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.”
Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.
Bro is all in on AI and even he doesn’t seem to consider “prompt engineers” actual engineers.
I’d like to thank Andy for introducing me to Proton’s competitor Tuta.
I’m currently in the market for a new VPN provider. I’d like to thank Andy for pointing me towards IVPN.
IVPN has been working well for me. Heard AirVPN is good if you need port forwarding too.
I’ve literally registered with them yesterday. Seems nice so far, worth exploring further.
He certainly clarified for me whether to pay for Proton or not. It’s not.
same here and i will forever be thankful for it :p
I just cancelled my subscription and quoted him as the reason.
Tuta, funnily enough, makes it very hard to send encrypted mail to people who aren’t also using tuta. Maybe also look at Mailbox.org and Posteo. They have a lot less marketing/hype/fearmongering compared to tuta and Proton, but have similar features regarding encryption and security, with less walled-garden like restrictions.
I just took mailbox.org for a spin and wasn’t impressed, I have to say. No apps, which I can live with, I guess. There was an option for installing the various functions as apps - but apparently Firefox isn’t compatible. So sadly it’s a no from me, I need a bit more functionality from a paid service.
Do you have experience with the office software or cloud drive from Mailbox.org? Proton’s spreadsheet app can’t even handle my modest flashlight collection and their Drive won’t mount as a drive on my Linux machine.
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).
Every time this asshole speaks it just throws the entire company even further off a cliff lmao
As someone who has been a Executive Director, I couldn’t imagine taking a political stance on anything. Good way to alienate you 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.
Mail: Tuta, Posteo
Files, calendar: Nextcloud. Self-hosted or managed. Mine also does my contacts and task sync.Nextcloud is slop-coded, unfortunately.
Define “slop-coded” with regard to Nextcloud. The self-hosted sub has presented a useful terminological framework to pin down what software “made with AI” can entail:
Hint - AI suggested solution, human does the task. Assisted - AI acts on part of a task, but a human handled the bulk. Pair - About a 50/50 split of human made and generated. Generated - Human prompted, AI generated.
Where on this scale do you see Nextcloud?
Nxtcloud is assisted, but it is still slop. That’s why I didn’t use vibecoded.
Just looked into their AI policy. Looks reasonable to me, so I don’t think the blanket characterisation as “slop” is fair, but you do you.
The only reasonable policy for me is Zig’s AI Policy.
Every company seems to be rolling out software with no testing these days. Why? Is this what they think their consumers prefer? Why would we want glitchy accounting software with a chat bot that can’t actually do anything? I think they broke supply and demand with AI somehow
2026 business has got very little to do with customers/consumers, supply and demand. Maybe it’s been that way for a long time, but this ‘AI’ nonsense has bought it to the surface, evidently.
Obsession with numbers? 🤷♂️
I think that Libre Office and /e/OS are still avoiding use of AI. Maybe mailbox.org as well. However, when the user base is growing, they all probably get more pressure to be catching up with the competitors.
Maybe I’m a particularly sensitive, spiteful snowflake, but the boss of my company accused me of being a “loser” because I cared about the quality of the product, I’d be looking to deliberately sabotage the product. And for a new job, of course.
Many of us are in exactly that position with our employers, but finding another job in this climate is easier said than done.
What recourse do we have other than switching to a competitor and waiting until someone over there does something I disagree with?
I use: 1984.hosting
100% green energy, small family company. I have never had any sort of problem.
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.
Well…some people are linux distro hopping and me…I find myself email hopping…f*uck
The issue is he’s correct in regards to business: the vast majority of people are clueless and will buy/use anything if the advertising is good enough.
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
Everything is going this way, best to set up a list of things to do to help yourself move quickly each time, you’re going to be doing it a lot.
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.
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.
“Yen, a former CERN particle physicist”…so his career as a physicist bombed and he figured he would try IT?
Goddammit… I just switched to Proton. I really don’t know if I can handle switching again so soon.
