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.”
While I like AI, this fundamental rule is no different from a human coder: Do QA before letting it go live.
guess its time to host my own email
Horrible stuff. I’ve been using Proton since 2020 and back then Proton’s thing was just an encrypted email service. Year after year, they’ve started adding all these other apps and services to Proton’s platform, and some of them fits nicely with the core email service (calendar, cloud for files, VPN). But lately they’ve began adding apps and services such as AI LLM chat (which is pretty crappy and inaccurate), remote video meeting software (which is really barebones feature wise) and apparently now they are working on Chromium based “privacy” browser (as if we don’t have enough browsers already, let alone Chromium based). All of this requires a lot more developers and takes more time to develop and maintain, which is probably why Andy is so keen on making progress faster by using AI.
But why does Proton need to add all of these apps? To fight big tech in all fronts? To create same kind of ultra loyal, “will buy anything” fanboy culture around Proton products like Apple has (and to lesser extent Google has)? Or is it to grow bigger company much faster than originally intended (because the investors want that) all the while taking bigger financial risks in doing so?
In any case, Andy needs to step down as the CEO. The next CEO needs to take a good hard look at what’s relevant to their customers. I don’t think anyone is asking for a vibe-coded Proton web browser, just because it’s “Proton”.
The proton LLM Lumo is one of the absolute best ones out there in terms of gathering info from the web. You can ask it to find sentences in videos or podcasts which you vaguely remember and it will do so, scraping transcripts and more. Meanwhile all other major LLM’s either refuse to do this or fail to do so and say the thing you ask for doesn’t exist. It’s not monetized so I’m not sure what they’re doing for it, but it certainly has its uses when looking for politics or news related stuff.
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.
For those of you that care enough, I suggest letting Proton know in their community voice platform/forum. You can also email thier foundation.
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.
Well…some people are linux distro hopping and me…email hopping…f*uck
I’d like to thank Andy for introducing me to Proton’s competitor Tuta.
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.
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’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.
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
“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.
Stop giving Proton money
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.
Guess that’s one way to throw your business case of being a secure and privacy focused service provider out of the window.
Didn’t you listen to the man? Security and privacy are for losers!
truly innovative and disruptive
he must be getting so many linkedin points
they did some of it already when they got their ceo to praise trump
“Yen, a former CERN particle physicist”…so his career as a physicist bombed and he figured he would try IT?
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.
