<< “I want to acknowledge myself, personally, that there was a communication failure on my part and there are many things that probably could and should have been communicated differently, and this is something that I’ll have to reflect on and improve over time. So I will do that.”
Note how he says that he wants to 'acknowledge' things. Not apologize. Not that he is wrong about the re-interviews. He says he didn't use nice enough language to soften the blow. Basically, in simple terms, he didn't Lisa it up as temporary refund adjustment.
edit: and the passive voice is a cherry on top
edit2: I gotta say -- all those CEOs are getting a little uppity for people who likely use copilot for summarizing emails.
Why can't they just say something like, "I really shouldn't have said X Y Z. It was insulting and I'm embarrassed that I chose that way of speaking to an employee. As a leader, it's important that I be encouraging and receptive." In other words, don't vaguely allude to what happened by saying there was "a communication failure." CEOs like to act like their subordinates are children and can't tell the difference.
Is he not right though? Have you not interacted with a once star senior engineer who now operates at the level of a low-quality junior because they refuse to use AI?
There was a point a few decades ago with architecture where people moved off blueprints to CAD files, and everyone had to learn CAD or be pushed out, which lead to terrible churn and people I know got kicked out of architecture for good. This is a similar situation; they're not kicking out engineers for being 5% less productive, they're re-interviewing to find engineers who are 1/10th or 1/100th as productive as their peers. It sucks, and I feel bad for people who have to fear for their job, but it's a necessary action
I have yet to see data that supports this claims. In the contrary all I have read and observed point in the opposite direction.
Also I have yet to see an easy way to assess the performance of engineers. Lines of code it is certainly not!
This doesn't even make sense. You don't go from star senior to low quality junior by just doing what you've been doing and refusing to prompt the slop machine. If anything you're retaining skills that everyone else is losing. Prompting an llm is not a skill, the only thing this "re-interview" assesses is if you're using the magic box like the idiot CEO wants you to. Which is another way to say, are you de-skilling yourself fast enough, because that's what the CEO thinks is best for the company right now.
<< Have you not interacted with a once star senior engineer who now operates at the level of a low-quality junior because they refuse to use AI?
I can honestly say no. I might question your premise a little. Lets hypothetically say you got Karpathy level senior; clearly a star and beam of sunshine in an otherwise dreary world. Is he now less of a star just because he won't use AI?
It is a real question, because if he is then the question becomes why.
Did he simply stop working as much? Or is he working the same amount, but it looks like he is doing less? If it merely looks like it, we may well have office situation on our hands, where rank and file may end up turning to management and asking themselves and the management one simple question:
What exactly it is you are doing here?
I know for a fact good management can enable some things, but I am starting to question the blind fervor I seem to see more of lately. If you can't motivate Karpathy or worse, you now are suddenly are unable to see his value, then maybe it is not Karpathy's fault.
<< This is a similar situation; they're not kicking out engineers for being 5% less productive, they're re-interviewing to find engineers who are 1/10th or 1/100th as productive as their peers
And this may be the big part: productivity. The problem is that productivity along the lines of silly metrics like: lines of code, agents commits per engineer are.. uhh.. not useless exactly, but, how do I phrase it a sensible way so that it reaches at least one stray manager that watches this conversation,
*really fucking dumb metric to treat as a measure stick.*
But who am I to judge.
<< but it's a necessary action
None of it is necessary. By definition it is all elective. That said, the nature of that relationship goes both ways and, I will be super subtle here, right now it is not the engineers, who can't do it all.
Quite the opposite, management could find itself in a pickle now, because it has neither skill to drive the development, practical knowledge that you only get from getting to close to the abyss, 'taste', theoretical foundation, curiosity or even basic exposure that would it let develop either of the previous facets.
Make no mistake, a lot of us choose to do deal with some of the idiocy for a stability gain. But, if there is none, why do I need you? I might as well try to strike out on my own and watch the AI coded towers fall ( being mildly dramatic for visual purposes; amusingly, I don't think I am that far off ) .
> Is he not right though? Have you not interacted with a once star senior engineer who now operates at the level of a low-quality junior because they refuse to use AI?
I don't even know where to start. Let me just say it that by using LLMs you voluntarily decide to let the atrophy happen to your skills, knowledge and experience. You do things without understanding them, or with vague understanding only. Your thinking process becomes completely dependent on something that you find more and more difficult to verify (if you even care). Why would anyone do such a thing to oneself?
Thank you for including other reports. However, everything seems to link back to 404. Convo.casa is just quoting 404I'm suspicious that 404 has a grudge against Proton, but I am open minded.
The articles seem damning. However, CEOs jumping on board the AI bandwagon is not particularly rare. I don't see a CEO pushing AI as reason to change my email provider. If it manifests to be a problem, then sure I will switch. So far I haven't seen any repercussions.
When a CEO calls people "losers" for caring about security, and when the CEO considers it a failure that they don't have hockey stick growth, to me that's absolutely a reason to consider changing for most people using Proton. If someone doesn't care about employees raising security concerns, or a company chasing profits at all cost, then why are they using Proton in the first place?
If all that is true it is a concern. I'm not going to make any changes until I see some validation. Validation from other media, or seeing a decline in quality of product.
Proton engineering culture always got a bad rep pre-AI era as well(per their glassdoor reviews[1]) . Poor engineering directly or indirectly makes them susceptible to data breach because good talent stays away. One reason why I hesitated moved to proton back when a lot of people did. My understanding is that the only reason they are in the game are because send email services are extremely difficult to run.
This is very disappointing, I've been on Proton for a long time and just assumed a "high trust non-Google" email provider implicitly had integrity. Knowing that they're scummy almost defeats the purpose of using it for me.
I think de-googling is itself has its costs. I've been waiting for a better solution to email. On a related note fundamentally I think the incentives to keep email infra alive is linked to the same incentive rooted in the core belief held by companies/services that ads work.
If there was an inflection point to break that perception — like covid gave a pause for thought for location based ad targeting — and hence the incentive, perhaps we can kick email as one of the ideas whose time has come.
It can, but it depends on how "googled" you allowed yourself to become in the first place. For me, that's not much at all. But if you've been all-in (or near it) for years, with tons of docs, your photo archive, etc. all tied to google, then yeah, moving away is gonna be difficult.
which is exactly why the AI push and brand harm from the CEO is so baffling, it is in essence an email service based on privacy and trust, what is the point of pushing AI so hard. Wonder if the CEO has some sort of AI psychosis, I prefer products branded on privacy/security to not take the 'move fast and break things' route
Damn. My proton plan just renewed a couple weeks ago.
I have not failed to notice that they’ve slowed focus on security oriented features and are now focused on a lot of things I don’t care about, but I didn’t realize the magnitude of the cultural problem there.
Without the security aspect, Proton is ridiculously overpriced. If they want to compete with GSuite or Zoho, they gotta come down.
I’m willing to pay premium for a niche security focused offering. I’m not willing to pay a premium for AI generated crapware.
I became a Proton visionary after I interacted with them here on HN. They took PGP really seriously and addressed my very specific concerns.
I don't care about the AI use bur I'm very sad to learn they won't be "lovingly" crafting their products anymore. Less craftsmanship and attention to detail can't be good.
Thankfully, owning a domain makes switching providers easy.
> now focused on a lot of things I don’t care about
Yeah, I'm a paying customer and have been asking for a desktop app for Proton Drive for years. Instead, they've focused their efforts on a crypto wallet and a chatbot. (Sure, we recently got a CLI app which _is_ better than nothing but come on.)
Yeah, I'll be looking for an alternative. I've already drifted off of everything but the email service. The opportunity to potentially not due business with orgs run by insufferable assholes is all the push I really need to take another look around.
Kind of amazing how completely Yen misunderstands Protons customer base. It’s pretty much entirely security conscious people who want to divest from big tech right?
They had a safe stable business with a loyal user base in a market niche they completely owned, could have basically just sat on their asses and de facto collected taxes from paranoid nerds and journalists for decades.
I just don't understand why they'd want to trade all that away for a chasing the same nebulous "something something AI" business plan as literally every other company in the tech industry right now. The odds they'll be competitive in such an endeavor and see a fraction of the success they had again is minuscule.
Maybe they know fundamentally what they do is trivial? Making something shitty and complex for the sake of it while still maintaining a facade of functionality takes guts and balls.
I already cancelled my subscription. They've demonstrated far too reckless behavior for me to trust something this critical to them, especially as they present themselves as the private and secure alternative.
Same here. Been a paying customer for probably about 3 years now. Off to either Fastmail or Tuta most likely. I'd like to self-host, but corporations have thoroughly ruined what should have been an open and decentralized system.
Aw schucks. I moved to Proton half a year ago in an effort to de-Google (and de-US) myself. Now this. Time to write a message to customer service explaining my concerns.
I really like the idea of using Fastmail over Tuta since they support normal protocols and thus third party clients. My main concern is that if they're able to serve those protocols, they have to be able to access my emails in plaintext in some form or fashion, which also means if their systems do (and most likely inevitably will these days) get hacked at some point, all my emails are now exposed and leaked.
Yes email is inherently insecure, don't forget your emails also sit on lots of other systems too usually unencrypted unless everyone else has opsec matching yours. Don't put important secrets in email I guess.
Frustrating that it was designed so badly and I don't think there's a way to fix it without fixing protocols really and doing E2E encryption and signing with keys only on devices, even then you depend on all the code handling that to be secure, and nobody on the other side to store plain text of your encrypted emails (which they must be able to see/get after all).
Ah sorry, I've been toying with moving to Proton for their password manager because I despise what 1Password has become so I think I just assumed everyone was recommending Fastmail because they have a comparable suite of apps. I maybe got over excited that there might be a decent alternative.
Most recent criticism is about either: that they switched from selling licenses to subscriptions, that they stopped supporting self-hosting, that they use Electron, or that they financially support Omarchy/DHH.
FastMail is great, I'm not sure there's the same expectations around privacy though. I've been using it for years and love my masked emails, but I don't have any expectations that my data is locked down or encrypted, and one legal request would expose my info.
This is already true for Proton. While they don't keep logs for ProtonVPN (as tested in court), they do for ProtonMail. Someone went to prison for trusting ProtonMail with their illegal activity.
I have already begun using my proton-domain email address with real people. They have just started learning it (or have finally updated my contact info). That’s one hurdle.
Another hurdle is I see no other good alternative. I used Fastmail for a while, but it was a bit laggy due to network requests across the Atlantic Ocean. Also it is under US jurisdiction. That company is no longer relevant to me.
I still think it is a valuable use of my time to make my voice heard to the company.
Weird. FastMail is many times faster than Proton ever was for me. FastMail is also headquartered in Australia, not the US. Fastmail also now has European servers.
Data regions like these offer no protection, it’s just a feel-good marketing term with no legal basis. Source: I work in this business with multinationals with a similar footprint and we have paid actual lawyers to look at it.
The only thing that unfortunately matters here is that Fastmail has a US incorporation.
Fastmail even writes as such:
> If what you need is a guarantee that your data remains only in the EU, we don’t have that, and we’d rather tell you directly than let you assume otherwise.
If you haven't already, it's a good time to pay for a domain. That way, no matter what host you may choose to use in the future, people will still be able to email you with the address they already know. It does add some additional cost, but imo it's well worth it.
For all the shit they get, every controversy they've ever had has boiled down to a comms issue. They've been consistent for decades and I trust them, even if they often make weird business decisions.
If an employee is getting their work done, with or without AI, why does it matter? Is it just the idea that if an employee is keeping up, without using AI, how much work could they get done if they were?
According to the manifesto, it seems to be that hopping aboard the AI train has inexplicably not materialized exponential revenue growth, and since it can impossibly be that AI has been oversold, the only conclusion must be that employees are dragging their feet and must be forced to go full send with vibecoding for the destined profits to arrive.
Agreed. And I'd add that some managers/execs think abuse is fun, or at least necessary. They're always looking to pick up a new stick to beat people with. Their peers and superiors frequently mistake it for competence and toughness.
If you're a start up especially in silicon valley, it doesn't matter how well something is built if you can't get to market, which creates a toxic culture of build fast at all cost, that small detail will be a "good problem to have", and AI has thrown jet fuel on the dumpster fire.
I feel like this is an internal bias I’ve actually built up over time. If I see another company providing a service come out after something I already am using, I subconsciously gravitate toward it.
If they’re coming to market when there’s already a dominant player, they must have improved something, right? Not saying it’s logical.
I question the premise. In fact most of the religious fanatics I see these days are the ones willing to sacrifice their skills and their ability to think to the machine god.
It doesn't matter but CEOs are dumb fucks. Ask this guy how HE uses AI and you'll see he most likely doesn't. They don't understand how anything their company develops works.
Usually that would be fine if reporting lines were healthy, but in the AI age with top-down mandates they're not.
This to me doesn't solve the actual problem. I don't care if engineers at Proton use AI, and I don't care if management makes it a requirement to work there. What I care about is using it as a way to instill fear. Combined with the CEO constantly blowing up on Slack insulting employees, it cultivates a culture of "yes-men" which is not good for a security and privacy minded product.
I know there must be a better phrase for it, but i'll just say that we're in the Age of Extreme Capitalism. I know folks tend to reply "Because capitalism" for many ills and awful behavior (I've done it my self!)...But i think its more than that. Its like an extreme, excessive, bonkers form of capitalism (and all things under and adjacent to capitalism)...Again, maybe there's a better label for it. But nowadays (and as others have cited that its felt like its been going on for what like a decade or so)...lots of folks in leadership positions seem like they're out only for themselves, and damned be everyone, and sell your grandma for that sweet money from her data...It feels so much worse than that Gordon Gecko character as portrayed in the old 80s WallStreet movie - like, so much worse, everywhere.
I'm looking at alternative email provider options, and I'm struggling to find options that have banned GenAI, and have the features and reliability I need. I will gladly pay a premium for a provider that's not going to let AI creep in gradually, and take a bigger role over data and security
Fastmail is excellent. They haven’t banned AI but their approach (set up MCP so AI power users can pull in their email data) is a lot more thoughtful and entirely nonintrusive so far.
I've been happy with fastmail. Their product and UX looks a little dated even - in a good way I realize. It's not trying to be anything its not.
Also iCloud paid accounts allow custom domains for email. The Apple mail product is way worse but it was amazingly simple to set up and I am happy I have my own domain.
Apple is extensively and heavily using GenAI internally, and I've not got confidence in their product quality going forward (macOS is still declining in overall quality, from my experience)
i've been using fastmail as one of my email service providers for 5+ years and they've been always quite cordial and friendly which i think is rare to find in large b2c email services.
at least when i contacted fastmail support early this year, i had no problem getting in touch with a real person and asking follow up inquiries back and forth in a timely manner.
> To be clear about what this isn’t: we have not integrated AI into Fastmail. There’s no chatbot bolted onto the inbox, and your mail isn’t being piped through a model in the background. The MCP server is simply another API endpoint for you to use, if you want to, with the AI client of your choice.
> That distinction matters to us. Our long-term values include “Your data belongs to you” and “We are good stewards of your data”. The pattern we try to follow is: rather than continuously reworking our UI to follow every new trend, we give you the interfaces to use your data however it suits you. MCP continues that pattern. It’s there if you want it, and nothing changes if you don’t.
Using AI for support is such a dick move to your customers. I can't understand how companies don't see how disrespectful it is. I ran into that at work with Sonicwall recently, and had to contact our account rep to get my case to a human, not a clanker. It really made me feel like they don't care about solving my issues, and as a result I doubt very much if I would ever choose the company if I were given the power over that decision.
I run a small email hosting service. It started out as something I set up for family and friends, but has since grown into a small customer base.
We're deliberately keeping things simple. No AI, no scanning your emails for other purposes, and no selling your data. That's not something we're planning to change.
The focus is on doing email well: deliverability, reliability, and keeping our outbound reputation clean through strict anti-spam policies.
We support SMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, and custom domains. It's fairly bare-bones, and we expect customers to know their way around email config.
But gmail have basically spotless security record? If you care about security, gmail is the option that basically had no security incidents in last 10 years (aside from "someone's mail password leaked from somewhere else" which is not gmail fault).
Only problem (and a big one) is just fact it is US company
> In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton 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.
There was a moment a while back when 1Password made some decision (I think abandoning delphi?) that made me take a step back and ask if they were a security company or not. In moments like this, I wonder if Proton's pitch is security or not. Even if this is a true take, I think someone saying that they need to be cautious and pentest something before launch is a valid concern, for a security company. Not all companies are security companies, but Proton specifically advertises itself as being security and privacy conscious. It is a bad look for a security company to do something that indicates a lack of security prowess.
I think the writing on the wall for manually writing every line of code is obvious, but that does not obviate the need to secure things. However, pushing for speed at the expense of security, AI or not, is a bad look for a security company.
> “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.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
This is the leader behind Proton? I think I need to be more on social media and pay attention to this. This single sentence, if true, has now made me decide to never pay Proton again. That's it. Done. I had email services, VPN, and was considering storage too. Nope.
I am so sick an tired of AIBrained CEO's. All this does is validate how much these people do not need to exist. They just don't. Their thinking is useless. Their in-grouping and in-breeding of mentality is psychosis at large. And now that feel, once again, they can take their masks off, it's time to start looking them in the face and saying, "No."
One could easily argue that the CEO's comments about employees being "losers" are quite abusive. He's not acting as a responsible leader. Sounds like a terrible place to work. Glad I never moved any services to Proton.
I feel like I got lucky in choosing fastmail. They are always compared. Fastmail gave me a better impression. Maybe there's something to that instinct.
I'm also a happy Fastmail customer, but they are not really comparable: Fastmail is an Australian company with American servers, they are not a privacy-conscious option at all.
It’s email. There isn’t much privacy in email other than TLS. Proton encrypting your inbox is basically useless since they could read your email in between TLS termination and encryption. I don’t care how private their fancy Swiss servers are and the NSA doesn’t either.
The sender and the receiver both have a copy of the email. The receiver's MTA pretty much has to have a copy of the email for sane antispam to work. Email itself intrinsically leaks the sender, recipient, and time as part of the SMTP message, which means anyone with access to email server logs can recover this information no matter how much security and encryption you try to put on top of it, and that means that whatever three-letter agency you care about probably has access to all the information they want anyways.
The only meaningful difference in security is going to be whether or not the outgoing MTA is going to try to use (or even require) TLS on the MTA-MTA connection, and what level of encryption is applied to the at-rest email.
Personally, I'm not too fussed about a mail system administrator being able to read my email because of the BOFH principle... it's not worth the sysadmin's time to read my email, because it's just not interesting.
I switched recently. I think the safe bet now is to just use my personal domain and whatever provider I move to next I can just update MX records. Really annoying but it is what it is.
I've had their top level personal account for years (visionary or something equally wanky). What are others using instead? I'm not sure I want to continue funding someone that is behaving like this (if it is confirmed).
I've seen a fair number of seemingly together people crumple as leaders when things behind the scenes were crashing. Is this what's happening at Proton, an unseen disaster that's turned leadership into burnt toast?
People in control of themselves don't publicly write such things, regardless of whether they think it.
I expect Proton's existing employees may be a particularly bad audience for a "let the AI worry about security" message from the top, given that they are more likely to be a) security experts and b) people who care enough about security to actively seek out a job at Proton.
Looking at the comments I seem to be the minority, but I appreciated the honesty to say, look we want to use AI and if you don't then this company is not a good fit anymore. Now they will let go these people anyway, but in a less transparent way.
The employee seems to have a better grasp of their demographic than the CEO. Hope he enjoys losing a good employee and their revenue continuing to fall through the floor. I'm not the only paying customer leaving ASAP.
As a customer of a company whose motto was privacy and security i'm extremely concern about this push at the expense of security. In what world is doing a security audit "loser thinking"?? Its not honesty, it's a techbro in ai psychosis running a company completely against it's core values.. Start of enshittification as they call it?
“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.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
I mean, I also appreciate the honesty of the CEO to say that security is not important anymore and if it is to you, this company is not a good fit anymore.
Letting people go for invented reasons isn't something that happens in civilized countries, by the way.
All of this has made me really appreciate that the people I work for, and with, aren't childish assholes. People need to realize this is not normal behavior from an executive or anyone in any sort of management position.
"Not the best at communication" is an entirely generous way of putting it. This is not a one-off mentality or an "oopsie". This is someone who believes themselves over-sovereign, singularly capable, and further that they alone have a true vision.
These are people you do not give time, attention, or money.
I guess they see AI companies either get bought or receive funding for billions and desperately want a piece of that pie so will do anything to make their company at least look like an AI company i.e. "AI-first".
man, and a hundred years later after they get 1917'd there will be an outcry for those "innocent benevolent leaders, who were hated just for their success"
Just makes me think how we have encouraged a generation of tech leaders to be complete assholes with no consequences. That “loser thinking” line should never be accepted in any company discourse, even from leadership. If this person wasn’t an exec, they’d be shown the door for that language.
Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?
I was recently 'mentored' with some leadership advice. Be optimistic. Nobody wants to put a pessimist in a leadership role. Who would you hire for a C level position? An optimist or a pessimist?
The problem is that being optimistic creates massive cognitive disconnects in engineering teams who are trained to think in terms of systemic failure modes. There isn't the same practice of systemic success modes (perhaps that's the role of product managers?)
Anyway, this type of CEO is pushing his brand of 'optimism' down the org chart and making anyone who feels different an outcast, hence his choice of words.
Yen's behavior, per the OP, is nothing like optimism. Optimists not only see a brighter future, they are positive and inspire that in others. Steve Jobs was an optimist (at least publicly), to pick a random person.
Yen says there is an existential crisis, Proton employees must adjust to survive, and those who don't agree or raise concerns are losers. Yen's behavior also strongly implies a future of abuse.
I interpreted it as meaning that optimism is an assumption that problems will go away so there’s no need to painfully face them, whereas pessimism is an assumption that things will get worse unless you actively search out problems and fix them.
ah yeah, I mean if that's the case, I think that's orthogonal, right?
In my interpretation of the words, I tend to think of optimism as being the brave thing because having hope is more difficult, and IME, you can only muster energy to solve a problem if hope exists. Conversely, pessimism to me feels cheap and easy, and if you say "everything's fucked, what's the point" then nothing gets solved
So, it's probably more of a quadrant/compass along the axes of optimism/pessimism and proactive/passive
> Oh trust me. We knew all along but we always viewed 'other employees' as lower caste deserving of the disdain they get.
Projecting much? There has certainly been disdain towards other fields, but it mostly seems to be the management class that gets ripped by programmers the most. HR too sometimes.
The thing with tech products is they could just leave and start another company. No need to go through union-busting behavior.
Every discussion of Proton leadership shortcomings shows a market of users looking for a better run company.
And if it’s all AI developed moving forward, why not? There’s investors out there that would support Proton’s original engineers to fulfill Proton’s original mission, without the AI psychosis abandoning security as a top priority.
> The thing with tech products is they could just leave and start another company.
This is such a cop out response. They still need funding, and infrastructure, and to build up an entire customer base who presumably they would need to bribe with free service at a loss in order to attract anyone new. Who’s gonna fund that when there’s a known market ceiling for the service that’s already been captured? We’re not in ZIRP anymore
As a guess? The same amount of customers that left Gmail for Proton vs. those that signed up for Proton without ever having a Gmail account.
I’d wager that most of their current customers have left something else to sign up for Proton in the first place, because of the privacy and security offering.
When Proton leadership abandons those values in favor of “move fast, break things, lay off engineers”, their customers are more likely to follow the people that take privacy and security seriously.
The CEO and CTO have made it clear that they want vibe-coded product updates without pentesting before exposing their customers to whatever may happen.
If you bought into Proton for privacy and security, that’s a red flag and a sign to find an alternative.
This is a wider problem than just the tech industry. The kind of rhetoric, words used in political rallies, debates, on TV etc just sets the tone for society as a whole to become a bit more meaner, nastier...one step at a time. Even religious talks, sermons etc aren't immune to this
> Even religious talks, sermons etc aren't immune to this
They aren't just not immune - often enough, particularly when it comes to anti-LGBT hate, religious speeches of all kinds are fueling the fire. And that's before we get into the serious Evangelical backing of the Trump administration, Hegseth being almost a crusader [1] or the worst of the worst who believe that there needs to be a holy war in Israel to incite Armageddon [2].
> Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?
Pretty much, I found some very helpful words and perspectives on this from Michael Sandel - Tyranny of Merit. The winners begin to think there success is their own doing, forgetting the luck, good fortune, and many people who helped them along the way. They grow arrogant and full of hubris, looking down on and belittling others.
The question is then, how do we get out of this mess? Sandel offers some interesting foundations, along with Acemoglu.
I think it also has to be that the more powerful you are, the more likely you are to attract and retain sycophants who do nothing but compliment you and tell you how great your ideas are. It's a tale as old as time since the days of kings and emperors.
Some of the best moments of growth that I've experienced have happened during adversity, when something I said or did was laid bare for me from another perspective, with all of the problems with my approach pointed out. Those moments are intensely uncomfortable in that moment but so valuable for long-run growth (provided you have enough of a check on your own ego and developed enough insight to learn from such experiences).
My guess is that this trend to sycophancy will happen in every hierarchical organization where individuals at the top are able to reshape their social environment to avoid uncomfortable moments that they don't wish to have. I think it takes someone truly exceptional to avoid creating that kind of reality for themselves, and why it's oh-so-common to see hyperinflated egos from the most powerful individuals.
That said, I would read the hell out of a non-fictional expose covering specifically just the sycophants around some of our most notoriously unhinged powerful people, ones that showed exactly who are applauding these Emperors Nero who play their citharas while their world burns.
> The winners begin to think there success is their own doing, forgetting the luck, good fortune, and many people who helped them along the way. They grow arrogant and full of hubris, looking down on and belittling others.
This line from the poster. Its been my experience over 30 years.
nerd-sniped me on this one. mainstream cool isn’t a thing. i think you mean successful. mainstream values success because it’s the vanilla proxy for a vanilla form of “value”.
so cool has always been about the “iykyk” kinda value. once too many people know there’s nothing to know anymore.
I think your cool only applies when you get quite granular. OTOH, everyone knows "teenager slang" is cool and "working in tech" is (now) cool, or "being a brain surgeon" is cool. So as I said in my original comment, those are two different "cool"s entirely.
I've noticed a marked increase in overall shitty, childish, selfish behavior in and out of the work place since around 2016. Being an asshole has absolutely been normalized.
I'm personally un-normalizing this. I've left meetings for this shit and will continue to do so. I don't give two shits which service is broken or what bug made it to prod, if you can't talk to me about it without sounding like a tweenage boy, you can fucking fix it yourself.
I don't think CEO personality types have changed all that much. I work IT in manufacturing, and have consistently seen this "macho masculinity alpha" type before. He was quickly let go by the board, thankfully.
We live in a world where CEOs typically have gotten their position through nepotism, or fucking over many people to get to the top. It's just who they are.
I guess people go where the incentives are. For at least the last decade that sort of behavior hasn't been punished or has even been rewarded (see: the entire Trump administration).
Meanwhile, being a decent person carries very little benefit anymore. So it's probably not surprising that people no longer take the effort.
Sure, but that only works if corporations are willing to value being a decent person in their hiring and performance reviews. In my experience, that is not the case at all.
As in any job or interview - especially if you offer something different than all the carbon-copy candidates - you need to compel them to see your value.
If you believe in what you do - and 'decency' (depending on definition) isn't hard to believe in, having a long track record and obvious advantages - it's relatively easy to be compelling.
Finally, don't work for the corp. Work someplace else. Start your own!
In more ways than the obvious, "great leaders are jerks, like Steve Jobs".
There has been a shift from "We" to "I". It rubbed me wrong when Apple launched the iPod, the iPhone, etc. In that moment, the world became more self-centered, instead of group-centered. Social media is the same, it's all about the individual: MY profile, MY followers, MY status.
It's anti-social by nature, and society is worse because of the shift.
Steve made really good products. Maybe not to your individual taste but it's clear he had a vision and worked tirelessly to follow it - no half measures - and a lot of people liked his vision. Everyone else is forgetting to copy that part.
Less "forgetting" and more "not as brilliantly insane as Jobs" ... but Jobs was NEVER someone that ANYONE should ever emulate.
Fun real life story: I worked with an engineer once who had some sort of disability that required him to walk around with crutches attached to his arms. Before he worked with me, he worked at Apple, and was high up.
One day he had a meeting with Jobs, and he was late, because a non-handicapped car had parked in the handicapped spot, and as a disabled person it took him a long time to get from a normal parking spot. He said as much when he arrived in the meeting.
Now here's the "Jobs is burning in hell right now" part. Jobs looks the disabled guy directly in the eye and, without any shame whatsoever, says "oh, I parked there ... I believe the US government overreacted after WW2 and built too many disabled parking spaces, so I park in them."
He says this ... to the sweaty disabled guy who just had to "race" across the parking lot to get to the meeting! Fuck Jobs and fuck emulating him.
Most of the Steve Jobs cult forget that Steve grew up. He was an ahole, but if you look at the historical examples they are almost exclusively from his first tenure at Apple. After his ouster and time with Pixar and Next it appears he mostly calmed down and learned to respect colleagues and employees significantly more.
IDK about the "being an asshole to your face" part (my story on that, above, did come from early Apple).
But he was still famous for working his teams an insane amount of hours throughout his career. It was an open "joke" that any new project he released would be completely unsupportable for the first week ... because he drove the entire team that built it so hard, the entire team crashed for a week after.
That is not how any healthy/reasonable adult runs any team, tech or otherwise.
"Do whatever you can get away with, with prioritization on local optimization with eager evaluation"
So basically, be an asshole/sociopath. The tennets of objectivism.
"morality" is basically memoized reinforcement learning over many human generations. So, it seems that the cache has been wiped out, and they need to learn again why they shouldn't be focusing on local optimization exclusively.
"Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?"
It's a team not a family.
The idea that demanding performance from your employees is "losing your humanity" is insane.
Teams are made of people. People skills make you more effective at dealing with people.
Obviously you can be a total prick and demand performance and maybe get some people onboard but nobody thrives in those environments and unless you want to deal with turnover and mediocrity you foster good working environments with your teammates
Plenty of people thrive in environments where high performance is demanded. This idea that you produce the best outputs by coddling your employees is pure cope.
Demanding high performance also doesn't necessarily mean forcing everyone to work 996 or yelling at people, but it can mean enforcing standards that everyone might not like or agree with.
You treat your team well because your highest performers are the ones with most options and the ones that will leave first when you don't. If productivity is bad before you pull something like this, you won't like what happens when all you have left is a team full of demoralized underachievers.
Even still, there are gradations of using AI. Yen seems to have been on a crusade to get everyone to vibe code the entire thing. Not a lot of high performing software engineers signing off on such practices either.
You can be demanding without using terms like “loser thinking.”
But performance isn’t a single thing. If you prioritize features over pen testing, you’re optimizing one kind of performance and neglecting security, which is an another kind.
For a company whose whole selling point is security, it’s a bad trade-off.
As I think about it, I am starting to suspect that it a layoff in disguise. Even the likely backlash part is. Still, it seems.. bold primarily because, if anything, we are in a transition period of sorts. No one figured everything out yet. You want people who can do it, but those are the ones who will jump ship, because those are the ones with options.
I believe Proton is advertising they are not Google as the primary reason to switch to them, and yet their leadership demonstrate they are no different. The way the CEO publicly shows no empathy for his own staff and even after the public reaction shows that Proton is no different from Google.
Cult like activity like this is never good for anyone, in business or politics.
> company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership
This is evil in ways most people probably don't understand. To explain, here is the real message behind this, stripped of neutral journalism language. I'm not going to be shocked if this is the actual hidden thought process.
"Hello. You have now worked at our company for 7 years, contributing thousands of hours of work towards making our products better. We regret to inform you that you are worthless. Your so-called 'contributions' don't deserve to be printed on toilet paper our CEO wipes with. Frankly, you are a waste of space sucking up the air inside our offices, and we are itching to get rid of degenerates like you at the first opportunity. Your only chance to temporarily offset our perception of your uselessness is our upcoming 20-minute degradation ritual where you'll dance to our whims and plead by showing how much you love using whatever our CEO says you'll use. Building good solutions, knowing our tech stack, working with other people, being creative? All worthless, just like you. What really matters is if you can make me feel good. Fuck you and get ready to crawl on your knees."
As a privacy and security focused company, this would seem like reputational suicide. Which in the privacy and security space you would figure is basically corporate suicide.
I wanted to install Proton on my kids phone, but apparently they think their client needs Android 10 to function for some reason, so they lost potential customer while no other major email app has such strict version requirement, in the end went with different service which works fine in Nine Mail and doesn't have storage limits like from quarter century ago. Heck, they barely offer what Gmail had 22+ years ago on their free plan.
Honestly losing the will over here; I Degoogled and moved to Proton a couple of years ago because they seemed to be a cool company aligned with my values. Is this coming from a “the business is failing and we need to ship faster to stay competitive” angle or is he just a massive ball bag? I mean either way he’s probably a massive ball bag but if he’s trying to save a sinking ship it’s at least somewhat understandable. Otoh if he’s just a massive greedy ball bag then I don’t even know where I go next.
> “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
It's insane that rational thought, even in engineering orgs, is out the window in favor of AI hype.
AI changes the Quality/Time tradeoff. As anyone with a even a little engineering background knows, that means you can,
* Cut time to get the same shitty software quality
with unlimited bugs that we're accustomed to
* In the same time, increase quality and make
actually secure software.
How much time does it now take, using AI, to make 'High Assurance' software? Provably correct components? Other quality measures that were once out of reach? etc.
And the capability of AI-resourced attackers makes higher-quality software necessary.
I'll be angling hard towards abandoning Proton (and no longer recommending it to others) so long as Yen remains CEO. Hopefully, the larger company realizes the threat someone like him poses to their image AND quality of service.
Like I said earlier this week, this re-alignment of the people that built and maintained their products is also resulting in a re-alignment of their customer base.
Hopefully we’ll see those talented engineers leaving to build an alternative to Proton products now that we know corporate leadership at Proton can’t be trusted.
The board should really oust the “loser thinking” CEO and CTO if they want to minimize the damage to their brand.
The company not providing even a written statement in response to 404 reporting speaks volumes. They don’t see themselves accountable to their customers.
As one of the first customers of ProtonMail, this makes me really disappointed. Yen has clearly gone off the rails. This is a complete betrayal of the core principles he founded Proton on.
<< “I want to acknowledge myself, personally, that there was a communication failure on my part and there are many things that probably could and should have been communicated differently, and this is something that I’ll have to reflect on and improve over time. So I will do that.”
Note how he says that he wants to 'acknowledge' things. Not apologize. Not that he is wrong about the re-interviews. He says he didn't use nice enough language to soften the blow. Basically, in simple terms, he didn't Lisa it up as temporary refund adjustment.
edit: and the passive voice is a cherry on top
edit2: I gotta say -- all those CEOs are getting a little uppity for people who likely use copilot for summarizing emails.
Why can't they just say something like, "I really shouldn't have said X Y Z. It was insulting and I'm embarrassed that I chose that way of speaking to an employee. As a leader, it's important that I be encouraging and receptive." In other words, don't vaguely allude to what happened by saying there was "a communication failure." CEOs like to act like their subordinates are children and can't tell the difference.
Agreed. Too little and too late.
Is he not right though? Have you not interacted with a once star senior engineer who now operates at the level of a low-quality junior because they refuse to use AI?
There was a point a few decades ago with architecture where people moved off blueprints to CAD files, and everyone had to learn CAD or be pushed out, which lead to terrible churn and people I know got kicked out of architecture for good. This is a similar situation; they're not kicking out engineers for being 5% less productive, they're re-interviewing to find engineers who are 1/10th or 1/100th as productive as their peers. It sucks, and I feel bad for people who have to fear for their job, but it's a necessary action
I have yet to see data that supports this claims. In the contrary all I have read and observed point in the opposite direction. Also I have yet to see an easy way to assess the performance of engineers. Lines of code it is certainly not!
This doesn't even make sense. You don't go from star senior to low quality junior by just doing what you've been doing and refusing to prompt the slop machine. If anything you're retaining skills that everyone else is losing. Prompting an llm is not a skill, the only thing this "re-interview" assesses is if you're using the magic box like the idiot CEO wants you to. Which is another way to say, are you de-skilling yourself fast enough, because that's what the CEO thinks is best for the company right now.
<< Have you not interacted with a once star senior engineer who now operates at the level of a low-quality junior because they refuse to use AI?
I can honestly say no. I might question your premise a little. Lets hypothetically say you got Karpathy level senior; clearly a star and beam of sunshine in an otherwise dreary world. Is he now less of a star just because he won't use AI?
It is a real question, because if he is then the question becomes why.
Did he simply stop working as much? Or is he working the same amount, but it looks like he is doing less? If it merely looks like it, we may well have office situation on our hands, where rank and file may end up turning to management and asking themselves and the management one simple question:
What exactly it is you are doing here?
I know for a fact good management can enable some things, but I am starting to question the blind fervor I seem to see more of lately. If you can't motivate Karpathy or worse, you now are suddenly are unable to see his value, then maybe it is not Karpathy's fault.
<< This is a similar situation; they're not kicking out engineers for being 5% less productive, they're re-interviewing to find engineers who are 1/10th or 1/100th as productive as their peers
And this may be the big part: productivity. The problem is that productivity along the lines of silly metrics like: lines of code, agents commits per engineer are.. uhh.. not useless exactly, but, how do I phrase it a sensible way so that it reaches at least one stray manager that watches this conversation,
*really fucking dumb metric to treat as a measure stick.*
But who am I to judge.
<< but it's a necessary action
None of it is necessary. By definition it is all elective. That said, the nature of that relationship goes both ways and, I will be super subtle here, right now it is not the engineers, who can't do it all.
Quite the opposite, management could find itself in a pickle now, because it has neither skill to drive the development, practical knowledge that you only get from getting to close to the abyss, 'taste', theoretical foundation, curiosity or even basic exposure that would it let develop either of the previous facets.
Make no mistake, a lot of us choose to do deal with some of the idiocy for a stability gain. But, if there is none, why do I need you? I might as well try to strike out on my own and watch the AI coded towers fall ( being mildly dramatic for visual purposes; amusingly, I don't think I am that far off ) .
> Is he not right though? Have you not interacted with a once star senior engineer who now operates at the level of a low-quality junior because they refuse to use AI?
I don't even know where to start. Let me just say it that by using LLMs you voluntarily decide to let the atrophy happen to your skills, knowledge and experience. You do things without understanding them, or with vague understanding only. Your thinking process becomes completely dependent on something that you find more and more difficult to verify (if you even care). Why would anyone do such a thing to oneself?
Related:
"Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692 67 comments
"Proton goes all in on using AI" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296602 110 comments
"Proton to 'Re-Interview' Staff About AI to See Who Gets to Keep Their Job" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251062 48 comments
Thank you for including other reports. However, everything seems to link back to 404. Convo.casa is just quoting 404I'm suspicious that 404 has a grudge against Proton, but I am open minded.
The articles seem damning. However, CEOs jumping on board the AI bandwagon is not particularly rare. I don't see a CEO pushing AI as reason to change my email provider. If it manifests to be a problem, then sure I will switch. So far I haven't seen any repercussions.
When a CEO calls people "losers" for caring about security, and when the CEO considers it a failure that they don't have hockey stick growth, to me that's absolutely a reason to consider changing for most people using Proton. If someone doesn't care about employees raising security concerns, or a company chasing profits at all cost, then why are they using Proton in the first place?
If all that is true it is a concern. I'm not going to make any changes until I see some validation. Validation from other media, or seeing a decline in quality of product.
“I’ll put on my seatbelt when the car crashes”
Proton engineering culture always got a bad rep pre-AI era as well(per their glassdoor reviews[1]) . Poor engineering directly or indirectly makes them susceptible to data breach because good talent stays away. One reason why I hesitated moved to proton back when a lot of people did. My understanding is that the only reason they are in the game are because send email services are extremely difficult to run.
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PROTON-Reviews-E13574.htm
Did an interview for them. They sent me a 3 page IQ-like test ("how much triangles are inside this triangle"-type of thing).
I guess they didn't like my reply of "many"
That's a whole wrong PROTON you linked (some car related company?), but the real one is not that much better either:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Proton-privacy...
This is very disappointing, I've been on Proton for a long time and just assumed a "high trust non-Google" email provider implicitly had integrity. Knowing that they're scummy almost defeats the purpose of using it for me.
I think de-googling is itself has its costs. I've been waiting for a better solution to email. On a related note fundamentally I think the incentives to keep email infra alive is linked to the same incentive rooted in the core belief held by companies/services that ads work.
If there was an inflection point to break that perception — like covid gave a pause for thought for location based ad targeting — and hence the incentive, perhaps we can kick email as one of the ideas whose time has come.
I am rooting for ATproto to be the replacement.
> de-googling is itself has its costs
It can, but it depends on how "googled" you allowed yourself to become in the first place. For me, that's not much at all. But if you've been all-in (or near it) for years, with tons of docs, your photo archive, etc. all tied to google, then yeah, moving away is gonna be difficult.
which is exactly why the AI push and brand harm from the CEO is so baffling, it is in essence an email service based on privacy and trust, what is the point of pushing AI so hard. Wonder if the CEO has some sort of AI psychosis, I prefer products branded on privacy/security to not take the 'move fast and break things' route
How is there a CEO salary listed?
On the Internet, sometimes people pretend to be someone they're not and even go as far as to provide erroneous data on purpose.
Some of those people might actually be dogs, but it is very hard to know!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
Damn. My proton plan just renewed a couple weeks ago.
I have not failed to notice that they’ve slowed focus on security oriented features and are now focused on a lot of things I don’t care about, but I didn’t realize the magnitude of the cultural problem there.
Without the security aspect, Proton is ridiculously overpriced. If they want to compete with GSuite or Zoho, they gotta come down.
I’m willing to pay premium for a niche security focused offering. I’m not willing to pay a premium for AI generated crapware.
I became a Proton visionary after I interacted with them here on HN. They took PGP really seriously and addressed my very specific concerns.
I don't care about the AI use bur I'm very sad to learn they won't be "lovingly" crafting their products anymore. Less craftsmanship and attention to detail can't be good.
Thankfully, owning a domain makes switching providers easy.
Gsuite is cheap because google is monitizing your data. Probably true for zoho or other providers unless they explicitly swear they're not.
you either pay out of pocket or you pay with data but there is no free lunch.
as a current Proton customer I'm going to start looking for alternatives.
I'm looking for an alternative now, and I really don't care if my plan is still good for another year.
> now focused on a lot of things I don’t care about
Yeah, I'm a paying customer and have been asking for a desktop app for Proton Drive for years. Instead, they've focused their efforts on a crypto wallet and a chatbot. (Sure, we recently got a CLI app which _is_ better than nothing but come on.)
Wrapping the CLI is an evening of Claude. https://github.com/juxuanu/cold-drive
We've all lost the plot
Yeah, I'll be looking for an alternative. I've already drifted off of everything but the email service. The opportunity to potentially not due business with orgs run by insufferable assholes is all the push I really need to take another look around.
damn, this guy crashing out live in front of his company and the (tech) world.
AI times are weird. Validates that truism I heard: money (and power and influence and now AI) is an amplifier. It amplifies what you always were.
AI is what to tech what alcohol is to people
> AI is what to tech what alcohol is to people
Was this sentence authored under the influence of one or both?
More like Siri speech-to-text (tech?) which is still phenomenally bad
> both?
I counted 4 things you could be under the influence of, not two.
Eh, it's just an extra "what".
More like cocaine. The symptoms of psychosis after prolonged overuse are even eerily similar.
It's an excuse for people to strip away the fig leaf of meliorism.
Well said.
AI psychosis is real, coupled with the fact that most execs are sociopaths to being with, that's not a good combo
Kind of amazing how completely Yen misunderstands Protons customer base. It’s pretty much entirely security conscious people who want to divest from big tech right?
Why would he throw all that away?
Outside the security conscious crowd and the digital sovereignty crowd, they don't stand a chance.
He seems to no longer understand that, and he might run a decent business to the ground with his delusions.
Because there are only so many paranoid nerds around, and way more people who love the hype
They had a safe stable business with a loyal user base in a market niche they completely owned, could have basically just sat on their asses and de facto collected taxes from paranoid nerds and journalists for decades.
I just don't understand why they'd want to trade all that away for a chasing the same nebulous "something something AI" business plan as literally every other company in the tech industry right now. The odds they'll be competitive in such an endeavor and see a fraction of the success they had again is minuscule.
Maybe they know fundamentally what they do is trivial? Making something shitty and complex for the sake of it while still maintaining a facade of functionality takes guts and balls.
I already cancelled my subscription. They've demonstrated far too reckless behavior for me to trust something this critical to them, especially as they present themselves as the private and secure alternative.
Same here. Been a paying customer for probably about 3 years now. Off to either Fastmail or Tuta most likely. I'd like to self-host, but corporations have thoroughly ruined what should have been an open and decentralized system.
Yep, same. Done.
Aw schucks. I moved to Proton half a year ago in an effort to de-Google (and de-US) myself. Now this. Time to write a message to customer service explaining my concerns.
Fastmail is good, I've used it a few years.
I really like the idea of using Fastmail over Tuta since they support normal protocols and thus third party clients. My main concern is that if they're able to serve those protocols, they have to be able to access my emails in plaintext in some form or fashion, which also means if their systems do (and most likely inevitably will these days) get hacked at some point, all my emails are now exposed and leaked.
I stopped worrying about this because everyone I correspond with uses email services that store emails in plaintext, mostly Microsoft and Google.
Yes email is inherently insecure, don't forget your emails also sit on lots of other systems too usually unencrypted unless everyone else has opsec matching yours. Don't put important secrets in email I guess.
Frustrating that it was designed so badly and I don't think there's a way to fix it without fixing protocols really and doing E2E encryption and signing with keys only on devices, even then you depend on all the code handling that to be secure, and nobody on the other side to store plain text of your encrypted emails (which they must be able to see/get after all).
You don't have to keep all your email there. Could keep recent emails, and archive the rest somewhere else. mbsync etc
+1 to Fastmail, I've used them for almost 8 years now, never ever have I had an issue with them.
I am also a happy Fastmail customer, but they are an Australian company with infrastructure in the US.
They have EU servers now.
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-offers-eu-data-region...
Is fastmail better than zoho? I'm have trouble choosing between them to move small org (of 5 people or so).
If you need Google Workspace replacement then Zoho, if not Fastmail is better and less bloat.
Sorry I don't know.
What's their password manager like?
I don't think they have one, I use 1password. Note sure why email and a password manager would be linked?
Ah sorry, I've been toying with moving to Proton for their password manager because I despise what 1Password has become so I think I just assumed everyone was recommending Fastmail because they have a comparable suite of apps. I maybe got over excited that there might be a decent alternative.
What has 1Password become? I haven't seen anything recently; perhaps I missed something?
Most recent criticism is about either: that they switched from selling licenses to subscriptions, that they stopped supporting self-hosting, that they use Electron, or that they financially support Omarchy/DHH.
Yes not very happy with 1pass either, would rather move off them.
I recommend Bitwarden. Cheaper and just as good as 1Password IMHO.
I'm in the other boat, I've been pondering de-Googling to either FastMail or ProtonMail, and struggled to make a decision.
Now it's been made for me and I can plan my migration to FastMail :-).
I migrated to FastMail from Proton earlier this year (after being with Proton since 2019). So far I'm more than happy with the decision.
FastMail is great, I'm not sure there's the same expectations around privacy though. I've been using it for years and love my masked emails, but I don't have any expectations that my data is locked down or encrypted, and one legal request would expose my info.
> one legal request would expose my info
This is already true for Proton. While they don't keep logs for ProtonVPN (as tested in court), they do for ProtonMail. Someone went to prison for trusting ProtonMail with their illegal activity.
You’re probably better off switching to one of the many good alternatives.
I have already begun using my proton-domain email address with real people. They have just started learning it (or have finally updated my contact info). That’s one hurdle.
Another hurdle is I see no other good alternative. I used Fastmail for a while, but it was a bit laggy due to network requests across the Atlantic Ocean. Also it is under US jurisdiction. That company is no longer relevant to me.
I still think it is a valuable use of my time to make my voice heard to the company.
What good alternative can you recommend for me?
Weird. FastMail is many times faster than Proton ever was for me. FastMail is also headquartered in Australia, not the US. Fastmail also now has European servers.
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-offers-eu-data-region...
EDIT: Re-reading your comment, maybe you meant the fact that the servers were exclusively in the US (until very recently).
Data regions like these offer no protection, it’s just a feel-good marketing term with no legal basis. Source: I work in this business with multinationals with a similar footprint and we have paid actual lawyers to look at it.
The only thing that unfortunately matters here is that Fastmail has a US incorporation.
Fastmail even writes as such:
> If what you need is a guarantee that your data remains only in the EU, we don’t have that, and we’d rather tell you directly than let you assume otherwise.
When I was deciding on alternatives, the other one I was considering is mailbox.org, which is out of Germany.
Plus Australia is a member of Five Eyes.
If you haven't already, it's a good time to pay for a domain. That way, no matter what host you may choose to use in the future, people will still be able to email you with the address they already know. It does add some additional cost, but imo it's well worth it.
ThunderMail from Mozilla can't come soon enough.
For all the shit they get, every controversy they've ever had has boiled down to a comms issue. They've been consistent for decades and I trust them, even if they often make weird business decisions.
If an employee is getting their work done, with or without AI, why does it matter? Is it just the idea that if an employee is keeping up, without using AI, how much work could they get done if they were?
According to the manifesto, it seems to be that hopping aboard the AI train has inexplicably not materialized exponential revenue growth, and since it can impossibly be that AI has been oversold, the only conclusion must be that employees are dragging their feet and must be forced to go full send with vibecoding for the destined profits to arrive.
Agreed. And I'd add that some managers/execs think abuse is fun, or at least necessary. They're always looking to pick up a new stick to beat people with. Their peers and superiors frequently mistake it for competence and toughness.
If you're a start up especially in silicon valley, it doesn't matter how well something is built if you can't get to market, which creates a toxic culture of build fast at all cost, that small detail will be a "good problem to have", and AI has thrown jet fuel on the dumpster fire.
I've never understood this. SV is full of the corpses of "First mover" advantage. Meanwhile many great companies were third or later to the scene.
I feel like this is an internal bias I’ve actually built up over time. If I see another company providing a service come out after something I already am using, I subconsciously gravitate toward it.
If they’re coming to market when there’s already a dominant player, they must have improved something, right? Not saying it’s logical.
survivorship bias fo sho
You should read about religious fanatics. Majority of Proton's customers are those "i will cut my own throat before i use AI related stuff" kind
I question the premise. In fact most of the religious fanatics I see these days are the ones willing to sacrifice their skills and their ability to think to the machine god.
It doesn't matter but CEOs are dumb fucks. Ask this guy how HE uses AI and you'll see he most likely doesn't. They don't understand how anything their company develops works.
Usually that would be fine if reporting lines were healthy, but in the AI age with top-down mandates they're not.
I guarantee you he chats with an LLM on a daily basis.
This to me doesn't solve the actual problem. I don't care if engineers at Proton use AI, and I don't care if management makes it a requirement to work there. What I care about is using it as a way to instill fear. Combined with the CEO constantly blowing up on Slack insulting employees, it cultivates a culture of "yes-men" which is not good for a security and privacy minded product.
I know there must be a better phrase for it, but i'll just say that we're in the Age of Extreme Capitalism. I know folks tend to reply "Because capitalism" for many ills and awful behavior (I've done it my self!)...But i think its more than that. Its like an extreme, excessive, bonkers form of capitalism (and all things under and adjacent to capitalism)...Again, maybe there's a better label for it. But nowadays (and as others have cited that its felt like its been going on for what like a decade or so)...lots of folks in leadership positions seem like they're out only for themselves, and damned be everyone, and sell your grandma for that sweet money from her data...It feels so much worse than that Gordon Gecko character as portrayed in the old 80s WallStreet movie - like, so much worse, everywhere.
I'm looking at alternative email provider options, and I'm struggling to find options that have banned GenAI, and have the features and reliability I need. I will gladly pay a premium for a provider that's not going to let AI creep in gradually, and take a bigger role over data and security
Fastmail is excellent. They haven’t banned AI, but IMO that would be equally as extreme as what proton is doing just in the other direction
Fastmail is excellent. They haven’t banned AI but their approach (set up MCP so AI power users can pull in their email data) is a lot more thoughtful and entirely nonintrusive so far.
I've been happy with fastmail. Their product and UX looks a little dated even - in a good way I realize. It's not trying to be anything its not.
Also iCloud paid accounts allow custom domains for email. The Apple mail product is way worse but it was amazingly simple to set up and I am happy I have my own domain.
Apple is extensively and heavily using GenAI internally, and I've not got confidence in their product quality going forward (macOS is still declining in overall quality, from my experience)
I’ve been using Fastmail for years. I haven’t seen any AI fluff yet…
Fastmail uses AI extensively for support and announced an MCP server earlier this year. Their CTO has also posted about using Claude for patches.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/16278789555215-A...
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/
i've been using fastmail as one of my email service providers for 5+ years and they've been always quite cordial and friendly which i think is rare to find in large b2c email services.
at least when i contacted fastmail support early this year, i had no problem getting in touch with a real person and asking follow up inquiries back and forth in a timely manner.
> To be clear about what this isn’t: we have not integrated AI into Fastmail. There’s no chatbot bolted onto the inbox, and your mail isn’t being piped through a model in the background. The MCP server is simply another API endpoint for you to use, if you want to, with the AI client of your choice.
> That distinction matters to us. Our long-term values include “Your data belongs to you” and “We are good stewards of your data”. The pattern we try to follow is: rather than continuously reworking our UI to follow every new trend, we give you the interfaces to use your data however it suits you. MCP continues that pattern. It’s there if you want it, and nothing changes if you don’t.
An MCP Server for Fastmail – National Email Day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47870988 - April 2026 (14 comments)
I have had no problem getting a human for customer support in a timely manner.
(fastmail customer)
The OP was asking about providers that have banned Gen AI. Fastly is definitely not that provider.
Using AI for support is such a dick move to your customers. I can't understand how companies don't see how disrespectful it is. I ran into that at work with Sonicwall recently, and had to contact our account rep to get my case to a human, not a clanker. It really made me feel like they don't care about solving my issues, and as a result I doubt very much if I would ever choose the company if I were given the power over that decision.
I run a small email hosting service. It started out as something I set up for family and friends, but has since grown into a small customer base.
We're deliberately keeping things simple. No AI, no scanning your emails for other purposes, and no selling your data. That's not something we're planning to change.
The focus is on doing email well: deliverability, reliability, and keeping our outbound reputation clean through strict anti-spam policies.
We support SMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, and custom domains. It's fairly bare-bones, and we expect customers to know their way around email config.
It's also just $5/year.
https://www.cheapestemailhosting.com
But gmail have basically spotless security record? If you care about security, gmail is the option that basically had no security incidents in last 10 years (aside from "someone's mail password leaked from somewhere else" which is not gmail fault).
Only problem (and a big one) is just fact it is US company
And that you have to do business with Google, who have a religious objection to providing any meaningful customer support.
I get better support from AWS as a $30 per month customer than I did with GCP and Google Workplace spending $300k per month at work.
As am I. Please let me know if you find any! I will do the same.
> In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton 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.
There was a moment a while back when 1Password made some decision (I think abandoning delphi?) that made me take a step back and ask if they were a security company or not. In moments like this, I wonder if Proton's pitch is security or not. Even if this is a true take, I think someone saying that they need to be cautious and pentest something before launch is a valid concern, for a security company. Not all companies are security companies, but Proton specifically advertises itself as being security and privacy conscious. It is a bad look for a security company to do something that indicates a lack of security prowess.
I think the writing on the wall for manually writing every line of code is obvious, but that does not obviate the need to secure things. However, pushing for speed at the expense of security, AI or not, is a bad look for a security company.
Holy shit.
> “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.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
This is the leader behind Proton? I think I need to be more on social media and pay attention to this. This single sentence, if true, has now made me decide to never pay Proton again. That's it. Done. I had email services, VPN, and was considering storage too. Nope.
I am so sick an tired of AIBrained CEO's. All this does is validate how much these people do not need to exist. They just don't. Their thinking is useless. Their in-grouping and in-breeding of mentality is psychosis at large. And now that feel, once again, they can take their masks off, it's time to start looking them in the face and saying, "No."
One could easily argue that the CEO's comments about employees being "losers" are quite abusive. He's not acting as a responsible leader. Sounds like a terrible place to work. Glad I never moved any services to Proton.
This guys sounds like a giant prick.
makes me sad, I use Proton, time to move away.
I feel like I got lucky in choosing fastmail. They are always compared. Fastmail gave me a better impression. Maybe there's something to that instinct.
I'm also a happy Fastmail customer, but they are not really comparable: Fastmail is an Australian company with American servers, they are not a privacy-conscious option at all.
It’s email. There isn’t much privacy in email other than TLS. Proton encrypting your inbox is basically useless since they could read your email in between TLS termination and encryption. I don’t care how private their fancy Swiss servers are and the NSA doesn’t either.
To hammer this point home:
The sender and the receiver both have a copy of the email. The receiver's MTA pretty much has to have a copy of the email for sane antispam to work. Email itself intrinsically leaks the sender, recipient, and time as part of the SMTP message, which means anyone with access to email server logs can recover this information no matter how much security and encryption you try to put on top of it, and that means that whatever three-letter agency you care about probably has access to all the information they want anyways.
The only meaningful difference in security is going to be whether or not the outgoing MTA is going to try to use (or even require) TLS on the MTA-MTA connection, and what level of encryption is applied to the at-rest email.
Personally, I'm not too fussed about a mail system administrator being able to read my email because of the BOFH principle... it's not worth the sysadmin's time to read my email, because it's just not interesting.
But if you don't care about that Gmail have spotless security record
There's a lot of ground between
"can technically read your emails but is motivated to protect your data"
and
"is an advertising company that mines your emails to sell ads targeting you, specifically".
There's now an EU option in Fastmail for hosting your data
But it's not about privacy, it's about data locality, at least at this stage, as far as I understand.
Oh, that's good to hear. Can you move an existing account?
I switched recently. I think the safe bet now is to just use my personal domain and whatever provider I move to next I can just update MX records. Really annoying but it is what it is.
Exactly! Don't lock yourself in to a single provider, especially for email where it's fairly easy to avoid by using your own domain.
I've had their top level personal account for years (visionary or something equally wanky). What are others using instead? I'm not sure I want to continue funding someone that is behaving like this (if it is confirmed).
Thunderbird Pro could be an option.
The child in me always enjoys it when disgruntled people use a company's projected openness against them - https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/945460-general-ideas...
I've seen a fair number of seemingly together people crumple as leaders when things behind the scenes were crashing. Is this what's happening at Proton, an unseen disaster that's turned leadership into burnt toast? People in control of themselves don't publicly write such things, regardless of whether they think it.
Whelp, it was good while it lasted. Proton subscription is cancelled. Glad I never migrated to their password store.
I expect Proton's existing employees may be a particularly bad audience for a "let the AI worry about security" message from the top, given that they are more likely to be a) security experts and b) people who care enough about security to actively seek out a job at Proton.
I noticed that according to the article the re-interviews were cancelled after a meeting of the board (which includes some pretty notable people).
I gather that the current CEO holds a majority of the shares. Is he susceptible at all to wiser counsel?
Looking at the comments I seem to be the minority, but I appreciated the honesty to say, look we want to use AI and if you don't then this company is not a good fit anymore. Now they will let go these people anyway, but in a less transparent way.
It’s kind of like appreciating the honesty of a CEO telling existing employees they need to start working weekends or find somewhere else to work.
There are ways to communicate without being rude and treating people with respect.
The employee seems to have a better grasp of their demographic than the CEO. Hope he enjoys losing a good employee and their revenue continuing to fall through the floor. I'm not the only paying customer leaving ASAP.
As a customer of a company whose motto was privacy and security i'm extremely concern about this push at the expense of security. In what world is doing a security audit "loser thinking"?? Its not honesty, it's a techbro in ai psychosis running a company completely against it's core values.. Start of enshittification as they call it?
“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.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
I mean, I also appreciate the honesty of the CEO to say that security is not important anymore and if it is to you, this company is not a good fit anymore.
Letting people go for invented reasons isn't something that happens in civilized countries, by the way.
In what shit hole of a country is this legal to pull lmao
All of this has made me really appreciate that the people I work for, and with, aren't childish assholes. People need to realize this is not normal behavior from an executive or anyone in any sort of management position.
When this story goes behind their paywall you can read it (in full) at https://web.archive.org/web/20261030171028/https://www.404me...
Keywords: bypass paywall
His words.... He is bulshitting his way out of this situation
ugh when will these execs stop focusing on tokenmaxxing?
that comment about "loser thinking" sounds like he's not the best at communication
"Not the best at communication" is an entirely generous way of putting it. This is not a one-off mentality or an "oopsie". This is someone who believes themselves over-sovereign, singularly capable, and further that they alone have a true vision.
These are people you do not give time, attention, or money.
I guess they see AI companies either get bought or receive funding for billions and desperately want a piece of that pie so will do anything to make their company at least look like an AI company i.e. "AI-first".
man, and a hundred years later after they get 1917'd there will be an outcry for those "innocent benevolent leaders, who were hated just for their success"
I've been torn on Proton for a while, but looks like I won't be renewing my subscription...
This person is so gross why do people like, or more importantly, _trust_ this company?
Is this Proton as in ProtonMail?
Yes, unfortunately
Wow. Clearly this isn’t a company I should be trusting to keep my email secure.
Just makes me think how we have encouraged a generation of tech leaders to be complete assholes with no consequences. That “loser thinking” line should never be accepted in any company discourse, even from leadership. If this person wasn’t an exec, they’d be shown the door for that language.
Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?
I was recently 'mentored' with some leadership advice. Be optimistic. Nobody wants to put a pessimist in a leadership role. Who would you hire for a C level position? An optimist or a pessimist?
The problem is that being optimistic creates massive cognitive disconnects in engineering teams who are trained to think in terms of systemic failure modes. There isn't the same practice of systemic success modes (perhaps that's the role of product managers?)
Anyway, this type of CEO is pushing his brand of 'optimism' down the org chart and making anyone who feels different an outcast, hence his choice of words.
Yen's behavior, per the OP, is nothing like optimism. Optimists not only see a brighter future, they are positive and inspire that in others. Steve Jobs was an optimist (at least publicly), to pick a random person.
Yen says there is an existential crisis, Proton employees must adjust to survive, and those who don't agree or raise concerns are losers. Yen's behavior also strongly implies a future of abuse.
Happy days are ahead!
Optimism is cowardice. Best case, they meant something different: energetic, positive, confident.
What makes you say optimism is cowardice? I'm genuinely curious.
I interpreted it as meaning that optimism is an assumption that problems will go away so there’s no need to painfully face them, whereas pessimism is an assumption that things will get worse unless you actively search out problems and fix them.
ah yeah, I mean if that's the case, I think that's orthogonal, right?
In my interpretation of the words, I tend to think of optimism as being the brave thing because having hope is more difficult, and IME, you can only muster energy to solve a problem if hope exists. Conversely, pessimism to me feels cheap and easy, and if you say "everything's fucked, what's the point" then nothing gets solved
So, it's probably more of a quadrant/compass along the axes of optimism/pessimism and proactive/passive
Pessimism is the thought that it cannot be fixed and it is hopeless. Optimism is wishful thinking and avoidance. You want to aim for realism.
Optimism is a result of confidence.
Knowing you can solve it doesn't mean you assume it'll get solved without effort.
It just means you're confident the problems will get solved. Pessimism stems from a perceived lack of control in my experience.
No, optimism is exactly not the result of confidence. Its cowardly avoidance and pushing problems aside.
Techies are getting a glimpse at how other employees have always been treated all along, and they don't like it.
Maybe they'll start unionising more, back in the days as long as they had a coffee and a chair they never complained...
> Techies are getting a glimpse at how other employees have always been treated all along, and they don't like it.
Oh trust me. We knew all along but we always viewed 'other employees' as lower caste deserving of the disdain they get.
One positive outcome of ai coding is that now they have been bought back down to earth with fear of god put in them.
> Oh trust me. We knew all along but we always viewed 'other employees' as lower caste deserving of the disdain they get.
Projecting much? There has certainly been disdain towards other fields, but it mostly seems to be the management class that gets ripped by programmers the most. HR too sometimes.
The thing with tech products is they could just leave and start another company. No need to go through union-busting behavior.
Every discussion of Proton leadership shortcomings shows a market of users looking for a better run company.
And if it’s all AI developed moving forward, why not? There’s investors out there that would support Proton’s original engineers to fulfill Proton’s original mission, without the AI psychosis abandoning security as a top priority.
> The thing with tech products is they could just leave and start another company.
This is such a cop out response. They still need funding, and infrastructure, and to build up an entire customer base who presumably they would need to bribe with free service at a loss in order to attract anyone new. Who’s gonna fund that when there’s a known market ceiling for the service that’s already been captured? We’re not in ZIRP anymore
> There’s investors out there that would support Proton’s original engineers to fulfill Proton’s original mission
Compromising on pentesting and security reviews is not in line with their original mission. Their customer base (including employees) knows this.
How much of the customer base actually follows their internal politics and dev processes?
As a guess? The same amount of customers that left Gmail for Proton vs. those that signed up for Proton without ever having a Gmail account.
I’d wager that most of their current customers have left something else to sign up for Proton in the first place, because of the privacy and security offering.
When Proton leadership abandons those values in favor of “move fast, break things, lay off engineers”, their customers are more likely to follow the people that take privacy and security seriously.
The CEO and CTO have made it clear that they want vibe-coded product updates without pentesting before exposing their customers to whatever may happen.
If you bought into Proton for privacy and security, that’s a red flag and a sign to find an alternative.
This is a wider problem than just the tech industry. The kind of rhetoric, words used in political rallies, debates, on TV etc just sets the tone for society as a whole to become a bit more meaner, nastier...one step at a time. Even religious talks, sermons etc aren't immune to this
> Even religious talks, sermons etc aren't immune to this
They aren't just not immune - often enough, particularly when it comes to anti-LGBT hate, religious speeches of all kinds are fueling the fire. And that's before we get into the serious Evangelical backing of the Trump administration, Hegseth being almost a crusader [1] or the worst of the worst who believe that there needs to be a holy war in Israel to incite Armageddon [2].
This kind of shit gets a lot of people killed.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/06/pete-hegse...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/us-evangelical...
Also, seems counterproductive. If you work for proton, you’re probably realistically updating your LinkedIn profile about now.
resignation is the only acceptable consequence.
> Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?
Pretty much, I found some very helpful words and perspectives on this from Michael Sandel - Tyranny of Merit. The winners begin to think there success is their own doing, forgetting the luck, good fortune, and many people who helped them along the way. They grow arrogant and full of hubris, looking down on and belittling others.
The question is then, how do we get out of this mess? Sandel offers some interesting foundations, along with Acemoglu.
Links to brain food:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50278616
I think it also has to be that the more powerful you are, the more likely you are to attract and retain sycophants who do nothing but compliment you and tell you how great your ideas are. It's a tale as old as time since the days of kings and emperors.
Some of the best moments of growth that I've experienced have happened during adversity, when something I said or did was laid bare for me from another perspective, with all of the problems with my approach pointed out. Those moments are intensely uncomfortable in that moment but so valuable for long-run growth (provided you have enough of a check on your own ego and developed enough insight to learn from such experiences).
My guess is that this trend to sycophancy will happen in every hierarchical organization where individuals at the top are able to reshape their social environment to avoid uncomfortable moments that they don't wish to have. I think it takes someone truly exceptional to avoid creating that kind of reality for themselves, and why it's oh-so-common to see hyperinflated egos from the most powerful individuals.
That said, I would read the hell out of a non-fictional expose covering specifically just the sycophants around some of our most notoriously unhinged powerful people, ones that showed exactly who are applauding these Emperors Nero who play their citharas while their world burns.
People stand on the shoulders of giants and bitch about the view
what inspires you to say that here and now?
I'm not making the connection, or can see several interpretations
can you expand?
> The winners begin to think there success is their own doing, forgetting the luck, good fortune, and many people who helped them along the way. They grow arrogant and full of hubris, looking down on and belittling others.
This line from the poster. Its been my experience over 30 years.
It's been something going on for 50-60 years, since globalization, financialization, and deregulation became popular
Or forever, if you want to generalize to human nature
This is what the mainstream public considers "tech bro" behavior. Software engineering used to be cool until these kinds of people took the limelight.
It used to be cool for nerds. When it became cool for normies is when these people joined in. The latter is what society actually considers cool.
nerd-sniped me on this one. mainstream cool isn’t a thing. i think you mean successful. mainstream values success because it’s the vanilla proxy for a vanilla form of “value”.
so cool has always been about the “iykyk” kinda value. once too many people know there’s nothing to know anymore.
I think your cool only applies when you get quite granular. OTOH, everyone knows "teenager slang" is cool and "working in tech" is (now) cool, or "being a brain surgeon" is cool. So as I said in my original comment, those are two different "cool"s entirely.
> "working in tech" is (now) cool,
yeah, thats not the case anymore, it stopped being cool sometime in the last 2 years, unfortunately. Just fyi if someone hasnt realized yet.
100% this.
Tech leaders have lost touch with people. And the top leaders — take your pick — have normalized shitty behavior.
I used to think Proton was good.
Not so, anymore.
I’m not supporting their products anymore. Cancelling my subscription
I've noticed a marked increase in overall shitty, childish, selfish behavior in and out of the work place since around 2016. Being an asshole has absolutely been normalized.
I'm personally un-normalizing this. I've left meetings for this shit and will continue to do so. I don't give two shits which service is broken or what bug made it to prod, if you can't talk to me about it without sounding like a tweenage boy, you can fucking fix it yourself.
Grow the fuck up, all of you.
I don't think CEO personality types have changed all that much. I work IT in manufacturing, and have consistently seen this "macho masculinity alpha" type before. He was quickly let go by the board, thankfully.
We live in a world where CEOs typically have gotten their position through nepotism, or fucking over many people to get to the top. It's just who they are.
I guess people go where the incentives are. For at least the last decade that sort of behavior hasn't been punished or has even been rewarded (see: the entire Trump administration).
Meanwhile, being a decent person carries very little benefit anymore. So it's probably not surprising that people no longer take the effort.
> being a decent person carries very little benefit anymore
You're caught up in the toxic rhetoric and justification. Imagine how appealing decent management is now, as a competitive advantage.
And generally, being a decent person is more important than ever.
Sure, but that only works if corporations are willing to value being a decent person in their hiring and performance reviews. In my experience, that is not the case at all.
As in any job or interview - especially if you offer something different than all the carbon-copy candidates - you need to compel them to see your value.
If you believe in what you do - and 'decency' (depending on definition) isn't hard to believe in, having a long track record and obvious advantages - it's relatively easy to be compelling.
Finally, don't work for the corp. Work someplace else. Start your own!
Especially* the exec
I blame the steve jobs cult
In more ways than the obvious, "great leaders are jerks, like Steve Jobs".
There has been a shift from "We" to "I". It rubbed me wrong when Apple launched the iPod, the iPhone, etc. In that moment, the world became more self-centered, instead of group-centered. Social media is the same, it's all about the individual: MY profile, MY followers, MY status.
It's anti-social by nature, and society is worse because of the shift.
Steve made really good products. Maybe not to your individual taste but it's clear he had a vision and worked tirelessly to follow it - no half measures - and a lot of people liked his vision. Everyone else is forgetting to copy that part.
Less "forgetting" and more "not as brilliantly insane as Jobs" ... but Jobs was NEVER someone that ANYONE should ever emulate.
Fun real life story: I worked with an engineer once who had some sort of disability that required him to walk around with crutches attached to his arms. Before he worked with me, he worked at Apple, and was high up.
One day he had a meeting with Jobs, and he was late, because a non-handicapped car had parked in the handicapped spot, and as a disabled person it took him a long time to get from a normal parking spot. He said as much when he arrived in the meeting.
Now here's the "Jobs is burning in hell right now" part. Jobs looks the disabled guy directly in the eye and, without any shame whatsoever, says "oh, I parked there ... I believe the US government overreacted after WW2 and built too many disabled parking spaces, so I park in them."
He says this ... to the sweaty disabled guy who just had to "race" across the parking lot to get to the meeting! Fuck Jobs and fuck emulating him.
With all due respect you don’t understand humans.
The same nut case responsible for pushing industries forward is the same nutcase that blows up.
Society can decide not to reward such people but it doesn’t.
Most of the Steve Jobs cult forget that Steve grew up. He was an ahole, but if you look at the historical examples they are almost exclusively from his first tenure at Apple. After his ouster and time with Pixar and Next it appears he mostly calmed down and learned to respect colleagues and employees significantly more.
IDK about the "being an asshole to your face" part (my story on that, above, did come from early Apple).
But he was still famous for working his teams an insane amount of hours throughout his career. It was an open "joke" that any new project he released would be completely unsupportable for the first week ... because he drove the entire team that built it so hard, the entire team crashed for a week after.
That is not how any healthy/reasonable adult runs any team, tech or otherwise.
It would appear that the presiding heuristic is:
"Do whatever you can get away with, with prioritization on local optimization with eager evaluation"
So basically, be an asshole/sociopath. The tennets of objectivism.
"morality" is basically memoized reinforcement learning over many human generations. So, it seems that the cache has been wiped out, and they need to learn again why they shouldn't be focusing on local optimization exclusively.
"Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?"
It's a team not a family.
The idea that demanding performance from your employees is "losing your humanity" is insane.
Teams are made of people. People skills make you more effective at dealing with people.
Obviously you can be a total prick and demand performance and maybe get some people onboard but nobody thrives in those environments and unless you want to deal with turnover and mediocrity you foster good working environments with your teammates
Plenty of people thrive in environments where high performance is demanded. This idea that you produce the best outputs by coddling your employees is pure cope.
Demanding high performance also doesn't necessarily mean forcing everyone to work 996 or yelling at people, but it can mean enforcing standards that everyone might not like or agree with.
The fact that you are framing it as a binary between “demand performance” and “coddling” tells me you don’t really have strong people skills
You can win without being an asshole. Try it sometime.
You treat your team well because your highest performers are the ones with most options and the ones that will leave first when you don't. If productivity is bad before you pull something like this, you won't like what happens when all you have left is a team full of demoralized underachievers.
The world has changed. There are zero high performing software engineers who refuse to use AI. Zero.
that is certainly wrong.
[citation needed]
Even still, there are gradations of using AI. Yen seems to have been on a crusade to get everyone to vibe code the entire thing. Not a lot of high performing software engineers signing off on such practices either.
In the new world, these formerly high-performing software engineers are no longer high-performing software engineers.
You can be demanding without using terms like “loser thinking.”
But performance isn’t a single thing. If you prioritize features over pen testing, you’re optimizing one kind of performance and neglecting security, which is an another kind.
For a company whose whole selling point is security, it’s a bad trade-off.
I think gruff language is fine if it’s allowed from both directions. I’m sure Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson cursed at each other a lot.
But when one side can do it and the other side can’t, it’s just a demonstration of power edging into abuse.
To what degree are the employees getting the benefit of any increased productivity from AI?
> It's a team not a family.
Yeah, calling people losers is a famously effective way to get performance out of your team.
As I think about it, I am starting to suspect that it a layoff in disguise. Even the likely backlash part is. Still, it seems.. bold primarily because, if anything, we are in a transition period of sorts. No one figured everything out yet. You want people who can do it, but those are the ones who will jump ship, because those are the ones with options.
> It's a team not a family.
Ah yes, as the old saying goes "team starts with 'my ' and there are no losers on my team"
Performance can be an expectation but don't try to shove shit down their throat unless you're willing to get it shoved down yours.
"don't try to shove shit down their throat unless you're willing to get it shoved down yours."
Fortunately the employer controls the relationship and can just fire employees with this kind of toxic attitude.
The Proton Foundation board should hold a confidence vote.
Too little too late. Violated security trust == canceled.
> stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more
Shocking...
It’s honestly hilarious that the Proton CEO just admitted security isn't their priority. So what's their selling point then?
> So what's their selling point then?
Same one as almost every other modern tech company. AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI
I believe Proton is advertising they are not Google as the primary reason to switch to them, and yet their leadership demonstrate they are no different. The way the CEO publicly shows no empathy for his own staff and even after the public reaction shows that Proton is no different from Google.
Cult like activity like this is never good for anyone, in business or politics.
> company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership
This is evil in ways most people probably don't understand. To explain, here is the real message behind this, stripped of neutral journalism language. I'm not going to be shocked if this is the actual hidden thought process.
"Hello. You have now worked at our company for 7 years, contributing thousands of hours of work towards making our products better. We regret to inform you that you are worthless. Your so-called 'contributions' don't deserve to be printed on toilet paper our CEO wipes with. Frankly, you are a waste of space sucking up the air inside our offices, and we are itching to get rid of degenerates like you at the first opportunity. Your only chance to temporarily offset our perception of your uselessness is our upcoming 20-minute degradation ritual where you'll dance to our whims and plead by showing how much you love using whatever our CEO says you'll use. Building good solutions, knowing our tech stack, working with other people, being creative? All worthless, just like you. What really matters is if you can make me feel good. Fuck you and get ready to crawl on your knees."
As a privacy and security focused company, this would seem like reputational suicide. Which in the privacy and security space you would figure is basically corporate suicide.
I wanted to install Proton on my kids phone, but apparently they think their client needs Android 10 to function for some reason, so they lost potential customer while no other major email app has such strict version requirement, in the end went with different service which works fine in Nine Mail and doesn't have storage limits like from quarter century ago. Heck, they barely offer what Gmail had 22+ years ago on their free plan.
Honestly losing the will over here; I Degoogled and moved to Proton a couple of years ago because they seemed to be a cool company aligned with my values. Is this coming from a “the business is failing and we need to ship faster to stay competitive” angle or is he just a massive ball bag? I mean either way he’s probably a massive ball bag but if he’s trying to save a sinking ship it’s at least somewhat understandable. Otoh if he’s just a massive greedy ball bag then I don’t even know where I go next.
I used to love Proton, but now I am looking for alternatives. With a moron like that at the helm, it is a matter of time for it to become shit.
Any suggestions of a good email provider?
Also, a VPN that plays nicely with port forwarding for torrents?
> “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
It's insane that rational thought, even in engineering orgs, is out the window in favor of AI hype.
AI changes the Quality/Time tradeoff. As anyone with a even a little engineering background knows, that means you can,
How much time does it now take, using AI, to make 'High Assurance' software? Provably correct components? Other quality measures that were once out of reach? etc.And the capability of AI-resourced attackers makes higher-quality software necessary.
I'll be angling hard towards abandoning Proton (and no longer recommending it to others) so long as Yen remains CEO. Hopefully, the larger company realizes the threat someone like him poses to their image AND quality of service.
Looking for a different mail provider I passed on Proton because of their support for cryptocurrency and because the CEO politics.
I don’t care you are hosted in Zwitserland, your CEO makes me distrust the company dearly.
Like I said earlier this week, this re-alignment of the people that built and maintained their products is also resulting in a re-alignment of their customer base.
Hopefully we’ll see those talented engineers leaving to build an alternative to Proton products now that we know corporate leadership at Proton can’t be trusted.
The board should really oust the “loser thinking” CEO and CTO if they want to minimize the damage to their brand.
The company not providing even a written statement in response to 404 reporting speaks volumes. They don’t see themselves accountable to their customers.
I see another service I will be cancelling. Thanks for the heads up on another improperly run email service
i thought this was supposed to be the company that WASN'T full of delusionally self-satisfied business chuds.
It’s all fair and square for a Tech CEO to be thinking like that. Morally despicable but totally expected.
It is an entirely different ballgame of idiocy to write something like
> that’s looser thinking
In response to one of his employees in a company wide slack chat. How stupid and unaware of yourself and your surroundings do you have to be?
Put aside that this may even be a legal case in itself, what does this say about his leadership in general?
I had to check the spelling - they spelled "loser" correctly at least. Would have been a great irony if they didn't.
hehe, sorry not a native speaker, but I should have seen that.
AI really does a number on some people's brain
what a weaker "leader" this guy is.
This guy is crashing out on reddit. What an imbecile.
As one of the first customers of ProtonMail, this makes me really disappointed. Yen has clearly gone off the rails. This is a complete betrayal of the core principles he founded Proton on.
AI is killing companies in all kind of evil ways
It's like the AI bros have handed out a cocktail of cocaine, benzos and fent to tech CEOs. They're hooked and going mad