If you’re looking to switch to a new provider, may I recommend my own service, Port87. We don’t use AI at all:
https://port87.com/2026/10/we-dont-use-ai/
It’s also a good idea to use a custom domain for your email, because there is always a risk that a provider you like today, you won’t like tomorrow. Custom domains make it much easier to switch to a new provider.
Thanks for the link. It looks interesting!
I’ve been using a combination of Google and Microsoft office products since forever, I’d love to switch, but I really don’t understand where the hell I’m supposed to go. I can’t really self-host (I only have a phone and laptop that I use as mobile devices) and I’d really like to not have to actively think about how my email works when I’m using it. I was sort of hoping Proton would be it, but they just keep sucking harder and harder, they don’t seem like a viable alternative anymore.
Does anyone here have some advice?
He has to go and the Proton workers have to form a union.
Every worker at every tech company needs to unionize.
Every worker at every
techcompany needs to unionize.FTFY
Every worker at every company needs to unionise.
Every worker needs to unionize.
Every union needs to unionize.
Every union needs a state (protecting its interests and preferably under control of these worker associations)
So, a union?
Or we just need to drop Proton. Why is the first reaction to reform a company?
If anything, the workers should band together to form a new, more flat organization (esp., coop)
Edit: just want to add, that “made in Switzerland” does not make a company a fair or good company.
o7
Glad I hesitated moving over completely from Google to Proton services, time to purge them completely
Proton prevents spying. Google is spying. You’re not doing yourself any favors. I’m moving from proton but Google is worse
He didn’t say he’s going back to Google.
Isn’t the fact that I want to get off Google mean I know that already
You’re right my apologies
ready to move my entire family once again to secria. hopefully it won’t implode right away after the switch
Near the start of the meeting, Yen said, “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.”
“So what does that mean going forward? Going forward, I’m still going to push,” he added.
Uh. This news makes everything about 0% better.
“Claude, write an apology for me that blames miscommunication but still acknowledges that I will not meaningfully change my behavior at the heart of the issue.”
of course, he will push. reflection and improve over time is part of his idea of slow-mode.
Brain dead CEO?! Tune in next week for more obvious news! 💀
Something about upper management just pushes people into being dicks. Maybe cause all they do is work? Even my grand-manager is quite blunt and out of touch. Guess that happens when all you do is micromanage others all day
I think its the opposite in that only dicks go into upper management
The further up the ladder you go the more importance is placed on numbers and metrics. Every meeting and every mandatory training is either about leadership decisions or some kind of numbers, be it profit, efficiency, budget or accidents. As a team lead you can still see the individuals you work with, but past that with 100+ people under you, even their health and safety gets reduced to numbers on a sheet.
It gets so ingrained in your brain that its nearly impossible to forget once you reach a point high enough where the shackles loosen a bit.
That doesn’t really excuse anyone from being an out of touch asshole though. You can still see people as people instead of numbers, it just takes more effort to do so.
Cool.
Not supporting your company anymore though.
LOL. They’re just going to do the same thing in a different way once the commentary has died down.
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. “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.”
Yikes, this Yen guy seems really charming
His words are aggressively out of touch, but I will say that I agree somewhat. I tried going back to handcrafting code for a bit and it really does feel slow. Like, “absolutely no way to compete in the current market” slow.
Speed is not a good quantifier for industry success. Speed to market might get you some initial customers, but speed alone won’t keep them. If your product is junky, slow, and insecure you are going to lose those customers you had, and potentially open yourself up to lawsuits in the process.
The things that matter more to long term success and sustainability are all the things AI is not.
I never said speed was all that mattered. But from my experience, and my other friends in the industry, it is possible to achieve speed while maintaining quality. security, and maintainability. Because these are all things that the AI can look for too. Just look at how many vulnerabilities AI is finding nowadays. Just like any other product manager, you can bring up concerns, ask the AI to look into them, and validate the AI’s claims. Just like you would manage a team of engineers. Which is of course still faster than writing everything yourself.
If all you ask the AI to do is produce lines of code, that’s all it will do. But AI workflows can be far more complex than that.
The quote is talking about how the CEO is scoffing at an engineer asking for a few days for pentesting. None of that has to do with using or not using AI for coding. Doesn’t matter who wrote the code, the management of a privacy first company looking to cut corners on testing for buggy code is a no no for their customers.
Without the whole slack context, the pentesting comment might have been part of a whole chain of comments trying to discredit AI, and the CEO is trying to push for AI. I wouldn’t jump to saying the CEO is against pentesting in general until I had more information
What part of insulting people that wants to take it slow makes sense as a response to a chain of comments discrediting AI? You’re twisting your whole body trying to invent hypotheticals that doesn’t even make sense.
Why are you making yourself look foolish to defend a company you have no financial or personal connection to? Unless you actually do.
Recall that I already mentioned that his comments seemed aggressively out of touch. Insulting your engineers is a bad look.
However, I’m saying that he isn’t necessarily against pentesting, which is what some comments seem to be thinking. I would want to read the whole context to see if that’s what he really believes.
Proton Mail is already junky and slow yet I bought into the mission. I admit that I was fooled. Subscribed earlier this year until 2028, though, so I’ll be on this sinking ship for a while.
It only feels slow when everyone is forced to use AI, none of these companies have proven to operate at a profit yet
Huh? The frontier model companies aren’t operating at a profit but all the major enterprise tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, etc) are using huge amounts of AI in the SDLC and beyond and certainly are operating at a profit…
They’re operating at a profit because of their large legacy products, not because of their new stuff.
Example A: Google
Did you even see their earnings miss and what they attributed it to?
Every single one of those companies reported negative free cash flow this quarter, and some have been running in the negative for a lot longer. The only tech company at that scale NOT losing money hand over fist is Apple, and they’re the only one not investing heavily in AI… but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Microsoft and Salesforce both have very positive free cash flow… but in any case that isn’t profit. All 4 of the companies I listed are still very profitable (Alphabet/google being the one “exception” where they are still wildly profitable but down from q3 2024 vs q3 2026). But even in the Alphabet and Amazon cases, they have negative free cash flow because they are investing like crazy in AI. This doesnt mean they aren’t profitable it means they are using their historic performance to make a big bet on the future. This is fundamentally very different from the frontier lab companies who have never been profitable and are staying afloat mostly from cash injection from big tech (Anthropic is an interesting one that may have just turned the corner).
It’s fine to have moral, labor, or environmental objections to “AI” (which is a very stupid name for some specific applications of machine learning) but I would expect Lemmy to have a higher level of discourse around this stuff that is actually rooted in reality.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say, what difference does it make if the users of a product are profitable when the creator of said product isn’t, the users of AI make their money on a diversified portfolio of products, the AI companies are making no profits right now as the subscription prices they are charging are at a loss to gain market share, if they don’t find a sustainable profit margin over time they will have to shut down or increase the cost of the subscription so only a limited number of companies and individuals will be able to afford it. Either way the gushing AI inference taps will stop leaking so freely at some point.
sounds like a “you” problem
“skill issue” comments are rarely productive. I have many friends that also work in the industry that feel the same, even if they are against AI. I trust their opinions (and my own of course) over yours.
cool. trust your -20 down voted comment
EDIT - and wait, let’s clarify. I NEVER SAID “skill issue”. my implication wasn’t necessarily “it’s because you’re slow”, it was “good things take time”. have some patience.
LLMs erode normal human patience. your skills will thank you for the time you invest.
Slow has nothing to do with pen testing or not. Pen testing is how you validate that the code is secure, AI or no. This is showing a shocking lack of care about security for a company pretending to offer a secure product.
Best of all, that really is something LLMs are quite good at too. Aikido has a feature where you whitebox pentest your entire application.
Without the entire slack exchange, it’s not clear whether Andy Yen was responding exclusively to the call for pentesting, or towards broader comments about AI code.
Look I’ll be honest, a CEO telling his workers their (valid) opinions are bullshit and looser thinking is absolutely unacceptable, even putting the context of security (or lack thereof) aside. If you refuse to listen to your engineers as a leadership, you have failed miserably.
“bullshit and loser thinking” would be inappropriate wording even if the opinions were actually objectively wrong.
I also found the comments pretty inflammatory, which makes me wonder what the engineers had said to get the conversation to that point. I don’t like to make judgement without the full context
No matter the context, someone who can be baited into putting something this obviously unprofessional in writing is not a good leader.
Fair enough, I do agree it’s very unprofessional
You might be able to ship a codebase quicker but once it hits a certain level of complexity, you’ll have a codebase that no single human being on your team really understands. You’ll now be forever tied to an ever increasing AI subscription cost
which may still be worth it to secure a strong position in the market. You have to look at what competition Proton is facing (Google Workspace)
But this is exactly why this is so fucking stupid. Most people didn’t switch to proton because their suite is better than google performance or feature wise. The google apps work just fine. You switch exactly because google is an unethical shit company, that harvests your data on top… If proton adopts the same values why the fuck would I stay with them…
Hey, the next quarter’s profits is all that matters, eh?
My job is not to be fast. This expectation of development speed is bosses not understanding why they hire specialists.
I code, make sure it works, is secure and maintainable. That’s how I own my work.
as mentioned in another comment, it’s possible to make it secure and maintainable if you manage AI properly. Managing AI is like a product manager managing a team. It’s up to you to push for security and maintainability, but AI can absolutely look for vulnerabilities and holes and code smells if you ask for it.
Yet somehow speed seems all that matters to c-suits.
Coming back to my point: slower ≠ worse.
Can AI speed things up? Oh, yes. Is it really better? It depends, but I’m leaning to no.I don’t think Andy Yen was saying that slower = worse, or that faster is all that matters. My read of the conversation is that engineers were pushing against AI saying that it makes code less secure and maintainable, and Andy was pushing back saying that’s not necessarily the case, that it’s possible to use AI to speed things up while maintaining quality.
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. “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.”
There was a Lemmy post about a Proton employee providing more context for Andy’s statements: https://no.lastname.nz/post/4106893
stop lovingly handcrafting all our code
I guess they’re headquartered in Switzerland, but have American values. It’s a shame, because having privacy engineered like a Swiss watch makes a lot of sense.
Remember, this is the same guy who, last year, posted an explicitly pro-Republican Tweet on the official Proton account, and then backtracked and tried to say they were apolitical. In his excuses, he used the extremely right-wing coded phrase “triggered” in a way that perfectly matched the way right-wingers use the term, and when called out for that he claimed he was “unaware that triggered is offensive” because “I don’t live in the US so I really don’t have ready a list of words people are not allowed to use”. Some very right-winger-complains-about-cancel-culture–coded language right there, and an excuse that falls apart the moment you realise that it would require being in tune with right-wing language enough to have used “triggered” accurately in the first place, that his complaints simply don’t work.
“Right now, everything seems consistent with it being damage control,” they said.
Oh dear.
What’s the consensus on a replacement for Proton?
i can recommend mailbox.org and ente.com
When switching over to a paid mail service like this, do you start by forwarding all your your emails from google (or another service) and then slowly start migrating accounts to the new mail address?
Or is there anything I might be missing?
Mailbox looks interesting to me, and have really been wanting to ditch my gmail, it’s the last thing I have left under Google at the moment.
i started by switching accounts mailadresses for all regular services ( also switched to duckduckgo mail forwarding and set the mailbox.org address there for normal Website accounts). Then i just included mailbox.org account in my Thunderbird Konfiguration and with this just drag and dropped the Mails Form Gmail to Mailbox folder. Only downside to this is that those Mails would not become encrypted in mailbox Servers in contrast to normally received Mails. i would advise against mass forwarding old mails, because it would make mail search much harder as they would get tagged with the new receiving date instead of the original one (this is hard for yearly tax return notices if you are looking for orders and receipts received by mail in a particular year), same with the Sender (now your old mailadress instead oft original).
You can definitely do that, but most people that use paid service providers for email usually own their own domain as well, so they will reconfigure their dns records from Google Works info to the new provider
If you don’t have a domain and only want to get rid of gmail forwarding is the way to go
I’ve seen Tuta mentioned the most
I’ve been very happy with Fastmail. A while back out of the blue they released a Flatpak app which is great. They also recently stood up a European region and I switched my data residency there without fuss.
I didn’t know they had a European region. Where’s the setting for data residency?
Process here: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/16796454162063-Choosing-your-data-residency
Took all of 10 minutes for the migration to complete for me
Fantastic. Thank you.
Edit- oh, reading through, even with an EU data residency there is a copy domiciled in the US. 🙁
For what exactly? I store my photos on pCloud and for email I use Posteo
I use cloud storage (lots of files), email, password manager, and vpn. Sometimes collaborative writing in documents. I’d like to not have lots of subscriptions. Maybe managed nextcloud + separate email provider? Idk.
Whatever you decide to migrate to, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Give yourself the flexibility to move one enshittified service at a time.
I use a mix of Tuta, mailbox.org (for one of my other domains), vaultwarden/bitwarden, and nextcloud.
This does very little to convice me to not migrate away.
My #1 issue was them sacrificing Security for Speed and this latest change does jack shit to address itI’m thinking the same. His whole “more prompting, faster, security is for losers” mentality is not going away with this. I’m glad I swapped to my own domain name at least when swapped to proton, so the next migration should hopefully be easier. Does anyone know any good guides or have any tips? Mainly worried that there will probably be a period I won’t have any emails coming in and would be a shame to get stuck in that position 😅 Specifically around changing the DNS records around
Change the DNS to your new one first. See you mail come in then pull your old emails across. Keep both accounts running until migration complete
Way to get your people happy and productive dipshit. This cancellation is far too late. Now employees are going to keep their heads down, take zero risks and merely check whatever boxes required. He demotivated his entire workforce in one fell swoop. And for people like me who wasn’t using their product or know much about them, now I have a foul taste in my mouth for the brand name.
Look, I am not a tech dynamo, so what can people like me use in place of Proton?
I use and recommend Fastmail.
Proton has always giving me the ick, but at this point I think 99% of it is Yen.
What about it always gave you the ick?
They way they marketed their VPN early on was the first thing I thing. The VPN seemed great but the marketing felt like virtue signalling, I don’t really remember the specifics so it could have been a me thing as. Then the news broke they turned over user data to authorities. I kind of expected it but they pushed the fact that they were in Switzerland like it made them more shielded from that (again kind of a marketing distaste). Then this year there was them accidentally funding a french far right youtuber. A small enough thing to have been a mistake, but also it piles on to the bad feelings.
So it’s not antagonism, but it’s an ick.
