I'm not at all surprised by a lot of men in tech coming out as insufferable insecure weird little guys, but what I continue to be amazed by is how many of them seem to not understand how technology works at all. It seems every tech company is another Apple, run by some freak who got lucky and found a talented tech guy whose work they could exploit.

I hate winner mentality. Competition is an artifact left over from our evolution and society has historically reinforced it because it resulted in better outcomes for the in group to the detriment of the whole. Eventually we've reached a point where people can compete against each other on unimportant things for no reason other than competing, which was also celebrated as a spectacle. Now we're at the point where people are applying the same "competition for competition's sake" attitude to things that do matter even to the detriment of the in group and themselves. And it is still celebrated because competition and winning has such a strong association with betterment in our culture. We will not improve as a society until we start viewing the desire to win as antisocial behavior.

I was out as soon as this dropped but anyone still in may want to reconsider.

Holy fuckin shit, what a jackass

I have never bought into the Proton hate seen on Lemmy, as most if not all of it came from a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology works. And if anything, this report confirms that the employees inside Proton really do seem to care about the product.

But ultimately, if the CEO is this hostile internally, those employees will leave and the product will just enshittify at an exponential rate. This is actually some very damning insight into the future of Proton.

Proton has a couple competitors that are viable to switch to, if not somewhat half baked next to Proton. But it’s important to understand for the people who have been berating Proton for handing over metadata to authorities and similar things, that Tutanota and other competitors will have all the same problems. Tuta is based in Germany which is a member of 14 eyes, and will if anything be more susceptible to the whims of the US government than Proton was.

You can help us by spreading this https://molecule.build/

we need collective worker power at proton

You'd be surprised how many companies have CEO's like this. Mine is the same way. Use AI or get fired is becoming very standard.

Proton products have been great for me, I use them all every day. Not renewing when my sub is up and I'll quote Andy Yen as why.

It makes no sense, Proton was just on for a free win and growth, they just had to keep status quo. I dont know who Yen has been speaking to, but he has become a complete nutjob (unless he always was?).

And, boy, will he ever be surprised when his tantrum sinks the company.

Manbaby Proton CEO Andy Yen confusing his codebase with what he fills his diaper with is sure gonna turn a lot of people away from the service.

Thunderbird in case you want to check it out

Oh, I shall indeed check it out.

Proton’s year-over-year growth is also “far away from what the market today considers to be good,”

More insight here. You can't have a company focused on privacy and security and expect to have the same growth as Google. You're a niche market, and you pigeon-holed yourself on day 1. That's just not how that works.

What did Tuta do?

Isn't it a paid service, though? I trust Mozilla more than Proton as well... but I also can't afford a paid service at the moment.

Be careful though, just like "Trump Derangement Syndrome" got swapped from meaning people crazed for Trump to meaning crazed against Trump... AI psychosis could be twisted by the media (tech bro owned) into "people who dislike AI are crazy."

i apologize, not to throw shade at you because I fully agree with the comment, but let's unpack this is a bit of a trigger phrase along the lines of sit with that a minute or not just x, but y

I've never seen a CEO do more good than harm. Ever. Some or mostly neutral, but most are actively demential to a business and the world. The only real use they even have is to resign/get fired when the company fucks up enough to need the appearance of accountability.

Same, that good will has evaporated though as he's continued to demonstrate poor decision-making and social skills. Bad traits for a business leader.

I have a lifetime Simplelogin account because I love that service.. It's now part of proton (as they bought it), so I think I'm stuck.

Does anyome know if there are any drop-in replacements to proton pass paid tier? Specifically

• cloud-based password manager that you don't sysadmin yourself
• unlimited email aliases
• also stores passkeys, notes, etc
• works on linus and android, as firefox extensions?

I want to switch but they locked me in pretty good with the enshittification and the email aliases.

"how to have time to do my job"

These fuckers treat us like machines.

You fight the fights you can, and you make peace with the fights you can't. This is a marathon, you have to maintain yourself to keep running - that's human nature and okay. We all can't make 100% optimal and good choices. Do what you can, educate yourself and others, grow; but also rest, enjoy, and don't let things wear on you if you can help it.

Everyone needs a break. There's always another chance to cancel, later.

Anyway, I canceled an extra time today, in your honor. (It seemed like their cancelation server was overwhelmed - I was getting timeouts. Naturally I reloaded each page a few times to be sure, because fuck everything about this.)

PS: Andy has partially responded to article in the ProtonMail subreddit. He has alleged that 404 took his comment about security out of context and offered absolutely zero context or explanation about that "Calling his employees losers" bit.

Here's his full comment:

Happy to answer actually, since the quote above was taken out of context. Proton today does way more security reviewing than we have done at any time in the past. With the proliferation of AI tools, our code is also under more third party scrutiny than ever before. We see this across the industry, with critical software bugs (like the recent PHP bug) being found on an almost daily basis. However, several extra days of human review is not the correct way to confront this challenge. We still have human review, but now augmented by AI, has become exceptionally good at finding vulnerabilities in code. For some time now, Proton has also been using unaligned models with custom skills to do a thorough review of our code. This approach is better, and also faster.

Yeah, if I end up switching providers, I’m bringing my own domain next time so at least my email addresses can stay the same.

Custom domains should be talked about more at some point in our lives for sure. That's the key, it makes switching services so much easier and feels kinda like the end game for at least one part of our lives lol.

I got myself tied up so deeply in Proton.. email, password manager, VPN, storage. Never doing an all-in-one service again. I'll find separate services for each of these, and if one goes to shit, it'll be less work and less time to switch.

Mullvad and airvpn are the two good non-self-hosted alternatives I know

My go-to VPN is just wireguard to my home LAN since I only use it to protect the first hop on public Wi-Fi. If you care about your ISP knowing anything that obviously won't work

I'm interested in some discussion of the downvotes here. It solves the first problem and I stated why it wouldn't solve the second depending on what they care about. I don't personally think a VPN is a good solution for the second at all: use Tor for that imo.