Wow my first exposure to Andy Yen shouldn’t have been this one. I’m seeing a loser here and it’s not the engineer…
(I don't know his writing style, so I have no idea if this is actually written by him or just posted by him.)
Yeah, I have no horse in the race as a non-user of Proton, but even if you completely removed AI from the situation entirely, if I worked for a CEO that ever used the term "loser thinking" non-sarcastically that would be enough to get me looking for another job.
And if I were a customer, get me looking for another provider.
I agree, you cant just let AI take over critical projects, but to not use AI, is just letting the bad guys use AI against you. Its a tool, use the tool, make the tool work for you.
"Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692 90 comments
"Proton goes all in on using AI" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296602 117 comments
"Proton to 'Re-Interview' Staff About AI to See Who Gets to Keep Their Job" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251062 48 comments
"Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307183 254 comments
I'm a technical co-founder. I definitely think that me and my team need to push ourselves to rethink how we work. Sometimes I have to push top-down, but I'd rather this happen in a measured way that's a combination of bottoms-up and top-down.
Before there were other voices of reason but these all get drowned out...
Ask AI (roughly) the same question; get (roughly) the same answer. Regardless of what model you’re talking to.
(Why? Because every AI company consumes the same whole-Internet corpus and distillations of all their competitors’ models; of course all their models’ answers will converge, especially about anything subjective where they haven’t supplied a specific “right answers for domain X” training dataset to override the “base consensus.”)
Exactly. The product is security and privacy. The thing being sold is that. If anyone could justify being slower to pentest, it is Proton.
I do wonder who would be demanding that Proton move faster. Would any user of their service ask them to sacrifice these attributes?
Apple is deeply in this camp; all it takes is one MBA's desire for bonuses to break the damn.
Corporations in unregulated waters are only as solid as the last captain.
Whenever I see "hosted in Switzerland" my mind immediately goes to the Crypto AG scandal.
> “Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document obtained by 404 Media reads. Proton’s year-over-year growth is also “far away from what the market today considers to be good,” and, “By all metrics that matter, we’re an underperforming company.”
So, the "market" is demanding it?
AI is a tool - like a compiler or a pen-testing tool or maybe like an uber-tool that can do all those things and more. It's not hard. 24 hours - put your best pentester against GLM-5.3 abliterated (host locally, so there's no data leakage to LLM providers). You know who will win and it won't even be close.
Quite unlike a compiler. I don't know about yours, but nobody destroyed thousands of books, started gas powerplants or illegally cut hundreds of thousands of trees to make mine.
This is the core of it for me. There are many, maaany companies that don't want to be what they are. For example: Meta doesn't want to be a social media company - so it lets facebook rot, makes 10% of its total revenue from scammers advertising to its customers, which seem to mostly be vulnerable old people and focuses on VR and AI.
I guess Proton is having that same problem. I don't really want to be part of that though.
Are you just going to ignore the rest of advertising that isn't "scammers advertising to its customers", and makes up the overwhelming majority of their revenue?
Aside, with age becomes a deeper understanding of how realistic the Dilbert cartoons are.
Having shareholders means that the company WILL NOT continue to serve their customers. Any company that has external shareholders is untrustworthy. Everybody should consider them as disposable. It doesn't mean that you cannot have a deal with them, now but the parties should be aware that anything that you share will be misused. So if Proton has any external shareholders, it is already untrustworthy to me.
Therefore, they cannot really gain any trust by being activist shareholders and change leadership. They already supported a certain "persona" to make them money.
It is not the norm for any engineer, or any company, who cares about the quality of the product. I will not say there are zero people who care who are trying to use LLMs to write code, because that isn't true. But neither is it true that most engineers find the tool useful. It is still wildly controversial in the programming community, contrary to what you state here.
> For most companies, trading some caution for speed is a reasonable call.
That isn't a reasonable call for any business, but it is an especially bad call for a business which sells itself on offering greater security.
My issue with what happened at Proton is twofold: first, the CEO treats his workers like dirt. That isn't a company I wish to do business with no matter how good their product is. Second, the CEO is in the full grip of AI psychosis, telling his engineers to use the tool just because it's trendy, not because it actually produces good results. That suggests that the product Proton produces will, sooner rather than later, turn into AI slop, full of bugs. I wouldn't wish to do business with such a company even if the CEO were a nice guy. So Proton now has a product going downhill, and a CEO who is a jerk. I'm not sticking around for that. I could just pay Microsoft if I wanted that kind of experience.
It was revealed to be owned by the CIA and German intelligence, formed in 1952 and secretly purchased by intelligence agencies in 1970
The customers relied on Crypto AG for their industry trusted privacy claims and “because Switzerland”
Looks exactly like everything wrong with Proton and its customer base despite so many obvious flaws to how Proton behaves, how their customers talk, justifications for how their anti spam measures undermine all of their privacy and records claims, and now the CEO dismissing engineers security concerns
I think the AI backlash against Proton so far is unwarranted. It is purely speculative and based on make-belief. I am a dev myself, I use AI more and more, and I have no more long-term experience than the next dev. But so far the claim that using AI in your corp and workflow will result in buggier, shitty code is not true on a broad scale. It is certainly not true for proton, at least I don't see service quality detiorating for my service. I think it is a tool, and what you get out of using it still depends on the skill of the craftsman.
As a customer, I do demand stable service and the promised saftey and security. But I also demand low prices and a product that can compete with the market. Now, the market is Google and Microsoft - two companies we don't even need to question if they lay off people due to AI usage. Proton is kind of under pressure to compete on a product level in a pretty much david-against-goliath situation. We see AI-assisted exploits such as the Linux use-after-free from Anthropic and can't blame Proton for restructuring their dev process to incorporate AI to find exactly these kind of security issues. I wouldn't even feel comfortable as a client if proton whipped on a "human code only" label on their services.
It definitionally manipulates people into buying stuff they didn't want before, leaving them poorer and our world devoid of more resources.
ArcHound•58m ago
They are not the types to accept enshittification and they are the types to read these news. As soon as they discover something else, they're off.
Good luck proton.
gostsamo•47m ago
1123581321•46m ago
trvz•42m ago
HappyPanacea•28m ago