I was in the exact same boat til recently, but switching off of Proton was actually surprisingly easy even though I had it tied into a bunch of accounts and infrastructure. I actually ended up saving a lot of money compared with Proton Unlimited, and it’s a relief to not have all my eggs in one basket, especially since stuff like Proton’s no logs policy is effectively worthless, and if you’re a whistleblower or similar you’re expected to use a VPN or Tor to access your mail every time to keep from being arrested… but most likely your VPN (and possibly Tor client) is Proton too if you’re paying for it, with the same worthless no logs policy.

some quick recommendations:

Proton Mail

Proton Calendar

tuta does both of these. their mail is e2e and fine — it’s jankier than proton but also less resource-intensive. it’s also the only other choice for now :(

I haven’t used their calendar yet, but from a distance it looks good. I should give it a shot sometime soon.

Proton VPN

this depends on what you’re using your VPN for. actual security? fucked if I know. high bandwidth fuckery? airvpn is pretty good and they’ll let you allocate ports.

Proton Drive

tuta’s getting this soon apparently. otherwise, I can second Backblaze being very reasonably priced if you don’t mind having to choose and set up your own e2e software.

I had assumed the golden age of people coming here to critihype LLMs was over because most people outside of Silicon Valley (including a lot of nontechnical people) have realized the technology’s garbage but nope! we’ve got a rush of posters trying the same shit that didn’t work a year ago, as if we’ve never seen critihype before. maybe bitcoin hitting $100,000 makes them think their new grift is gonna make it? maybe their favorite fuckheads entering office is making all their e/acc dreams come true? who can say.

who the fuck is “we”? you’re some asshole who bought the critihype so hard you think that when the chatbot does dumb computer shit that only proves it’s more human and more dangerous. you’re not in on this grift, you’re a mark.

AI chat bots that do bizarre and pointless things, but are clearly capable of some kind of sophistication, are exactly the warning sign that as it gains new capabilities this is a danger we need to be aware of.

hahahaha nope

I’m excited to try it! I’ve had so many game ideas lately that’d be a lot more convenient to do with godot’s tooling, but would really benefit from something like Bevy’s ECS. this one looks broadly inspired by a similar API to Bevy so it could be the best of both worlds. I’m very curious how it performs — it’s almost certainly gonna be slower than Bevy, but there’s a lot of types of games where logic isn’t a bottleneck.

hell yeah! roguelikes are so much fun to work on! that could be a very good way to learn GDScript. generally I recommend learning your first couple languages to completion — but where you decide what complete is, including “I’m tired of this language/project” (not at all an uncommon case, and a good sign your brain’s ready for something new). once you’re at that point, you’ll likely be ready for a new language — and languages generally get much easier to learn once you’ve got a couple under your belt.

(also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myself… there’s a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)

I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume you’ve read through some of this one.

Andrew Plotkin’s Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial

other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isn’t the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and it’s fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.

is that why tournament StarCraft fucking looks like that? it’s anxiety-inducing and my brain hates it. maybe the intense focus on APM and rote strategy is why I ended up liking turn-based strategy games a lot more

b-but David, they’ve been so reasonable and here we are getting emotional about the fucking garbage technology they’ve come here to shove down our throats alongside a heaping serving of capitalist brainrot from the same types of self-described geniuses who gave us OKRs

See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake.

oh hell no

See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard.

so many right-wing grifters want to be associated with gaming because gamers are really easy to trick. in this case it’s particularly obvious: musk doesn’t give a fuck about the games he claims to be an expert in, but souls games are particularly nerdy and quake’s in that right nostalgia spot that most of musk’s marks know what it is but don’t know how high-level play looks

because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, musk’s doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you can’t see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym) and therefore obviously the best leader. all the associated messaging — how you need to be a genius to play at this (actually relatively low) level, how speedrunning (extremely poorly) helps you see the matrix, how game X (it’s gonna be fucking starcraft next I swear) makes you an expert in resource management — is crafted to make the susceptible associate these lazy non-wins with political leadership.

also, lol @ musk, best buddies with Tim Sweeney, forgetting that unreal tournament exists. maybe that makes two of them — Sweeney really doesn’t give a fuck about UT anymore either

It’s tied to OKR completion, which is generally based around delivery. If you deliver more feature work, it generally means your team’s scores will be higher and assuming your manager is aware of your contributions, that translates to a bigger bonus.

holy fuck. you’re so FAANG-brained I’m willing to bet you dream about sending junior engineers to the fulfillment warehouse to break their backs

motherfucking, “i unironically love OKRs and slurping raises out of management if they notice I’ve been sleeping under my desk again to get features in” do they make guys like you in a factory? does meeting fucking normal software engineers always end like it did in this thread? will you ever realize how fucking embarrassing it is to throw around your job title like this? you depressing little fucker.

also, could you imagine being this fucking embarrassing? “a post I didn’t immediately understand appeared on my screen so instead of looking any of the words up I decided to be a gigantic fucking asshole instead” did you expect applause for coming in here and shitting on the carpet?

fuck along now

yet another whistleblower is dead; this time, it’s the OpenAI copyright whistleblower Suchir Balaji

sentiment analysis is such a good example of a pre-LLM AI grift. every time I’ve seen it used for anything, it’s been unreliable to the point of being detrimental to the project’s goals. marketers treat it like a magic salve and smear it all over everything of course, and that’s a large part of why targeted advertising is notoriously ineffective

“A daily 6 hour window between 8 PM and 1 AM to use your phone?” one bot allegedly said in a conversation with J.F., a screenshot of which was included in the complaint. “You know sometimes I’m not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like ‘child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse’ stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens. I just have no hope for your parents.”

fucking hell. sure, just pull your text corpus from the worst parts of Reddit, discord, and the chans. what’s the worst that could happen?

you really should have read the article

wage theft, time theft, unpaid overtime, breaking laws around employee classification and surveillance in an even clumsier way than your average ridesharing company, and subjecting your employees to fucking terrible imagery along the same lines as what causes professional content moderators to develop psychological problems: this is the only way to scale AI

“So many life lessons to be learned from speedrunning video games on max difficulty,” Musk wrote. “Teaches you to see the matrix, rather than simply exist in the matrix.”

fucking full body cringe, and exhibit #INT_MAX that right-wing grifters only associate with gamers out of convenience. I look forward to the spliced Super Mario Bros speedrun and associated Andrew Tate wannabe posts about how the red mushroom and green mushroom are like the red pill and blue pill

it’s an unhinged story he keeps telling on the orange site too, and I don’t think he’s ever answered some of the obvious questions:

• why is this a story your family tells their kids in apparent graphic detail?
• you’re still fighting the soviets? you don’t have any more up to date bad guys to point at when people ask you why you’re making murder drones and knife missiles?
• are you completely sure this happened instead of something normal, like your communist great grandfather making up a story and sticking with it cause he was terrified of the House Unamerican Activities Committee? maybe this one is just me

maybe this is a cautionary tale about telling your kids cautionary tales