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.”
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.
Thx for the screenshots. I read them both.
I’d like to thank Andy for introducing me to Proton’s competitor Tuta.
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.
I just cancelled my subscription and quoted him as the reason.
same here and i will forever be thankful for it :p
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
Maybe I’m a particularly sensitive, spiteful snowflake, but if 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.
Stop giving Proton money
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.
WTF? Is he 12 years old?
Is this really true?RIP Proton.
Privacy minded people tend to also want security.
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.
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.
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.
Well…some people are linux distro hopping and me…email hopping…f*uck
“Yen, a former CERN particle physicist”…so his career as a physicist bombed and he figured he would try IT?
guess its time to host my own email
Get rid of Andy Proton
