlying host as “disposable”, in that it intentionally does not support in-place OS upgrades. As in, if you want to jump from an older LTS to the most recent, you need to explicitly spin up a blank, new LTS host, run the installation script from scratch, and then restore the data from an overnight backup.
I can understand an immutable container/binary with external data storage and config settings, but flipping the script and locking down the underlying OS? Yeah, that seems excessively unnecessary.
Ain’t no such thing as “buying domain”.
Only renting.Good point. Though you are of course right, and it will cost money in perpetuity, I think it is important to distinguish between locations and which top level domain one buys under. At least where I live, I have government guaranteed rights regarding switching registrars and keeping my domain, and a court is needed (or lack of payment) to force me to abandon my domains. That way I avoid the problem of vendor lockinn.
Yeah, self-host … then you end up on a VPS with a bad spam/RBL reputation because they have other customers being spammy dickheads, and their entire IP allocation is listed. This covers far too many VPS providers. So, when you’re trying to simply get things done, you end up randomly having to troubleshoot your emails not going through or ending up in remote spam folders.
Its a mess. Email sucks. Wouldn’t suggest self-hosting if you have low patience or are busy.
then you end up on a VPS with a bad spam/RBL reputation because they have other customers being spammy dickheads, and their entire IP allocation is listed.
Sure, if you don’t do your own research and legwork, first.
In fact, there are a shitton more bad corners you can paint yourself into if you are too fucking lazy to do some trivially basic research ahead of time, from hosts to software chosen to how you configure things.
Hell, a lot of these bad corners also involve turnkey solutions hosted by others. So simply having someone else do all the work can hose you just as badly. Sure, Azure/O365 or AWS Workmail or Google Workspace solutions are usually not that kind of corner, but unless you are willing to pay out the nose for minimal needs, you’re usually going to go for something a lot smaller and possibly more sketchy.
I think the best option for self-hosters who don’t want too much headache from their email is to host the email yourself, but send your emails through a relay other providers actually trust. It sucks to get so close to full control and give it up, but if you’re like me, you send almost no email, so there’s almost nothing at all to see for the relay, and all your received mail still comes straight to your server.
Self-host if you care about privacy and tech ethics, otherwise whatever seems most stable.
Self hosting an email service is a pain in the ass since most providers will block your email or show it as spam
Hasn’t been my experience with a correct DKIM & DMARC setup.
I didn’t mean to suggest that it was easy, simple, or even a good idea. Just that we live in hell.
Any EU/Swiss-based provider that takes their job seriously, really. Here’s a starting point.
Proton’s encryption has always been more a publicity stunt than anything. A service that’s really committed to privacy shows it in their values and the way they act, not with technological gimmicks.
All that Proton’s encryption has really accomplished is that their services are one step away from complete customer lock-in: if they discontinue their “bridge” connectors tomorrow and force you to use their website and mobile app, and you haven’t backed up your email elsewhere, you’re fucked.
Migrating your email service to another provider should normally take one hour, provided you use your own domain(s) and back up your mailboxes regularly over IMAP to your own storage. Then it’s just a matter of changing some DNS records and waiting for them to propagate.
So call me paranoid but I’ll never use a provider that doesn’t offer standard IMAP and SMTP access to the mailbox.
