The thing I am interested in proton docs is if it can have API functionality. Proton docs allow anonymous users to write things and I wish if there was an API functionality, then people can use it to create anonymous/(pseudonomous?) comments and hose those comments as a comment engine and many other interesting things like creating forms themselves on it.
I would love to build on proton but Alas the API isn't open source and recently with Proton meet and its controversy, my trust on proton has shifted a bit too which dampened my enthusiasm in all of this.
(To make the API I even used puppeeter instances to do it, and after quite a long time I was able to succeed actually but that's just not scalable)
To your point about automation, I'm increasingly wondering whether the "post-labor economy" would be anywhere near as idealistic as it's typically presented. If people aren't working, they're presumably not paying taxes, and without taxes, there's much less incentive for a government to make choices in the people's best interest.
Or put another way, perhaps there's no representation without taxation.
You can argue we're already there. Politicians don't do anything for their constituents if big money disagrees.
I still remember when Obama was first elected and we thought we'd get something close to European style health care. Nobody was like oh gosh, golly I'm getting a subsidy to afford for profit health care insurance.
From technological point of view robo communism is very possible. I just don't know if it's what we're going to get.
The alternative is an endless spiral downward. You have fast food restaurants in NYC where outsourced customer service takes orders. Having a robot flip patties isn't hard. You could end up turning 6 jobs into 1.
Which on its surface is a good thing. Food service is ultimately a very dangerous job, and wouldn't it be great if those other five people could be working on art or something else.
We need to rethink what makes a person valued. I'm not religious, but from that angle, as a child of God you have inherit value.
This value exceeds any network you can seek to obtain.
Strongly disagree with this sentiment. Influence can have a lot of sources, from institutional authority to simply being persuasive, which is distinct from manipulation.
In this context influence and persuasion are being used interchangeably, but persuasion is the act of winning someone over to your point of view, so they understand the topic as you do. It respects their autonomy and acknowledges that people can change their mind when presented with different perspectives. Oftentimes, being likeable (or at least respectable) is a prerequisite for getting someone to listen to you in the first place, so it's a central pillar to being influential.
Manipulation on the other hand, doesn't respect someone's autonomy. It might involve deception, threats, coercion, etc, but it ultimately aims to make someone do something that they don't want to do.
If you're getting a little kid to eat his dinner for instance, persuasion might appeal to his motivations (e.g. having more energy to run faster), while manipulation might look like saying not eating would make his mom sad (guilt tripping), or that he wouldn't get to play with his favorite toy (threat).
I'd argue that {someone who is good at getting desired outcomes} is going to have a toolbox of carrots, sticks, and other things and I think sometimes you are going to be 100% ethically happy with how a situation went and sometimes you are going to feel some conflict between your values. [1]
I'm not sure where the line between "manipulation" and "persuasion" is exactly but certainly a person's intent and how they think about themselves and other people has something to do with it. There are many feats that I can do today with ease that my evil twin coveted a few years ago and just couldn't do because he had a bad attitude.
Reminds me of when Bjork was protesting the construction of a new hydropower plant in Iceland, when the Director of Iceland's National power company (behind the project) was actually her uncle. I used to be romantically involved with someone in his side of the family and noticed Bjork was conspicuously absent from any family gatherings he hosted, of which there were many.
Is this before or after you account for the initial training impact? Because that would need to be factored in for a good faith calculation here, much as the companies would rather we didn't.
That was my initial opinion, but more recently it's been established that there's quite a bit of a cat and mouse game here – people have come up with elaborate workarounds to avoid getting booted or limited by the platform, while the platforms come up with increasingly sophisticated monitoring to catch them before they win too much.
Though to your point I think these big winners are not representative of most users, who in my experience often think they're beating the system but in reality just don't log their losses very well. The house always wins etc etc.
While some ideas are more obvious than others I always wonder whether the same insights occurred independently (of each other -- excuse the poor choice of words), or if the ideas can all trace their roots back to the same teachings.
> I always wonder whether the same insights occurred independently
No. Authors, Henry David Thoreau in 1854 and here Melville in 1851, and others at the time in that region were very heavily influenced by Hindu scriptures especially the Bhagavad Gita. Hindu mythology was mentioned several times in Moby Dick including referring to the whale as the Fish Incarnation of Vishnu.
Fascinating how much this varies by culture too. People generally have attitudes similar to you in Nordic countries, or even Seattle, but then you go to South American countries, or India, and it feels like everyone talks to everyone all the time.
Danes are, according to the internet, in the "don't talk to me ever" group, but I don't think that true. Mostly I believe that's because the areas of the internet where people talk about the glory of self-checkout and the benefits of wearing big ass head phones are a little self-selective in their view of the world.
Obviously you should not bother people, but even in random encounters many people absolutely loves to talk. In many you can see their eyes light up if you talk to them of ask them a question. The internet has us so conditioned to believing that people just want to be left alone that we miss out on a ton of wonderful human interaction.
We honestly can't keep both talking about a loneliness epidemic and at the same time push the narrative "don't talk to me ever". We should absolutely respect e.g. people on the autism spectre or anxiety and their issues with talking to strangers, but I feel like we're allowing them to dictate a mode of interaction, or avoidance thereof, which isn't healthy for the rest of us.
Google docs may not be private but it takes <1 second to load when I click the browser bookmark, vs 11 seconds to load a Proton document.
11-second load time for a page is a lot of friction in 2026, no matter how secure your product is.
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