> This time I’m doing things the right way by connecting my own domain to a mail host. I’m currently with Fastmail since they were by far the most popular option when I asked for suggestions on the fediverse.
Question for the general public: why Fastmail over Proton?
For more accounts/users (e.g. Proton Unlimited or Fastmail Family), the pricing is reasonable. But mailbox.org certainly looks like the best value at first glance unless you need a lot of storage. If you've got 6 users and/or several domains, FastMail does look pretty nice.
It's been a few years since I went with Fastmail over Proton, but if I remember correctly Proton prioritizes privacy while Fastmail prioritizes other features which were higher up on my list, like storage (not as important to me now), custom domains, email aliases. Fastmail also gives you static webhosting, which I don't think Proton offers (could be wrong).
Proton apps are very janky in comparison. For example:
You open Proton Mail.
You'd like to read the second email in your inbox so you hit J a couple times.
Nothing happens.
J/K don't work unless an email is already selected so you use your mouse instead.
You hit T to move the email to the trash.
You'd like to read the next email so you hit J.
Nothing happens.
Hitting T didn't leave you with a selected email so J/K don't work.
I have anecdotally heard that proton has some more deliverability issues than Fastmail since it’s more preferred by scammers for its privacy features. That influenced my decision since I was probably already going to face some delivery challenges being on a custom domain.
My anecdotal experience has been the opposite. We used to have an old email domain which, due to Google workspace misconfiguration, had terrible deliverability. Switching to Proton solved all our problems on that side.
I use and like proton for my custom domain. Haven’t used fast mail though so I can’t compare. I like that messages to other proton users are automatically encrypted.
I've used Fastmail for years but a year ago switched to Proton.
For me the only reason to switch to Proton was that its hosted within the European continent, while Fastmail is hosted in
I would say that Fastmail is the "Ferrari of e-mail" services. It does everything well, or extremely well, especially if you have more advanced setups like wildcard domains.
In particularly, I miss being able to send from wildcard domains. While proton has a thing called simplelogin, it only works kind of seamlessly if you get an e-mail on a wildcard address and want to reply to that same address. Sending from any * domain requires you to make the address via the simplelogin page and isn't nearly as seamless. While you can make some sending addresses (i.e. regular aliases) in the protonmail interface, that's a trap, because once you've made an alias, you can't delete it unless there's no mail related to it in your mailbox anymore (even if you have a catch-all setup; I wonder if it has anything to do with how the encryption keys are setup, but it still sucks).
I also miss both snoozing and pinning mail. Officially, the proton mail apps (1) do support snoozing, but that requires "conversation view" to be enabled. I think the conversation view over groups e-mails too aggressively, and don't really understand why snoozing without conversation view isn't possible. It's utterly annoying. As far as I know, pinning e-mails isn't a thing in the proton apps. There are "stars" but these could have been labels (which also exist). They don't pin the e-mail to the top.
The proton mobile apps also lack various settings which are in the web interface, like access to sieves. The apps are sometimes a bit laggy, especially if you have a lot of e-mails, although there seem to have been some improvement on this end. I also still get double "fingerprint to unlock" requests sometimes.
Then there's theming, which I can imagine is (even) more of an opinion, but I liked the Fastmail interface more than the proton interface. I think its cleaner. Not a particular fan of any of the themes of protonmail.
I left Fastmail just as it added offline access. This was originally my biggest gripe. I might have stayed longer if they added it just before I left.
For Proton, they have been releasing a lot of new services lately. I hope they will spend a year or more, just polishing what they currently have. They did say they will spend some time on polish in a blogpost recently, but haven't really seen the fruits from this yet (or I care about different things than they do?). And I hope I will one day be able to add more domains to my account. Even with Visionary, you only get 6 domains for 6 users, and no way to add more.
I sincerely hope Proton will never add any of the AI nagging , the OP was talking about. If they do, I'll leave the instant.
I agree we weren't "meant" to live in nations of 350m people and have incredibly large and complex societies and institutions but we do and it's impossible without hierarchy.
A model, given exactly the same inputs, will return exactly the same outputs.
But your prompts are not the only inputs. Among other things, there is a random seed injected by the vendor.
That is a primary source of non-determinism.
Then, of course, is the fact that you don't personally have an old copy of the model, and the vendor isn't going to keep the model forever, and there are no unit tests to make sure that, faced with prompts like you gave it before, the newer models won't suffer major regressions in the functionality you were using.
And even if there were no non-determinism, the models suffer greatly (much more so than traditional compilers) from the butterfly effect.
It is literally impossible to pin down part of your prompt in such a way that it always will contribute to good outcomes, and such that you can simply vary a tiny bit of the prompt to logically correlate with tiny variations in the output.
It seemed unlikely that ancestral populations had so many physiological differences, but not cognition. This seems like the last piece to compliment observed IQ differences between groups and levels of civilizational attainment.
I don't understand how that argument could even work. Since the dawn of recorded history there has been (1) wildly varying levels of civilizational achievement depending on the era and (2) not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations.
We could get into the reasons why physiological differences ("height") behave differently in genetics than behavioral differences ("cognition"), but we don't even reach that --- first you have to explain to me how genetic advantages are the reason European-extracted people are so successful now, but weren't in play when we were getting our asses handed to us by the Abbasids and Tang Dynasty Chinese.
- Among those who believe in intellectual differences among human groups, very few believe Europeans are the most intelligent group. The prevailing opinion you would find is that both Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians (your second example) are more intelligent on average.
- Northwest Europeans encountered intense selection over a Millennia starting around 300AD through a couple of mechanisms: The Church banning cousin marriage, and Biparte Manorialism. This resulted in the destruction of kinship networks, established the nuclear family, and selected for the high-trust peoples that enabled a kind of society you can still only find among those peoples.
You're not even responding to the question. You're describing (what you believe to be) features of global civilization today, projected out from "300AD". But at various points over that interval, European civilization wasn't on the leaderboard, and was being outcompeted by the Khmer, Mali, China, you name it.
You see this all the time in these kinds of discussions, the assumption that because "western" civilization possesses X, Y, and Z traits, history must consist of a linear progression towards realizing those traits. Obviously, no. For many centuries the west was brutal, illiterate, tribal, and chaotic, primitive in ways other cultures were not.
It's just a tedious history lesson except that it abruptly falsifies the idea that you can look at "civilizational achievement" and reason back to genetic superiority. Obviously you cannot. You could come up with some other evidence for genetic superiority! But this particular argument is patently wrong.
The notion that you can only find a high-trust society among Europeans looks like transparent bunk to me, easily refuted by looking at other highly developed countries. And the notion that this might be a matter of genetics even more so. Sadly, we won't be able to use CRISPR therapy as a way of improving social trust anytime soon!
What you call "westernised" is just describing the adoption of bourgeois and open market norms. There's nothing about these norms that's inherent to what we call the West: classical Western culture (Greece and Rome, but the attitude persisted well into the middle ages and ultimately fed into multiple streams of modern-era thought) similar to other ancient societies, actively despised market participants, broadly equating them with swindlers.
Ireland and Eastern Europe are outside the Hajnal line, and yet they're one of the biggest growth success stories. I suppose we'll get our answer soon enough as to whether it really matters. Do note however that a late marriage age for females (the key finding of the Hajnal line) implies that they have to be enabled to self-support via work, which was a key step towards modern bourgeois norms and was also inherently correlated to general prosperity.
The issue isn't that it's impossible for their to be a causal genetic mechanism behind highly polygenic behavioral traits; whether you call that "filtering" or not doesn't change anything.
The issue is that there's no time interval long enough and directionally stable enough for that to have happened. What you're seeing instead are people who have built a sort of civilizational leaderboard in their head based on current events and projected it back to (apparently) 300AD. That's obviously not what happened in real history.
It takes much longer to develop new features via random mutation and selection than it does to alter the distribution of existing features via selection. This is trivially true, no? I’m not sure what the argument against this is, please elaborate.
Like I said, it doesn't matter what you call it, what matters is that you won't find stable associations of civilizational progress and ethnic groups over the course of history. You can compose other coherent arguments for causal genetic superiority, but it can't be "civilizational achievement".
Okay, I am focusing on the one assertion you made which I quoted, and I think you are arguing the top level point back at me.
Features can change at a population level in the amount of time that different human groups have been separated from one another. That is all I’m saying here. It seemed like you didn’t agree with that point, and I’m interested if you can refute it in a well reasoned way since the implications are pretty counter-zeitgeist and being outside the zeitgeist is annoying.
By the way, “genetic superiority” is a category error and I find it annoying when people talk like that. An animal can only be better or worse in a particular environment, and even then different animals can exist in a similar niche without being better or worse. This sort of rhetoric has made this area very hard to discuss.
I saw in the article that male pattern baldness became way less common over the studied period. Their definition of "way less" was 1-2%. Even if it wasn't the case that, lacking natural weapons, generalizable cognitive faculties are highly advantageous for our species regardless of factors like climate, there's not any real reason to figure cognitive changes would occur way faster than the 1-2% reduction in MPB. So is the argument that some large scale population has a mean IQ that differs by 1-2%? That's vastly less than the impact of poverty or childhood nutrition.
I would! I grew up in a low-density suburb near Portland, then lived in small-town Minnesota, Madison, SF, Chicago, and Cincinnati. I didn't own a car until my 30s, and I currently drive about once a month---camping, Costco, lumber, that sort of thing. Pretty much all my day-to-day travel is and has been by bicycle (now an e-bike), foot, train, or bus.
Situations vary, obviously! I'm no stranger to rural life, I wound up in a car-dependent suburb with terrible bus service for a bit, and my partner is in the trades. Private vehicles are sensible and essential answers to lots of problems.
But as the Netherlands illustrates, it's not all-or-nothing: reductions in car utilization and car infrastructure have real benefits. Broadly speaking I think we can and should disincentivize private car use, increase public transit frequency, and build networks of protected infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-car means of getting around.
I'm a CSO.
Oh nice, Strategy or Security?
Stonehenge.
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