Sorry to be frank and for the upcoming rant as your site is mostly fine, but looking at most websites I visite these days be it from a company, a service, a webshop, an open source project, a forum, a blog, a newspaper or almost any form of social media. I'd say I do not know for whom anyone is designing those sites, but I can clearly say it is not for me (as a human user and/or customer).

The websites with the best UX I know are mostly those who haven't really changed for the past 20 years.

I might be crazy but assume to not be alone in this one, as I have yet to find someone who likes their back button being hijacked. Likes being blasted by an autoplay video on max volume. Likes seeing the UI reorganized almost every other month. Likes seeing constantly moving and/or blinking elements on a mostly text based website.

I've yet to hear from someone liking no longer being able to say "no" and being only allowed to say "yes" or "maybe later" (which is a code for "I'll annoy you till you finally break and say yes"). I've yet to hear someone liking to have less informationen visible and being forced to navigate a maze of menu items for things which used to be just their. Or who simply likes not being able to tell what is or isn't an element which can be interacted with.

Who are those people who like to give almost every other site their phone number? And who are those who likes telling almost every other click how the "experience" with the website was so far? Who are those people who like being reminded about the mostly useless annoying AI assistance every other click?

I've yet to find someone who sad "Oh boy, it was really nice that they asked me to give the online shop on some rando rating site 5 stars". Or "Oh boy, I sure love the popup about signing up to the awesome informative newsletter each time I visit the site". Or "I really like that my PC fan starts to spin audible whenever I go to this website". Or "Oh yes, I was so happy being asked to install the mobile app for an rando website I found via a search engine" Or "It's really nice that I always have to solve a captcha and noone is telling me why"

In my experience people do not like modern website, they at most tolerate them. It's like paying taxes. Can't do nothing about it.

Edit: Typos

> The websites with the best UX I know are mostly those who haven't really changed for the past 20 years.

> I might be crazy but assume to not be alone in this one, as I have yet to finde someone who likes their back button being hijacked. Likes being blasted by an autoplay video on max volume. Likes seeing the UI reorganized almost every other month. Likes seeing constantly moving and/or blinking elements on a mostly text based website.

Are these really common features for modern websites? I think most browsers block auto-play of videos. Back button hijacks: annoying but again I feel like I stumbled across that more often 5-10 years ago.

Nowadays the annoying website thing seems to be screwing around with the scrollbar.

Although, I definitely do agree that the 20-30 years ago style is best. Just give me some text. I’m going to block the JavaScript and set my own background colors and font anyway, so the less clutter the better.

It seems that websites keep finding ways around my autoplay blocking settings. Back button hijacks I haven't seen in a while I don't think, but I feel the sentiment.

Honestly, the second to last paragraph reminded me a lot of my experience with eclipse back in 2011 to 2014. I think it was called the eclipse dance back than. A random order of clearing the cache, rebuilding, disabling/enabling plugins, creating a new workspace and restarting the ide would solve most problems. It is one of the reasons I developed a disdain for eclipse. I later even switched jobs mostly to get away from it.

Thank you for the link. This sadly makes me consider switch to another email provider. I think it is great that they listen to their customers, it really is, but it makes me think that what I value in an email provider seems to be different from what the average (or at least questioned) customer values.

The words privacy and ai are in my mind almost irreconcilable. I wish them all the luck in the world and hope their other customers stay happy, but it seems they will have to lose me. Which is fine. I think they do what is best for proton, it is just that proton might be no longer what is best for me.

I just keep wondering if companies know that while lacking a certain feature may cost them customers, having it may do so as well.

>> The words privacy and ai are in my mind almost irreconcilable.

You can run many AI system on user machines. Some versions of stable diffusion can run on laptops. They can be run privately, even on air-gapped machines if necessary.

But not Proton and Scribe's AI: it trains locally and send the combined gradient update to a central server,

No it doesn't

Wireshark it yourself.

No, this is not correct. Proton Scribe cannot read user emails, and relies on the open-source Mistral model.

This would appear to be a lie.

> The words privacy and ai are in my mind almost irreconcilable.

Can you explain why?

Under privacy I understand that I have to the limits of my ability control over with whom I share information. But the same is true for anyone sharing information with me. If I have to input any data from someone else to a program without their implicit or explicit permission it breaks, at least in my opinion, their privacy. The same is true if I for example forward an email addressed only to me to another person. I think I can not expect others to at least try to not break my privacy if I break theirs. Though I can not control other people and would never desire to do so. And I may break unknowingly their privacy as they may do with mine. We all make mistakes and modern software has become horrendous in telling the user what it does.

I know that email providers are scanning the received and send emails. But that is something both party involved know (or at least should know) beforehand. This is what I mean with implicit permission. People sending me an email can and must expect that my email provider will scan their emails to a certain degree. They can und must expect, that I will store their email on a local device for an indefinite period. But they can also expect that I will not post their emails somewhere on the web or forward it to someone else. If they desire otherwise they may state their desire and if I agree with them I will try to accommodate for that to the best of my ability.

For most cases I know about in which ai is used there is neither an implicit nor an explicit permission involved and just the assumption that the other side is ok with their data being shared with a 3rd party as long as it is with a machine which may or may not promises to run locally. Having this permission is an assumption I will not make and which I think is wrong.

Hence why in my mind privacy and ai is irreconcilable. Because the only way I can see to have them both is with an incredible unpractical overhead of managing all this implicit and explicit permissions.

Hopes this answers your question. Though I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else.

Thank you for replying, but I don't quite understand what you wrote in the context of a writing assistant where there is no sharing in any form with anyone.

Generative LLM's like this often reveal confidential info that they were trained on, and anything provided to them in order to generate other output can be used as future training data which can then be re-iterated to others

The latter can't be true since the input never leaves your computer, it's private information. The comments you're writing right now on the other hand are public information and can and will be used to train an LLM.

If i could upvote this a thousand times, at least, that post belongs at the top.

After the submission it was actually on the front page. But then quickly got flagged then unflagged (I didn't reach out to dang).

And it is.

What email provider would you switch to?

I am considering the same thing.

I would suggest Fastmail. They are excellent in what they provide. Just email and calendar. So if you are using proton other features (pass, drive..etc) then it wouldn't be 1:1 replacment.

My concern with them is that they don't store email encrypted at rest and being an Australian company their laws allow the government to put back doors in and are not obliged to tell their clients.

The government law is out of their control but not having your emails at rest unencrypted.

What's your source on them not encrypting emails at rest? They claim they do: https://www.fastmail.com/features/security/

I am terribly sorry. I got this wrong.

It is end to end encryption they don't support as this article explains. Yes, it is two very different things however just as important.

In the past few years I've tried Proton, Mailbox.org and now I'm with Posteo.de. Unfortunately they don't support custom domains, but I use SimpleLogin to solve this problem. Overall I'm pretty happy with this setup.

While I can only speak for myself, I kindly disagree with the reasoning.

The main reason that made me stop using RSS/Atom in my private life was that most sites stopped providing full feeds and instead opted for only showing the headlines or headlines with a short snippet. Even those sites without any ads started doing that for some reason. If I have to use a browser to read the articles anyway I might as well simply check once a day my usual sites, because that will just work for the foreseeable future in contrast to any RSS/Atom alternative which is doomed to have the same fate.

The main reason that made me stop using RSS/Atom in my professional life was compliance and the only available RSS reader being Microsoft Outlook which is IMHO an awful RSS reader. Also I had ever so often a clash with our internal IT-Department because they assumed my frequent pulling of some job-related feeds were due to a computer virus and it just became a hassle to convince them again (and again) that it was not. So instead I made a daily reminder with a time slot of 15min to look manually at the few job related sites and use mostly the link-highlighting of the browser to identify if I already read something.

To sum it all up. As soon as RSS/Atom did not work anymore for me I opted to adapt in a way that would not force me to adapt again. Given that any 3rd party service is bound to be broken at some point I'd rather accept my fate than fighting the inevitable.

I'm in the partial "work from home" group and I agree to most points and would stress it is in my experience by far easier (and less stressful) to have a very good equipped home office than an at least half-decent equipped office.

For my home office I simply buy the equipment I need. But for the companies office I have to ask multiple level of management for simple equipment like a mouse with more than 3 buttons just to be told that a 3 button mouse was good enough.

Probably off-topic: I may miss something but I have the feeling the shown C program should segfault a lot as the variable `fname` in `char* make_filename(const char*)` does not seem to be initialized.

Yeah it should be something like

    char fname[BUFSIZE];

Also better to pass that in as a variable I don't think you can return a char array allocated on the stack like that

I do not know why, but by default the body element has an overflow of hidden set via css. There is probably a good reason to do this that I do not know about. Would love to know the reason behind that from a WebDev as it strikes me as unnecessary having seen the page with JS and without JS and not being able to see much of a difference.

Might be to avoid a visual reflow - otherwise the content will render, then the webfont will load and the whole page will reflow and jump around.

Google amp used to have a ridiculous 4 second timeout waiting for the font

It might not be the best example but in my experience Microsoft seemingly tries with Windows the approach of (almost) everything being an API. It might be the Windows API specifically or that I'm mainly driving Linux outside of work, but I often found the approach of (almost) everything being an API annoying.

The presence of PowerShell softened my annoyance somewhat, but it never the less often feels unnecessary over-complex and overtly limiting. Tasks I can do in a few seconds on Linux often require reading long convoluted documentations and writing quite long PowerShell scripts or even full blown programs on Windows.

My experience is that the more basic and simple the task at hand the more annoying having to search thru pages upon pages of documentation and writing scripts became. But the more complex a task became the more I was happy not having to always deal with (and error handle) parsing an integer out of a string or splitting a string by a certain character.