Yeah, it's pretty weak from the CEO, bowing down to the morons. I will not move away because I've never used them, just like you, but let me tell you, I'm angry. And I want you people to know it: look at how angry I am. Such a good boy.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> “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.”
Andy Yen is a prick. This is what is driving the "AI revolution" folks: C-level assholes who are more interested in maximizing their gains than creating healthy businesses with motivated employees--everything is different now, but nothing has changed. They all get to cash out with much more benefit than anyone else in the orgs they run if things go well, and if things don't work out it's no skin off their teeth, they are loaded and have all the power. They don't lose their jobs or income; if they have destroyed people's careers via layoffs or created (more) toxic work environments who cares. And apparently that goes all the way to destroying human society entirely if we're talking about scum like Dario Amodei or Sam Altman, who couldn't find their way out of a metaphorical ethical wet paper bag if someone poked a hole in it for them.
I am not an AI doomer or against LLMs conceptually--I've found them very useful for hobby projects, and at work they've enabled some positives (while creating plenty of negatives too)--but it's disgusting to see how much we are all being dragged around by the nose by people who could care less about anyone but themselves, even after having that thrown in our face over and over by these same tech C-suite scumbags over the last two decades in so many other ways. I'm so tired of it.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 site on lots of other systems too. 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
“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.
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?
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.
Like I said earlier this week, this re-alignment of the people that built 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.
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.
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 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?
> 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 while they play their citharas while their world burns.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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].
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.
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.
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 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.
<< “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.
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
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.
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!
<< 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 ) .
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.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] threadAI 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.
Was this sentence authored under the influence of one or both?
I counted 4 things you could be under the influence of, not two.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296602
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251062
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.
Only problem (and a big one) is just fact it is US company
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.
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
Keywords: bypass paywall
Andy Yen is a prick. This is what is driving the "AI revolution" folks: C-level assholes who are more interested in maximizing their gains than creating healthy businesses with motivated employees--everything is different now, but nothing has changed. They all get to cash out with much more benefit than anyone else in the orgs they run if things go well, and if things don't work out it's no skin off their teeth, they are loaded and have all the power. They don't lose their jobs or income; if they have destroyed people's careers via layoffs or created (more) toxic work environments who cares. And apparently that goes all the way to destroying human society entirely if we're talking about scum like Dario Amodei or Sam Altman, who couldn't find their way out of a metaphorical ethical wet paper bag if someone poked a hole in it for them.
I am not an AI doomer or against LLMs conceptually--I've found them very useful for hobby projects, and at work they've enabled some positives (while creating plenty of negatives too)--but it's disgusting to see how much we are all being dragged around by the nose by people who could care less about anyone but themselves, even after having that thrown in our face over and over by these same tech C-suite scumbags over the last two decades in so many other ways. I'm so tired of it.
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PROTON-Reviews-E13574.htm
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.
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.
I guess they didn't like my reply of "many"
https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Proton-privacy...
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 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 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.
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.)
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.
Now it's been made for me and I can plan my migration to FastMail :-).
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 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.
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.
Usually that would be fine if reporting lines were healthy, but in the AI age with top-down mandates they're not.
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.
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.
I don’t care you are hosted in Zwitserland, your CEO makes me distrust the company dearly.
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?
Maybe they'll start unionising more, back in the days as long as they had a coffee and a chair they never complained...
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.
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
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 while they play their citharas while their world burns.
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.
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.
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
Grow the fuck up, all of you.
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.
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
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.
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!
"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.
It's a team not a family.
The idea that demanding performance from your employees is "losing your humanity" is insane.
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.
Fortunately the employer controls the relationship and can just fire employees with this kind of toxic attitude.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, calling people losers is a famously effective way to get performance out of your team.
But when one side can do it and the other side can’t, it’s just a demonstration of power edging into abuse.
Meanwhile, being a decent person carries very little benefit anymore. So it's probably not surprising that people no longer take the effort.
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.
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...
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.
Shocking...
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.
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 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 ) .