Honestly, I agree.

I saw Andy’s post. And I’ve seen a bunch of reactions and people proclaiming to cancel their accounts. And I think the negative reactions are all a little strong.

No, I didn’t love Andy’s statement and I certainly don’t support Trump. Yes, he goofed up by using the official proton account to respond. But is Andy or Proton supporting or funding Trump or anyone else in US politics? Do the statements directly affect proton’s operations or services? No? Then how much does this really matter? Does Andy’s statement even tell us that much about his personal politic?

I realize there are many reasons for people to not support Trump, notably minority groups. But using Proton services is a big step removed from “supporting Trump”. Moreover, we don’t have many alternative to proton. There are a few and people should feel free to explore them. But I also don’t know about the political opinions of leaders at those companies. We rarely know this kind of information when spending money.

For me, proton is still a good company, providing good and valuable services, and operating in ways that I support (Swiss non-profit). Andy’s presumed political alignment and dumb comment doesn’t negate all the good stuff.

Edit: Ok! Turns out I didn’t see the “official response”. Ya it’s bad. I dislike this a whole lot more. Apparently, Proton is involved with US politics. IMO, this really does give people a reason to vote with their wallet.

It’s a shame though because they’re right about corporate democrats vs progressive democrats. We (the US) really needed Bernie Sanders and he was thrown out by crappy politics. Still, corporate democrats are a hell of a lot better than fascism.

I recently had an insight on (US) politics that applies here. Our ridiculous two party system is unsurprisingly to blame for this. Both parties encompass both reasonable and terrible ideas. And members of both parties are fed entirely different pieces of propaganda. So republicans are fed the idea that all democrats embrace the worst, extreme ideas that fall under the democratic umbrella. While democrats are fed the idea that all republicans embrace the worst, extreme ideas that fall under the republican umbrella. This makes members of both parties see the other as simply evil and so the opposing party is impossible to embrace. It often doesn’t matter what experiences a person goes through.

Ok that is an impressive number but it feels a little disingenuous. You still need to something on your machine to interpret the js code, right? Is that included in the 13k? How much storage does that take?

EDIT: Well this is by far my most negative comment here. That’s almost entertaining. I’ll share a few more of my thoughts here rather than respond to individual comments. Maybe the context will make this more palatable.

First, I expect that the js language is doing most of the work here. Which makes sense. But having a browser installed as a prerequisite is an enormous dependency.

How would that stack up against other languages? Can I build a 13k binary using C? How about C#? I think Go is maybe the most interesting because the binary is entirely self contained by default. No external dependencies aside from the OS. I don’t think this or a similar game is viable with only 13k. Which is fine! I just that I find 13k is disingenuous.

That brings up the question of whether or not we should include the OS in the storage size. I would think not. But that’s only because the OS is (usually) the least common denominator when we talk about developing software. It’s generally assumed by default. But if someone wants to compare with a game that interfaces with hardware directly, then yes, we should absolutely include the OS as a dependency.

Now that I’m giving this more thought, I suspect that the devs wrote 13k of code + assets to make the game functional. Still impressive. But the more I think about this, the more meaningless that number gets. Does pre or post compiling matter more? What if we compress the thing as tarball? There’s just too many ways to manipulate this number.