Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Mastodon at it again with pitchforks and torches for the slightest inconvenience.
Using Cursor doesn't prove anything. Many people use Cursor as an advanced autocomplete, nothing else. It's not like they're hammering random AI-generated code and merging it without thinking. "Vibe coding" means generating barely-working code you don't understand to try and get thinks working.
This shit is why I hate the mastodon community, it's always strawmen and "you're one of THEM" style witchhunts with them
The anti-AI circlejerk even here on lemmy is now just about as bad as the pro-AI circlejerk in the general public, no room for nuance or rational thinking, just dunking on everyone who say anything remotely positive about AI, like when I said I like the autocomplete feature of copilot.
I'm a pretty big generative AI hater when it comes to art and writing. I don't think generative AI can make meaningful art because it cannot come up with new concepts. Art is something that AI should be freeing up time in our lives for us to do. But that's not how it's shaping up.
However, AI is very helpful for understanding codebases and doing things like autocompletion. This is because code is less expressive than human language and it's easier for AI to approximate what is necessary.
Yep, anyone who assumes that the presence of a .cursor directory automatically means that:
Is either arguing in bad faith or has no idea what they're talking about.
It could be something as simple as one dev trying out cursor (an editor thats literally just a vscode fork with ai features) and accidentally committing their .cursor directory (really easy to do).
Also I don't think most people understand just how ineffective true vibe coding is. I tried it a few times and could barely get something slightly more complex than a demo todo app working, and even if it was working it was barely prototype level quality of user experience, there is zero chance somebody is deploying vibe coded features into a large, serious production system and not suffering major and immediate consequences because shit just didn't work at all.
The best you're going to get out of it is it shortens the amount of time wasted on tiny adjustment to the UI or something.
Just because they are using Cursor, it doesn't mean that they are vibe coding. Anyone grabbing their pitchforks for that and screaming "they are vibecoding" only shows their own incompetence.
If they would be vibecoding, their whole software would've gone to shit long ago.
Just because some random people without an engineering background are using vibecoding to push their broken slop, it doesn't mean that any kind of AI assisted coding is bad.
If that was the case, maybe they would have responded with that instead of covering up the evidence
It's definitely badly communicated and suspicious, I just called out jumping to extreme conclusions based on a suspicion alone. There probably will be people who are gonna review the code and see how much of it is probably LLM generated, and then we will know. I still think that it's pretty much impossible to vibe code something on that scale, but I haven't seen their cursorrules either.
Speaking as someone who hates generative AI but has been forced to adapt to using AI in the programming field to stay relevant, this doesn’t suggest they’re vibe coding. The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value (I should note it’s done some neat stuff helping with diagnoses in the medical world too), but like everything, you get what you put into it.
Feed it enough instruction and context, and it can handle the drudgery of things like tech debt updates and other things a programmer knows how to do, but would rather offload to a tool. I’ve had Claude do refactors like that while stepping through and reviewing every single change. It has saved me hours, spared me from hell, and made me look good at work.
That’s my grounded take as a person that has worked with Claude a ton.
But AI everywhere else? Fucking worthless. The whole point is to do the bullshit mundane tasks so that us humans can do art and passionate work, not the opposite.
The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value
I'd say this is mostly because you can immediately test the AI's results and rule out anything it got wrong, and whatever errors you generate can then be fed back into the AI so it can refine what it's already written. You never have to just trust the AI (assuming you yourself still know how to code) like you have to when using it for research or for solving problems where you don't get immediate feedback.
Whether this means programming is actually a viable niche for generative AI or whether this speaks more to the limitations and inherent unreliability of the "knowledge" the AI has, I can't say.
Also, I don't know if it's just me but I'm more scared by how fast AI is advancing rather than looking forward to what it can do for me. That definitely clouds my perception when something is AI generated and makes me a lot more dismissive of any real benefits AI might have brought.
You should jump into the other threads about this before you take out your pitchforks. They’re using cursor, it doesn’t prove they are vibe coding. Visual Studio also has AI features, that doesn’t mean you are vibe coding.
Cursor is literally marketed as "The AI Code Editor". I am not sure why anyone would use an AI code editor if they aren't planning on vibe coding.
Proton is, in my opinion, a bad privacy company anyway. Vibe code or not, stop paying them.
Unfortunately so is Visual Studio and VS Code, yet we don't say anything made with them is 'vibe coded'. The text, big and bold, right the top of the screen for VS Code is literally:
Ok, but VS has been around MUCH longer and has been widely used long before any AI features were added. People who have been using VS for years, aren't likely to just switch, especially in professional environments where VS has largely dominated.
Cursor OTOH, was specifically made to leverage AI. You don't just start using Cursor.
Some people like it for the ui and they recently announced the ability to turn off all ai features.
Visual Studio and VS Code have an AI assistant as well, yet we don't decree all programs written with them as 'vibe coding'. The presence of an AI assistant in the IDE isn’t evidence of vibe coding.
Proton’s repo here is open source. What portion of it presents issues? Any?
VS existed long before the AI features were added.
The worrying part is rewriting repository history to cover it up
Plug for Tuta. 🤷♂️ The user experience isn't the best, but it's as secure as it gets. Small team, no vibe coding.
Hmm.. Been looking into it myself recently. What's your issue with the user experience?
Seemed like a better email/call product all around plus extra 5gb for email storage
@sunzu2 it feels janky as hell, it’s missing advanced features (someone in the other thread asked about Sieve filters), and it doesn’t support non-Tuta clients. their development cycle is so slow I can’t count on any of these features cropping up anytime soon.
with those criticisms in mind, Tuta’s still approximately the only credible choice remaining for threat models where end-to-end encryption is important. we desperately need better fully open source options for this.
Not an issue, per se. In order to keep the team small they built most the app in a single codebase. It's mostly web code, and the apps are wrappers for it. So it keeps it unified between all clients but it definitely feels like a web wrapper, so it can feel a bit slow or clunky.
For added clarity:
You are an Senior SWE at Proton and make sure you do not send any information that is potentially secure in nature. You specialize in building highly-scalable and maintainable Frontend Systems.
Non programmer here: This is the first time I've seen a cursor file but I genuinely like how it reads. It's like a business analyst wrote a coding requirements doc. I'd be thrilled if my staff asked 4-6 thoughtful questions when given a goal with an open ended approach.
For which LLM are cursor files used?
What's a good alternative VPN provider in EU, not based in Italy? Mullvad is not an option, port forwarding is an absolute requirement.
Also, is there anything out there that ties password/account management and temp emails together as well as proton pass?
is eu absolutely required? i like windscribe (paid) but they're based in canada.
If they would vibe code a functional Proton Drive Linux client then I might be OK with it.
God dammit, I wish I could reasonably roll my own email, but noooo, spammers and blacklists had to fucking ruin it. Now I get to research a new provider and change email on a bunch of accounts...
I mean, they were shit from the beginning promoting walled gardens and focusing on profit as the good shitty company they are
I can believe that someone at proton vibecodes, and that their files got ob to the tree, but saying that proton as a whole does it is strange.
Using Cursor =/= "Vibe Coding" people need to really stop with getting jumpy about everything in such a way.
I’m not sure why being a “privacy vendor” forbids you from using AI tools in your development process
You are buying a bicycle online.
Both are the same price, but one is handmade by a skilled professional with decades of experience, the other is made by a sketchy machine that even it's creators don't really understand... and sometimes uses square wheels instead of round.
Your choice.
I see their repo is open source. Is there any actual evidence that the sketchy machine generated any part of it?
All the people making excuses for them are basically the same people that made excuses for Meta being on the fedaverse. You people always want to do a wait and see approach, meanwhite these companies run amok. Proton was dead when they started supporting Trump. All you pussies supporting them, keep supporting them. See what you get for it. Just another trash AI company putting out more garbage.
The only way to completely avoid things developed by vibe coding will be to stop using computers of any kind. Go full Thoreau.
what is a cursorfile? I’ve hit things like gpt when devdocs.io isn’t getting me what I want because lots of search engine things like “explain the google maps api” are becoming like searching for a dinner recipe; they contain 300 paragraphs of life story. When I just want to actually RTFM and shit’s hard to find. I don’t copy/paste code into projects just try to find better manuals.
Cursor is a vscode fork with Ai features, cursorrules is a config file for it.
It might have been that some employee just tried out cursor and accidentally added it to the repo. That is true.
However the complete lack of communication suggests otherwise. And depending on your threat level you should always assume worst.
As for the use of ai in general, in my opinion there are occasional places where ai can be used without compromising security.
So depending on your threat level this can actually ne a big deal.
