Link: https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

Guess that's one way to throw your business case of being a secure and privacy focused service provider out of the window.

Every time this asshole speaks it just throws the entire company even further off a cliff lmao

I'd like to thank Andy for introducing me to Proton's competitor Tuta.

Every company seems to be rolling out software with no testing these days. Why? Is this what they think their consumers prefer? Why would we want glitchy accounting software with a chat bot that can’t actually do anything? I think they broke supply and demand with AI somehow

Alright, that's enough for me. What's the best mail, calendar and drive alternatives? Preferably the ones that aren't slop-coded.

Also, has anyone had any experience with Migadu?

I already think proton mail is pretty slow to render/load, they don't have much room to make it worse before it's too much-in other words they better be real careful with that vibe coding.

In general these events have me thinking of switching providers (and I have a paid tier).

2026 business has got very little to do with customers/consumers, supply and demand. Maybe it's been that way for a long time, but this 'AI' nonsense has bought it to the surface, evidently.

Maybe I'm a particularly sensitive, spiteful snowflake, but if the boss of my company accused me of being a "loser" because I cared about the quality of the product, I'd be looking to deliberately sabotage the product. And for a new job, of course.

truly innovative and disruptive

he must be getting so many linkedin points

He certainly clarified for me whether to pay for Proton or not. It's not.

Guess I need to make sure I get my email server up before the next renewal. Since that was recent, hopefully way before next renewal.

I'm not sure I can win the war for deliverable self-hosted email, and I send almost no email ever anyway, so I'm considering setting up a server that accepts email directly but relays outgoing mail through a relay that's actually trusted by email providers. Can anyone recommend good relays for that?

Many of us are in exactly that position with our employers, but finding another job in this climate is easier said than done.

Mail: Tuta, Posteo
Files, calendar: Nextcloud. Self-hosted or managed. Mine also does my contacts and task sync.

Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.

Bro is all in on AI and even he doesn't seem to consider "prompt engineers" actual engineers.

I'm currently in the market for a new VPN provider. I'd like to thank Andy for pointing me towards IVPN.

“Loser talk” is something a fucking 4chan basement dweller would say. I hate how society is just the stupidest fucks at the forefront now.

Didn't you listen to the man? Security and privacy are for losers!

Nextcloud is slop-coded, unfortunately.

the best are the ones you host yourself. quite doable, except email if you don't want to send emails straight into the spam folder.

Stupid fucks keep getting money from evil fucks because evil is controlling the stupid to do bad things without understanding what's being asked until it's too late.

they did some of it already when they got their ceo to praise trump

What recourse do we have other than switching to a competitor and waiting until someone over there does something I disagree with?

Stop giving Proton money

As someone who has been an Executive Director, I couldn't imagine taking a political stance on anything. Good way to alienate your customers and lose profit. Anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together knows this.

RIP Proton.

Privacy minded people tend to also want security.

I think that Libre Office and /e/OS are still avoiding use of AI. Maybe mailbox.org as well. However, when the user base is growing, they all probably get more pressure to be catching up with the competitors.

Obsession with numbers? 🤷‍♂️

Define "slop-coded" with regard to Nextcloud. The self-hosted sub has presented a useful terminological framework to pin down what software "made with AI" can entail:

Hint - AI suggested solution, human does the task.
Assisted - AI acts on part of a task, but a human handled the bulk.
Pair - About a 50/50 split of human made and generated.
Generated - Human prompted, AI generated.

Where on this scale do you see Nextcloud?

same here and i will forever be thankful for it :p

Tuta, funnily enough, makes it very hard to send encrypted mail to people who aren't also using tuta. Maybe also look at Mailbox.org and Posteo. They have a lot less marketing/hype/fearmongering compared to tuta and Proton, but have similar features regarding encryption and security, with less walled-garden like restrictions.

Hosting your own mail server. But unless you're really certain you want to do that, and are very clear on what you need to do to keep your setup secure and your mails out of spam, don't. It's not impossible, but probably not worth the effort.

I am personally probably going to switch to mailbox.org when my Proton contract is up, already using it with an org I sysadmin for, and all in all pretty happy. Of course no guarantees that they don't enshitify, and they recently raised prices, but they're a lot less publicity/marketing focused compared to Proton. Less silicon valley energy, if you get me.

I am also setting up my own Mailserver with a throwaway domain to test the waters, but I'm not expecting to use that for anything serious in the near future.

I just cancelled my subscription and quoted him as the reason.

Well...some people are linux distro hopping and me...email hopping...f*uck

WTF? Is he 12 years old?
Is this really true?

The issue is he's correct in regards to business: the vast majority of people are clueless and will buy/use anything if the advertising is good enough.

I did exactly this (except relay), started a few months ago as I don't have a ton of time to sink into it. Went with Mailcow Dockerized (Tried Stalwart, too much behind paywall) on my VPS. My renewal is next month and since I was already paying for a VPS I figured I should tinker with this instead of paying for Proton. I already had domain(s) so that part was fine, I almost never send either but tested sending to gmail and proton. Initially had issues with gmail but was able to resolve them by adding my domain at https://postmaster.google.com/

So far no other issues hampering the project, been receiving all emails fine including catchall. I do have in the back of my mind if I ever need to back out of self hosting to look into migado.com.

Ah shit balls! 3 months into a paid up email, calendar, drive and VPN suite. Have moved a lot of files over. Will start looking again, but definitely separating everything from now

"Yen, a former CERN particle physicist"..so his career as a physicist bombed and he figured he would try IT?

I use: 1984.hosting

100% green energy, small family company. I have never had any sort of problem.

The business culture is sick. This way of thinking is not limited to just a few people.

IVPN has been working well for me. Heard AirVPN is good if you need port forwarding too.

Nextcloud is assisted, but it is still slop. That's why I didn't use vibecoded.

I don't trust my skills enough to spin up a mail server. Or honestly any server that will be exposed to the internet.

Do you have experience with the office software or cloud drive from Mailbox.org? Proton’s spreadsheet app can’t even handle my modest flashlight collection and their Drive won’t mount as a drive on my Linux machine.

I just got out of my 1 year membership with them and happily moved over to tutamail and selfhosting 😅

My membership end in march.... Tome to find another mail hoster.

For those of you that care enough, I suggest letting Proton know in their community voice platform/forum. You can also email thier foundation.

As I've said elswere, you can let Proton know your thoughts in their community voice platform/forum. You can also email thier foundation.

Andy Yen sounds like an asshole.

I still need to move away from Gmail, but it's probably not going to be to Proton.

Neither do I trust my uptime/maintenance of a mail server. I pay 1 EUR a month to Posteo, & it’s the only subscription to anything I have. Email ends up being an important access point for recovery & contact, so I keep it separate—paying to keep the lights on somewhere that posts it encrypted & responsibly.