I really didn’t have money on Proton crashing and burning as a trusted community partner and company due to leadership AI psychosis this rapidly.
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I know I'm quoting huge chunks of the article and I apologize for that but it's _so_ mind-bogglingly filled with inanity I... I can't _not_.
These people, the ones _running_ the company, really have lost their minds and gone _all_ in on a technology they fundamentally do not understand.
Someone has convinced them LLMs/AI is _faster_ and _better_. It's... It's not really _either_. And it's being _dumped_ on the market right now.
@401matthall the beautiful irony of this is that his comments on AI are what’s going to kill the company.
the userbase absolutely hates this and a large enough chunk will move away.
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@jb my understanding is that their engineering folks have been told that they are no longer engineers, instead they are now AI babysitters
@ds yeah, just caught up with the rest of the thread, and the 404media article.
I would also be hunting for a different provider. What a shitshow.
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I really didn’t have money on Proton crashing and burning as a trusted community partner and company due to leadership AI psychosis this rapidly. It’s incredibly disappointing and a huge loss.
@hacks4pancakes I'm just.... I just don't know any more.
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@jb my understanding is that their engineering folks have been told that they are no longer engineers, instead they are now AI babysitters
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I really didn’t have money on Proton crashing and burning as a trusted community partner and company due to leadership AI psychosis this rapidly. It’s incredibly disappointing and a huge loss.
@hacks4pancakes I've been a paying Proton user for a decade, but it's clearly time to change. My annual plan renews in less than a month, so I'm watching this thread intently for replacement suggestions.
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If you use and particularly, pay for anything they make, you need to read this. It’s one of the worst I’ve seen even in the 20s.
🫠 I don’t think they’re recovering without the board removing executive leadership. https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/
@hacks4pancakes agreed. Though even if Yen were removed today I would still be very wary of the existing code. It was built under conditions where employees felt unsafe bringing up security concerns and were pressured to stop even reviewing AI-generated code. So god knows what vulnerabilities are embedded there.
It's also hard to turn around a culture once it's been this way. Most of the people with genuine expertise in security and privacy no doubt have been driven out, and those who are most willing to uncritically say yes to anything are who are left. Getting those people to engage in critical thinking and speaking up, oof, takes more than a CEO change. Anyone who succeeds him will need years of committed work to undo cavalier attitudes, toxic communication, and lazy development practices.
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We are continually seeing this phenomenon in our societies, our politics, our families, our workplaces.
I don't _really_ wanna switch topics or fall into hyperbole but things like this AI _craze_ when combined with the other issues facing the _species_... This is sufficient to qualify for a Great Filter scale impact.
How's that for hyperbole?
@401matthall markets go up and markets crash.
This crash can actually be beneficial on the whole, the current status is potentially a huge waste of rare minerals and energy.
Most of the services provided are not in important parts of life-sustaining value chains (like john deere).
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@Niall @Cotopaxi @hacks4pancakes mailbox.org is getting some good noise over in the Reddit thread about this. Tuta is also an option, but they also use ai coding apparently, although likely not as shithouse as proton does.
@liquidlamp Tuta is getting hung out to dry here today too!
@Cotopaxi @hacks4pancakes -
@tkissing @cgsines @hacks4pancakes dashlane is pretty decent for non-techies in my experience
@Azvede Pricing seems okay, except for the fact that Family plan does not support sharing groups of passwords - and I'm not able to afford the enterprise plan for this.
Wish I could take a sabbatical at work to "just" write my own web interface on top of the KeePass format.
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@afx @hacks4pancakes
I appreciate that suggestion, although I'm interested in how you classify "small"? e.g. migadu and posteo have come up in my search; would you class either of them as small?In general, I acknowledge small firms often have a 'mission' that's related more to their product rather than their profits, with larger companies leaning towards the latter. But there's also a lot of overhead running an email service, which makes for economies of scale.
There's presumably a goldilocks zone for email provider size - we just need to gather all the company stats and sort the list accordingly to find the best choices.
@GerardThornley @hacks4pancakes Small in my personal case is manitu in Germany. That's where my domain is hosted.
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If you use and particularly, pay for anything they make, you need to read this. It’s one of the worst I’ve seen even in the 20s.
🫠 I don’t think they’re recovering without the board removing executive leadership. https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/
@hacks4pancakes Is Andy Yen buying up old houses exclusively to eat the lead paint off the walls? What an unhinged piece of shit.
I'm glad I never got around to exploring beyond their VPN. Still means I gotta find a new VPN provider that doesn't suck, though, and I've no idea what that is these days.
Anyone have any recommendations?
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@cvwarren about the worst I’ve ever seen
@hacks4pancakes @cvwarren worst leadership model
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@tkissing Bitwarden used to be a strong contender, but they too are moving into a direction that concerns me.
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@tkissing Bitwarden used to be a strong contender, but they too are moving into a direction that concerns me.
@lenzgr Sounds like they are on a road to private equity taking over. I've been thru that on the employee side and the results sucked for employees and customers alike. I don't want to be on this going different
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@hacks4pancakes
The AI use aside, the whole attitude of "ship it, LOL!" on a security focused product is mind boggling!@FunkyBob @hacks4pancakes And the language. Proton either kicks him and the CTO or seems completely done. My guess is Proton users are not your average non techie and will not go along with this turn.
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@jsmall @hacks4pancakes the ai psychosis is hitting executives everywhere. I work at a fortune global 500 company and it's getting ugly. They went from saying "it's just a tool to improve your productivity and you'll still write most code" to "you have to disclose how much you use it" to "in 6 months nobody will write code anymore" to "restructuring" in a matter of 2 years. Most of that has happened in the last few months.
@infidel @jsmall @hacks4pancakes This or similar I've been told by engineers also, sensible people I know+respect, with decades of business experience. The change of paradigm. A 80%/20% ratio of pros coding with/without AI. The end of human coding & the whole displacement to thorough-requirement-as-prompt model.
It's hard for me to accept and picture its trustworthiness on critical systems, as Proton would be on the personal level.
Can't wrap my head around it.
It's like "Trust this magic, bro". -
@jwcph @hacks4pancakes Well OK but if you've been on it for years - since early days?
@annehargreaves @hacks4pancakes Then start preparing to leave when the red flags begin to appear. All too often we avert our eyes until the flames rise high & then we end up with our backs against the wall & a knife at our throats, which is exactly where they want us.
