Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning
(www.404media.co)
from communism@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 29 Oct 16:29
https://lemmy.ml/post/54651957
from communism@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 29 Oct 16:29
https://lemmy.ml/post/54651957
Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”
In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
threaded - newest
Guess that’s one way to throw your business case of being a secure and privacy focused service provider out of the window.
they did some of it already when they got their ceo to praise trump
Every time this asshole speaks it just throws the entire company even further off a cliff lmao
As someone who has been an Executive Director, I couldn’t imagine taking a political stance on anything. Good way to alienate your customers and lose profit. Anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together knows this.
Idk, somethings are worth taking a political stand on, not all things, but something. The all mighty dollar isn’t all there is to life
Alright, that’s enough for me. What’s the best mail, calendar and drive alternatives? Preferably the ones that aren’t slop-coded.
Also, has anyone had any experience with Migadu?
the best are the ones you host yourself. quite doable, except email if you don’t want to send emails straight into the spam folder.
I don’t trust my skills enough to spin up a mail server. Or honestly any server that will be exposed to the internet.
Neither do I trust my uptime/maintenance of a mail server. I pay 1 EUR a month to Posteo, & it’s the only subscription to anything I have. Email ends up being an important access point for recovery & contact, so I keep it separate—paying to keep the lights on somewhere that posts it encrypted & responsibly.
you dont have to expose or open ports nowadays.
I already think proton mail is pretty slow to render/load, they don’t have much room to make it worse before it’s too much-in other words they better be real careful with that vibe coding.
In general these events have me thinking of switching providers (and I have a paid tier).
Guess I need to make sure I get my email server up before the next renewal. Since that was recent, hopefully way before next renewal.
I’m not sure I can win the war for deliverable self-hosted email, and I send almost no email ever anyway, so I’m considering setting up a server that accepts email directly but relays outgoing mail through a relay that’s actually trusted by email providers. Can anyone recommend good relays for that?
I did exactly this (except relay), started a few months ago as I don’t have a ton of time to sink into it. Went with Mailcow Dockerized (Tried Stalwart, too much behind paywall) on my VPS. My renewal is next month and since I was already paying for a VPS I figured I should tinker with this instead of paying for Proton. I already had domain(s) so that part was fine, I almost never send either but tested sending to gmail and proton. Initially had issues with gmail but was able to resolve them by adding my domain at postmaster.google.com
So far no other issues hampering the project, been receiving all emails fine including catchall. I do have in the back of my mind if I ever need to back out of self hosting to look into migado.com.
Bro is all in on AI and even he doesn’t seem to consider “prompt engineers” actual engineers.
“Loser talk” is something a fucking 4chan basement dweller would say. I hate how society is just the stupidest fucks at the forefront now.
Stupid fucks keep getting money from evil fucks because evil is controlling the stupid to do bad things without understanding what’s being asked until it’s too late.
What recourse do we have other than switching to a competitor and waiting until someone over there does something I disagree with?
Hosting your own mail server. But unless you’re really certain you want to do that, and are very clear on what you need to do to keep your setup secure and your mails out of spam, don’t. It’s not impossible, but probably not worth the effort.
I am personally probably going to switch to mailbox.org when my Proton contract is up, already using it with an org I sysadmin for, and all in all pretty happy. Of course no guarantees that they don’t enshitify, and they recently raised prices, but they’re a lot less publicity/marketing focused compared to Proton. Less silicon valley energy, if you get me.
I am also setting up my own Mailserver with a throwaway domain to test the waters, but I’m not expecting to use that for anything serious in the near future.
I use: 1998.is
100% green energy, small family company. I have never had any sort of problem.
As I’ve said elswere, you can let Proton know your thoughts in their community voice platform/forum. You can also email thier foundation.
Stop giving Proton money
RIP Proton.
Privacy minded people tend to also want security.
Well…some people are linux distro hopping and me…email hopping…f*uck
WTF? Is he 12 years old?
Is this really true?
The business culture is sick. This way of thinking is not limited to just a few people.
Ah shit balls! 3 months into a paid up email, calendar, drive and VPN suite. Have moved a lot of files over. Will start looking again, but definitely separating everything from now
I just got out of my 1 year membership with them and happily moved over to tutamail and selfhosting 😅
My membership end in march… Tome to find another mail hoster.
“Yen, a former CERN particle physicist”…so his career as a physicist bombed and he figured he would try IT?
For those of you that care enough, I suggest letting Proton know in their community voice platform/forum. You can also email thier foundation.
Andy Yen sounds like an asshole.
I still need to move away from Gmail, but it’s probably not going to be to Proton.
He sounds like my manager. For him AI is a silver bullet for every problem.
guess its time to host my own email
I’m on a 2 year family plan in proton that has to be around 1 year in. Now, in the last few months I’ve been upping my game in self-hosting, even for our family business (moved from Zoho Workplace to a VPS with Nextcloud and MXroute for email, with mandatory PGP for internal emailing and all files in next loud encrypted, and it’s been great, but it does come with some extra work for me).
I spent the last 2 days deploying stalwart in the same VPS with a domain I wasn’t using to test it as a potential email server to self-host when Proton’s subscription ends. It seems to be working well, I even got it to e2ee between that and my Proton email (
can’t get Tuta to accept a single email from it though, still need to tinker a bit it seems). Using SMTP2Go for outbound emails (free gives me 1,000 emails sent every month, ans I know my 6 family users together don’t send even 500 emails in a month combined) to avoid the VPS IP address from being blacklisted if something goes wrong.I urge everyone to try it. It is not as easy to implement as they try to make it in YouTube videos, specially if you try to use as many security and privacy features as possible, but it is the easiest email server I have ever tried to implement, and I believe it is absolutely feasible for personal stuff (not too sure about business, so I’ll stick to MXroute for that for now).
If you have an unused domain (maybe a used one that you don’t rely on for emailing) and some space in your homelab or in a VPS, Stalwart + SMTP2Go is a fun and potentially productive project to give a shot.
Edit: I just went into my Tuta account and the emails are there. Seems it was an impatience issue more than it was technical 😁
While I like AI, this fundamental rule is no different from a human coder: Do QA before letting it go live.
Thanks for sharing! Good post, totally worth the read.
And I know which company to stay away from, and will solidly recommend this to others as well.
Proton is legit, they said.
It seems like they offer a good product, but by my reading they are still on the venture capital.
I’d rather let them enshitify a couple of times before making a commitment with anything private.
Ah, yes, once again the old adage “When they show you they are, believe them” has proved it never fails.
A happy Proton paying customer, I bailed within a week when Andy made his pro GOP/trump comments some time back.
Folks said I over reacted. I handed them that adage. It was right.
Protons top “loser” engineers will find themselves welcomed elsewhere. What a disaster Proton has become under Yen.
I mean, he ain’t wrong.
Shareholders don’t value stability.or the lobg term. They value short term profit. What happens to the company or products after is less than an afterthought.
Even though it dies with the person affected by it, cancer always wins by killing its host in the end. And clearly, in the CEO’s eyes, so should Proton.
Proton is supposed to be a non-profit. There are no shareholders
goodbye proton vpn, hello airvpn
I have six months left on my protonmail. Started the move to mailbox.org yesterday. Signed up for oscura and need to set up my vaultwarden
Goddammit… I just switched to Proton. I really don’t know if I can handle switching again so soon.
Ugh.
I’ve heard Andy interviewed. Couple times. He came across as personable and likable. But that takes a backseat if he’s gonna steer his company off a cliff and I have to stop trusting their products. Even smart people can make dumb choices. Esp when no one is empowered to push back. It can get pathological, when the CEO starts to believe they walk on water.
Frankly I think the Proton Foundation needs to sit Andy down and have a heart to heart.
Get rid of Andy Proton
I commented before from the summary. Read as much of the 404 story as I can now.
It’s bad. If I didn’t trust 404 Media, I might think this was a hit piece. But 404 does good work and I trust their journalists. I should really subscribe!
Social media is prone to instant lynch mobs, one of its worst aspects. I do not intend to rage quit. But I WILL re-evaluate in 3 months. Just marked my calendar. They need to very publicly reverse course, AND restore my trust. I believe in giving ppl and co’s a chance to learn from mistakes, or nobody ever gets wiser. But I need to see that happen, or me and my $ are out.
I also no longer trust Andy’s judgement. The Proton engineers are saying the right things. Again I trust 404’s homework, or I would be much more skeptical of all of this.
…uservoice.com/…/51867423-andy-yen-steps-aside
Vote on making him step down
.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cd774748-17a7-42e3-a1ad-f64c2c919f96.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8fb45aae-9c57-4170-8d2f-14b5a095e9f5.png">
I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
Thx for the screenshots. I read them both.
Considering what he said, I am a bit pissed that the AI stuff is basically the only thing that matters. Like he (and the first image) mentions that he spoke to an employee badly, but it is almost forgotten about with the larger part pleading that people don’t think they use AI for everything. But if he can express so many repetitive things about AI, then he could address the actual human that wasn’t “using AI more”. I know the part that people are mad about is the idea of speed-running security with too much potential AI involved causing some profit drops from current and potential customers. Just kind of weirds me out how even in this plea he is using the topic of AI more than the fucked human behavior.