this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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TranscriptA post by [object Object] (@zzt@mas.to) saying: courtesy of @davidgerard@circumstances.run, Proton is now the only privacy vendor I know of that vibe codes its apps: In the single most damning thing I can say about Proton in 2025, the Proton GitHub repository has a “cursorrules” file. They’re vibe-coding their public systems. Much secure! I am once again begging anyone who will listen to get off of Proton as soon as reasonably possible, and to avoid their new (terrible) apps in any case. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114961415946154957

It has a reply by the author saying: in an unsurprising update for those familiar with how Proton operates, they silently rewrote their monorepo’s history to purge .cursor and hide that they were vibe coding: https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/2a5e2ad4db0c84f39050bf2353c944a96d38e07f

given the utter lack of communication from Proton on this, I can only guess they’ve extracted .cursor into an external repository and continue to use it out of sight of the public

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[–] galoisghost@aussie.zone 153 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Um, it’s a public repository. You can view the code that’s been added. Even if it IS AI generated, you can review it yourself.

I’m as anti-AI as anyone but this is misplaced AI-alarmism.

[–] oatscoop@midwest.social 33 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

can review it yourself.

You're a supervisor and you have 2 employees: Bill and Jim. As a supervisor your job is to ensure the work is being done correctly.

Bill is competent and rarely makes major mistakes. Jim does a decent job most of the time ... but he's also a savant at screwing up -- he regularly fucks up in ways that aren't immediately obvious but are guaranteed to cause serious problems days to weeks from the screw up.

You can glance over Bill's work and be fairly certain it's fine. You need to go over every single piece Jim's work to check for problems, and even then some are probably going to slip through.

AI is currently Jim, and Jim has no business writing code for anything privacy or security focused.

[–] grindemup@lemmy.world -3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is a great example since AI isn't taking on the role of an independent software engineer here, so there is no "Jim" and this is much less of an issue than y'all are making it out to be. You know that auto-correct is also a form of ML right? Have you considered that tools can be used responsibly and that standards for software developers still apply even when they use new tools?

[–] petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You know that auto-correct is also a form of ML right?

Yeah, and I don't fuckin use it.

Also, my auto-correct is saying that sentence is missing a comma, so I guess you don't either.

[–] grindemup@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Cool that's great. Can you tell me that none of the software you use has been developed by software engineers making use of machine learning methods?

[–] petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I can: I do not use any software.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 83 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Does anyone here actually review code?

[–] CrazyHorse@lemmy.cafe 235 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Only my own code and so far most of it has been unacceptable.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

i once wrote a script to launch a program with specific flags that i think was mostly correct, it holds center place on my CV

[–] HakunaHafada@lemmy.dbzer0.com 47 points 3 days ago

Pure, unabashed honesty. I love it. 🫶

[–] GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes, and it's one of the most important things I do. Given the AI codegen boom we're seeing, it's also the skill I have that is increasing the fastest in value.

[–] rozodru@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

yes as a consultant/freelancer THIS is where the majority of my work is coming from now. if you're good at this SERIOUSLY consider consulting and freelancing for various companies that are now desperately trying to fix their AI tech debt. It's the ONE thing that is completely in demand right now due to the sheer incompetence of all these places that decided vibe coding and AI was the way to go.

you have no idea how much money you can potentially be making right now doing this. I'm booked solid for the rest of the year purely because of this.

[–] thedruid@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Not gonna really be thing long-term. Up front savings vs customer long term retention. The up front savings are what business cares about. So yeah you'll get some companies who fucked up. Most just double down on the a. I.

What you're doing is entering the bargain-phase

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Uh yeah? You’d be stupid not to review code, whether written by an AI or a human. I don’t trust either.

[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 27 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm guessing OP means code you use rather than code you write, in other words auditing. Likely very few of us do that with any thoroughness. IIRC proton does have some independent auditing.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

That’s what I mean too. Y’all don’t just copy-paste from stack overflow praying it works do you?

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 18 points 3 days ago

That obviously not what they meant. They mean, do you review the code for every open source application you use? Do you review every library you utilize? I'm willing to be it's a no for both of these, because no one has time for that.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 17 points 3 days ago

No, like proton mail app. Have you reviewed it? Or Signal or Veracrypt or TheNewHotness.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Does anyone here realize that one person using Cursor doesnt mean "tHeY'rE vIbE cOdInG aCrOsS tHe wHoLe pLaCe!"

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Then why didn’t they just say that instead of being shady and rewriting history?

[–] thedruid@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because thier bosses aren't accounta le to you and I? That don't have to say a dn thing

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

that would make sense if it wasn't a fucking business selling the promise of security lol

[–] thedruid@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Again. They don't answer to us. They don't have to say anything

Now. I agree that they SHOULD. It would be not only be better buisness, BUT its the right thing yo do

But no, they don't. The should.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

oh so you just want to be annoyingly pedantic, cool

[–] thedruid@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

No. I'm saying quit bitching and switch f you don't like it. I have

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today -5 points 3 days ago

Because it's also not a great idea to expose your rules files, and tell people first "oh shit, we mentioned rules files. Please don't look!" before

I'll be honest here, I've had less dogmatic conversations with conspiracy theorists about COVID. If you just need to make this a huge problem that later turns out to be a nothingburger and you'll never look back and grow as a human, then hey, you do you. But know that you'll look like a fool to anyone that isn't a goldfish and remembers more than 3 months at a time. Because you clearly don't know what's a big deal and what's not, and this is a Grade A waste of all our time to pitch a fit about.

[–] expr@programming.dev 20 points 3 days ago

That is pretty immaterial to the issue. The issue is that when it comes to security, it's extremely poor form to rely on unintelligent mimicry.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 16 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Probably anti-Proton. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but the amount of pro BlueSky, anti Proton, anti Signal people I see on Lemmy make me wonder sometimes.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 27 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Proton CEO did it to the company...

Signal requires a phone number... If you don't see an issue with that... Then you live in a better place than the rest of us. I am happy for you.

[–] Broadfern@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Signal is the sad compromise for the people I hold dearest because I refuse to use Messenger anymore and SMS is a joke with how glaringly unencrypted/de-facto wiretapped it is.

I’d love to get everyone on SimpleX but they already look at me like a wacko over Signal. The convenience tax is just non-negotiable for them and I have no idea how to bypass it.

[–] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I used to be a big proponent of simplex even if I dont use it with anyone, but I was told that the main developer supports tr*mp and m*sk... If you go to their github, they only link twitter as their social media and if you check their account...

https://github.com/epoberezkin (dunno if were allowed to share twitter links)

Talks about "far-left radicals", says that nazis were socialist etc. etc. .... Really yikes

TBH I feel like so many project leaders are wackos that I don't even judge the products by those, just by things they do. I still have hope in Simplex, but there were a couple of red flags, such as content scanning proposals, including clientside. Sure, it can probably be relatively easily forked to remove that specific thing, or you can choose the servers that don't do that, but it's still alarming that they try.

[–] Mika@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yuck. Well then again we sit in Lemmy, and the lead dev is a proud tankiest tankie. Open source do be like that.

[–] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Lol, got a point there

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 8 points 3 days ago

Simplex ain't ready... So ain't pushing it as of now.

Once it is normie ready, I will start the move.

Signal is a temp solution

With that being said, I agree 100% with your comment. We work with what we got today!

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

For private communication Signal is the gold standard LOL

Not everyone needs shitty xmpp extensions, Matrix that lacks PFS and is enshitiffying as we speak (I say as an avid user) or overkill like SimpleX or Briar.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Sure... But you are also feeding NSA meta data on your communications which is whatever I guess for most people but I don't like it

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

You seem to be misinformed. Signals architecture is explicitly designed in a way to minimise metadata as much as possible. You can look up the data they had to hand over due to lawsuits, it was absolutely minimal

First - I'm not sure Sealed Sender would help against the server being changed to be actively malicious and trying to build social graphs. Second - even metadata concerns aside, a centralized system is just not resilient. Proposals like Chat Control are A LOT more easily enforceable with them than with tiny selfhosted servers.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

minimise

Just enough, just enough

Download portmaster and review signal connections ;)

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I know that Signal runs on US cloud infrastructure (like AWS IRRC)

Doesn't change a thing about it's security or what they hand to disclose to authorities

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 5 points 3 days ago

There is such thing like national security laws.

So you don't know shit.

If they are told to log, they will log. And there is enough meta data leakage to create heat map of your contacts

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org -1 points 2 days ago

I know that Signal runs on US cloud infrastructure

And only that one.

Signal dev is quite adamant on not letting people have their own servers, select a EU provider (yeah, EU is nazifying, but at least it's a large enough second-hand basket) or host the (suppossedly zero-knowledge) messages on one's own infrastructure. I'd say that's curious.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The question is not is Proton perfect in every conceivable way, the question is: is it more private than Google and the answer to that is yes.

When you opine on social media that Proton is somehow just as bad as Google you are helping doing the work of Google and that's the part that (again I don't truly believe this) makes me wonder if Google/Meta/Twitter is sowing the social web with seeds of doubt about more private alternatives.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Proton ceo is a pedo king bootlicker and their product lacks focus was my criticism.

You ain't never gonna catch me defending sundar the creep and rest of them parasites

[–] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

You may want to double check that.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I didn't say defending, I said helping. Which you are.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 1 points 2 days ago

You are entitled to you opinion

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago

It really reminds me of the Mastodon mob mentality that caused so much trouble for fosstodon :/

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