All you have to do as a CEO is shut the fuck up and let your product do the talking. The less I hear about your shit views the more likely I am to stay with your product.
The issue is to become a successful CEO you tend to have to believe your own lies and very quickly surround yourself with sycophants. Whats more if you buck this trend you tend to limit your skillset as societally we reward bullshit more than results.
South Park really got it right this season lol
What are equal or better replacements for their software suite: email, vpn, cloud storage, password manager, AI?
All of the advice I give depends on your preferred level of privacy. If I had to give you all of these services in 1 provider I’d suggest Infomaniak, a Swiss tech company. https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/kdrive VPN: Mullvad (it collects less data from the user, even) Email: not sure about this. I never used Proton Mail since it didn’t work for me with IMAP protocols by design. Password Manager: Bitwarden or self-hosted Vaultwarden AI: I use DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai interface, although I’m not entirely sure if that measures up to the privacy standard you need.
I’ll add Psono for a self-hosted password manager since the future of Bitwarden isn’t clear.
Depends on what you need. Tuta for Mail is great. If you’d like to self host password managers, stuff like Keepass/Vaultwarden/Bitwarden. You can also choose to pay for Bitwarden if you’d prefer a managed infrastructure. The only AI I’m familiar with that has some level of self respect is Mistral with Le Chat. Not familiar with VPN/Cloud storage.
Yeah, I canceled my sub. I have no idea if the CEO of my new email provider is any better, but I know that Yen is abusive to his employees, and that matters to me. I know he’s deep in the throes of AI psychosis, and that makes me not trust him at all. I’m gone.
The services I use could be run by child-raping centaurs for all I know. But they keep their mouths shut and stay in the shadows. Ignorance is bliss.
Certainly hoping the child-raping centaurs aren’t running my email server… but I think there’s a little more here than blissful ignorance. I think it matters that, even if my new mail CEO is as bad as Yen, he hopefully sees that he’ll be punished if he acts like Yen. Because I’m not the only one that has left Proton: I think Yen is really going to feel the heat. Hopefully that deflates the egos of other techbro overlords…
What did you end up switching to?
Ah okay. I considered that one but Tuta had double the storage for the same price, so I went with them.
Slagging off his employees, slagging off his customers. Real bright spark this guy.
The original 404 Media article.
404 Media is a great publication with a strong track record. They are worth paying for.
So true, they’ve really been rapidly climbing kn my books over the last year especially. One of my favorite news sources rn. Would love recommendations for ones of similar quality outside tech, for any topics
Everyone go vote at their feedback website. There are several posts in the General Suggestions section that suggest Andy Yen step down. Mark them as critical.
When someone shows you who they really are, believe them the first time. And sadly, this is who Proton is right now, this guy. And this is who the Proton board is, people who support this guy and his vision.
This is proton. Shop accordingly.
Finally migrated to Proton in July, cancelled yesterday; had paid for the full year but have already started moving.
I was so happy to be supporting a company I believed in and was looking forward to the services getting better and better… Then the crap started to kick off: re-interviews for all, with us or against us mentality, cancelling the re-interviews, doubling-down and insulting your team, behaving like a petulant child. Then Bart posted the tone-deaf AI manifesto…and that seems to be it so far…
I get that AI is here, I get that the cat is out of the bag. It’s fair to suggest that it is no longer possible to not use AI in the codeflow… For me this less about AI=good/Bad, more about attitude and behaviour; and how that shapes the ethos.
Where are you moving to?
I started building a homelab a few years back. Levelling-up my Linux knowledge and succeeding with dockers and VMs on the NAS but not, until now, on dedicated hardware. It’s currently functional-with-bumps, but the WAN at home is a 10 year old neurotic DSL with only 120Mbit/50Mbit. So not fast-fast/24-7. Remote access is via Tailscale. Good for Calendar, Notes, and (potentially, if and when the “Error when trying to connect (Bad healthcheck status)” thing is resolved) Office. So it currently, for me, is a kind of proof of concept:
That I can, in fact, host my own services on my own hardware and retain total control over all of my data therein.
Will probably get a mini ITX somethingorother or a used Thinkcentre within the next week or two; plonk Nextcloud AIO in a Proxmox thingy/VM and get that running well locally before migrating it to a dedicated off-site, probably Hetzner. The off-site then eventually becomes the production, with the local for dev and testing before pushing.
I could even take the time to do Pen-testing, for example, but access would be exclusively via Tailscale/Wireshark anyway - so no internet facing TCP services at all.
New users (family or friends), would access exclusively via Tailscale/Wireshark.
While I digress, my point is that I ultimately want a solution that is not fucking Google. is not fucking Google indicates that my options are, and ultimate choice is, based purely on trust.
Proton are offering exactly and precisely what I want and need!! :
“A better internet starts with privacy and freedom” “Trusted by over 100 million users and organizations” “Communicate and browse. Privately.” “Store, share, collaborate. Securely.”
It’s simple! The interfaces are simple! Great VPN. Reliable Password manager. Works perfectly on all my devices. The office bits and the calendar are simple; kind of like a polished Google Documents from twenty years ago. They’re not as functional as any of my other officey things; in a quirky but sometimes annoying way; but I didn’t mind at all because:
I trusted and believed in the core ethos of Proton.
Great products. Perfect offer. Trust.
Andy’s abhorrent behaviour, and the way this whole fuckup has been absurdly non-handled with a total lack of responsibility, completely destroyed my trust. Pretty damn fast too. Sorry for the rant but I’m so so tired of it all and it pissed me off.
To answer your question:
- Passwords: Bitwarden > Vault Warden
- VPN: No idea yet
- Nextcloud AIO
- WeTransfer for large transfers
I trust the fractured services and self-hosting more now.
What about you?
On a side note, he’s smart for letting a lot of people back out of Proton services. The VPN speeds are better now.😆
Was thinking of switching after the BS from last year. My subscription ended this month and I’ve finally finished changing my services. Also did not want everything in one basket.
Is Andy Yen the asian version of Johnny Cash?
Fuck, that got me.
No he’s the Asian version of Eddie Money
Shit that made me laugh out loud and my fiance is asleep in the next room
This is the quoted article: 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.”
Personally I am okay with code being written by AI as long as it is properly being checked and tested. The CEO is a prime example of management becoming a security and safety risk, which all engineers know is very dangerous. It is the same story as what caused the Challenger disaster.
I have a 2 year ProtonVPN Plus subscription so there is not really a point in canceling it right now, but if this situation doesn’t change by the end of those 2 years I’m inclined to not renew it.
That CEO needs to step down, not just for their reputation but for the safety of their software.
Your first sentence is basically impossible. When reviewing code, your insight is always inferior to the person who wrote it. Often my code reviews consist of questioning the programmer on why they’ve done what they have, because I need their perspective as well.
You can’t do that with an LLM because it doesn’t really know why it did things.
And testing properly…? Nobody does that. LLM or human.
I disagree with this. Just reviewing the code is exactly what I mean by “properly being checked and tested”.
There are people/companies that just vibe code the hell out of their stuff without any review whatsoever. That’s not something I want to touch.
Just reviewing the code
I was warming up to this. It certainly is better than vibe coding, but I’ve started to see libraries [with this ai policy] push out bigger releases faster with bad ergonomics and unnecessary, undocumented breaking changes, because the ai quietly migrated the internal tests/examples.
Clearly, they’re reviewing large amounts with an eye on new features and they’re not thinking through ergonomics: spending time with it, writing it themselves, and seeing where the sticking points are.
Maybe if you’re using ai for the migration, then-- problem avoided, for now. As time goes on I could see it compounding and becoming a tangled mess that’s not only inaccessible to humans, but requires more and more compute to navigate than thoughtful, handcrafted code.
Personally I am okay with code being written by AI as long as it is properly being checked and tested.
I disagree.
The CEO is a prime example of management becoming a security and safety risk, which all engineers know is very dangerous. It is the same story as what caused the Challenger disaster.
I agree.
That CEO needs to step down, not just for their reputation but for the safety of their software.
I agree.
This guy sounds like a Mini Musk and I hate Musk.
Say and do stupid shit, get stupid prizes.
Proton’s reputation has been getting shaky. First it was the poorly worded communication regarding support for Republicans. Then the privacy in question when they handed user’s data over to authorities. Now this.
How’s that for loser thinking, Andy?
Ok, the first 2 instances are wildly out of context, don’t know how much it is the case in the newest case.
The congratulations to Trump were for the appointment of Gail Slater, which he very much agreed to because of Slater’s reputation as being “not good for big tech”. (Slater did not last long, as expected)
And the “data transfer” to authorities was a legal requirement imposed by the courts of the country they are in (based on “terrorism” charges by the french authorities - for essentially squatting), with no actually doable legal recourse left (as it often is in “terrrorism” cases). No preexisting data was available. They had to wait for the activist to log in, to catch the IP address of the client connecting to the surveilled account in the live system.
Refusing to comply with lawful orders of the country you are seated in can absolutely wreck your shit, and you might even lose control over your infrastructure people depend on.
And had the activist used an VPN to connect to his mailbox, the story would have probably ended there, especially if the VPN had been Proton itself - the injunction was only for the Mailbox, and VPNs are pretty much untouchable regarding surveillance in Switzerland.
Don’t forget about Proton sponsoring Nazi YouTubers.
There was something before that about providing a journalists data to authorities or something too.
After a Swiss court order, and they only could provide an IP adressen where the account was first made. Don’t spread partial information that doesn’t reflect wat happened.
I think I was pretty clear I didn’t know the full details in my comment. Besides, I don’t see what is misinformation here. And IP address is a user’s data.
Do share how much data they could actually provide
It’s a bit surprising how many CEO’s express disdain for their users and employees.
When employees are reduced to an “input resource” number on a spreadsheet, and they sit insulated from user complaints, and likely surround themselves with sycophants, I suppose it’s inevitable.
Power corrupts, you can see it all around us once you start looking.
Power corrupts, you can see it all around us once you start looking.
Yes, but also the corporate world has a nasty tendency to promote psychopaths to CEO positions because they think a lack of humility is the same as competence.
It’s not just in the corporate world. Trump is a good example. He’s a complete douchebag and obviously has no clue about anything, but he somehow makes up for it with his extreme self-confidence.
The world is extremely complex, so it’s understandable that posers who claim to have figured it out are popular. I think many people even know that the guy they’re following is full of shit, but they can’t accept that they are victims of forces they don’t control or even understand, so they lie to themselves to at least feel a little bit of security.
They aren’t all bad though yet all of them generally get a bad rap because the internet accepts conspiracy theories as gospel. I’ve worked the tech industry for three decades now and will argue the middle management make up most of the psychopathic population per capita.
Well yeah why do you think they get the CEOs from?
it’s a bit surprising how many CEO’s express disdain for their users and employees.
Not surprising one bit if you understand how Capitalism works. We are just tools of the bourgeoisie.
Those who’ve never known hunger, hate to share even a morsel or crumb.
It should be common knowledge but marketing and legal teams spend lots of money and time protecting them.
You mean PR department. Marketing department does market research and ads
No, I mean marketing the org. They own the brand. C-level activities directly impact brand so marketing works to mitigate impact.
PR department is propaganda department. When propaganda earned a negative reputation, Edward Bernays, the same person who wrote the book that coined the term Propaganda coined the term PR to replace it in an American corporate context.
In a lot of companies those roles overlap.