Proton’s AI manifesto for software engineering | Proton
proton.meHow will Proton navigate the AI transition? Read the internal memo by Proton CTO Bart Butler.
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I didn’t expected this kind of thing to show up today.
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I don’t want to use a vibecode slop that isnt tested by real humans.
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I just want a secure and privacy respecting email not ai slop.
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Good Bye Proton I am Not Happy With You
Any Suggestion ?
- I want drive and calender support
- Made by humans not slop machine.
- FOSS
- May Be a Linux Client Support
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I hate this timeline.
Tutanota is a paid service with a calendar app and email client app on Android and iOS. Fdroid availability too. For desktop, AppImage for major Linux distros, including Arch, Debian, Mint, Fedora, etc. I like it so far. My favorite is all the free aliases so that my spam goes somewhere else. My personal email never gets any nonsense.
Clients are Open Source. The service is paid, but I’d rather pay a bit instead of deal with BS. Nothing is free and they have to pay for those servers to run and keep shit in production. It just 3€ a month to get email, use of custom domains, 20GB storage, unlimited calendars, and you can select a family option to add more people for the same price. You can use 3 custom domains. Not sure if you get the domains or just carry them over, but I’d like to know.
Tuta drive is launching in a few months.
I’m also interested in disroot. Check that out. I’ve also tried kolabnow which I thought was okay but didn’t use it to long. I kind of forgot about it.
"The LLM is fast. You are slow, but you carry with you a lifetime of experience, judgment calls, and understanding. "
I hope their next great plan is to extend life expectancy, because without a new wave of experienced humans, this plan is shortsighted.
“It should come as a surprise to no one at Proton, least of all in engineering, that software engineering has irrevocably changed this year if not before”
Yep, I’ve never had to fix so many bugs and resolve so many production outages in a single year as I’ve done this year. AI is great. Couldn’t be happier. /s
Remember when Windows updates could be moderately trusted to not irrevocably brick devices if not run smoothly
I wish you were exaggerating but my workplace has been sending multiple bricked laptops a week in for warranty. All windows update.
I gotta say I’m getting real tired of having to change my email on every service over and over and over.
Custom domains
This is what I need to do, yeah. That way the underlying provider is all that changes. Good call!
This is why I self-host, with my own domain 😁
True
Listen up Bart, you dumb fuck. If you willingly cede all this creation to the LLM then the last generation of fucking people with expertise are the ones working now! Go down this road and It dies with them.
Because who’s going to bother to learn code when it’s all brain dead chodes like you running the show and telling everyone to hand over the reins…. Oh but of course we’re still the one at fault if something goes wrong because we’re the manager and “Not only are you responsible for the work getting done, you also now own how it gets done.”
Holy fucking Christ, I don’t know if I ever ever gone 180 on an organization as quickly as I have on this one over the past week.
That’s true. They set a speed-run record for dumb-fuckery.
Currently the situation at where I work. I get paid to lobotomize a bit of myself every single day
Honestly sounds like my average day before LLMs too
It’s wild to see how everyone successfully clocked crypto as a scam but then immediately applied the same “NGMI” FOMO mindset to the next scam.
Don’t get me wrong. LLMs are useful for several important software engineering functions: prototyping, iterating on implementations, collecting supplementary data, lining up disjoint interfaces… but it makes a terrible foundation, and it can’t refactor beyond a 101 level.
The only reason the industry is able to pretend that synthetic text extrusion is a sustainable replacement for granular human discernment is because most of our economy is just about building a marketable scam and leaving someone else to hold the bag. If company decision-makers knew they might face any consequences at all for steering the ship into a tar pit, this mass psychosis would not be possible.
Edit:
Also, this…
…is precisely Cory Doctorow’s point about reverse centaurs, and the difference between labor and capital when it comes to deploying new tools. I don’t think they even realize they’re putting the quiet part in bold.
I don’t even get what “left behind” even really means here? It’s not like they’re at the cutting edge of some winner takes all race, they’re building already established tech (email, cloud storage, etc.) based on a specific ideology (privacy), and all they already have enough momentum and brand recognition to just continue riding the current privacy-tech wave. I just don’t get why they felt the need to rock the boat with drama like this. This whole saga just reads too much like VC backed “move fast and break things” mindset which would put a sizeable chunk of their core customer base off the product
I believe that the CEO has delusions of being a Google competitor, at least in the EU. That seems to align with their consistent behavior of releasing new products while leaving their existing apps and services in a mostly, kinda functional state. Who asked for Lumo? How much did their customers want a crypto wallet? Spreadsheets and documents? From what I can tell, most of us wanted a fully functional email client, a working calendar and a VPN, all of which should have feature parity across all their supported platforms. Instead we put up with trash apps while Proton makes continually unfulfilled promises and rolls out another unnecessary product.
Which is ridiculous because of the non-profit majority shareholder. What the hell happened at Proton after this announcement in 2024?
“…community is the most important thing to us, and we want to ensure that Proton continues to faithfully serve the community for the next 10 years and beyond. To achieve this goal, I, as Proton’s founder, joined together by Jason Stockman (Proton’s co-founder) and Dingchao Lu (Proton’s first employee), have jointly endowed the non-profit Proton Foundation through a donation of Proton shares. These transfers and commitments from the foundation founders make the Proton Foundation the primary shareholder of Proton and make irrevocable our wish that Proton remains in perpetuity an organization that places people ahead of profits.”
Profit must always increase at an exponential rate or your company is a failure. Sustainability is death to these psychos.
Attacking their AI policy is the wrong approach.
Attack their BS leadership. They are the problem.
AI can used responsibly to help make things better, but never under leadership like theirs.
I can attack both.
Ironically, the only thing worth automating with ai is leadership.
Correction. What the current leadership does.
Not what they should do.
Even used responsibly, the fact that LLM “AI” is trained extremely unethically means that any model that isn’t a custom, ethically trained LLM is very unethical to use. I know ethics aren’t popular these days, and I say this as someone who ran a nonprofit for ethical software development before Google helped make it quite so clear that being “Evil” won’t cost a company any money anymore.
Organizations rot from the head, and there is often no way to change a company after 4 layers of management is hired by the bad leadership.
Absolutely true. A company having 4 layers of management is usually a red flag already.
Curious how AI policies like this tend to be red flags for BS leadership. In this case, the two are absolutely inseparable.
Maybe it “can” be used ethically, like Theranos’ blood machine “can” detect every disease.
Theranos is different. There both the business promises and the technology was fake.
With AI, the technology works, but the business promises around them are fake.
Agree Its all because of their bad Leadership
I’m on a multi-year sub unfortunately… I guess I’ll still move out whatever I can and just set myself up to not use them
In your case I would start by getting my own custom domain, still bound to proton, and start moving my accounts to it little by little. Once you decide on a different provider you’ll switch your DNS records to it and everything will keep working (potentially also doing a backup of your whole inbox)
Yeah I’m already on a custom domain but I’ve been depending on Proton Pass’ aliases a lot… Well, it’s fine. It’ll just take time I guess
This exactly for me. At least it’ll give me time to find the best alternative once everyone settled into their perspective services
Yeah I’m also counting on that
There are plenty of alternatives, including Posteo.de and Mailbox.org.
Both of which support every client via IMAP and SMTP instead of inventing their own protocol for no fucking reason.
My friend likes posteo. I hear good things but never tried it.
I predicted this and argued with so many people about Proton being a shitty company. I am not even happy about this, just sad that so many people wasted their time and money.
It’s almost entertaining at this point to see how out of touch they are. Many Proton users chose them because they were supposed to be the anti-techbro alternative to Google and Micro$oft, and alas, instead of actually taking a look in the mirror, they double down instead.
I switched over to Tuta. Not sure I can escape developers using AI, but I can escape a CEO with a giant ego.
I think Andy Yen prefers that you use his entire title, which is “fucking dumbass lunatic CEO with a giant ego.”
they gave some hints when their ceo started praising fascists.
Yeah. I know thats when I canceled business with them.
it’s just the last drop in the bucket but, tbh, this shouldn’t come as a surprise from Andy seeing his past behaviour. Although I must admit that reading that manifesto from the CTO did make me puke so hard. As a developer myself (and yes, one that does use a mix of hand-written code and LLMs to some degree), seeing a CTO writing a manifesto like that one would basically mean to me: right, fuck these guys, time for a new job.
I’m glad that I’ve been this whole year transitioning all my important accounts to use a custom domain as their main email and seeing all this clusterfuck was the reminder I needed to cancel my Proton account.
My new provider is ForwardEmail, I was unsure between them or Mailbox.org but then went with the former as, since I self-host a lot of my services, I don’t need all the extra bloat. Tuta may be an option for some but for me was out of the options, I want to use Email client without the need of having to install an intermediary local proxy.
Regardless of what you choose to use now, highly recommend you get a custom domain. After that switching provider is as simple and changing DNS entries in your DNS registrar.