Proton's AI manifesto for software engineering | Hacker News Reader

Proton's AI manifesto for software engineering

proton.me

18 pointsdoener11 comments

> “Programming” is dead. Engineering is not, nor is expertise.

No, it isn't. I'm sorry but this coke-bender manifesto is hilarious.

Proton actively maps user accounts (sysadmins just look in) to IP addresses, e-mails, and shuts down journalist accounts because governments ask them to.

Use bittorrent for some Linux isos on their free service it'll DNS hijack your webpages to whine at you, aka they openly MITM you.

> But it is past time to commit, as an organization, to the transformation that the moment requires

Replace this guy with AI.

Made a great use of my weekend to end my business subscription to Proton. This is the last straw.

What do you use as alternative? I came from Google Workspace and Office365, they are horrible. And I don't think Microsoft and Google have a different stance on AI than Proton.

There are some suggestions here https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/

Yeah I guess I stay with proton. I use drive, vpn, email (own domains), meet and their password manager. Seems I'd have to use individual providers for each of those, and manage a multitude of subscriptions.

"This is not the death of expertise. The LLM is fast. You are slow, but you carry with you a lifetime of experience, judgment calls, and understanding."

1) Does expertise atrophy if you are just a human-in-the-poop (I mean loop) for an extended time period?

2) How do junior engineers develop the so-called expertise if they have not gone through all the steps and suffered repeatedly?

On the privacy and security side:

1) Using AI to create apps seems to make them more vibey, less reliable and less secure ... at the same time AI has the ability to find bugs better than before. Feels like a paradox that will get resolved at some point in the future, but at the moment software "feels" like it's getting less reliable.

2) If I were a government, I'd be super excited to inject backdoors and subtle vulnerabilities via AI into proton. To use AI without a good strategy into a privacy organization is like having the fox guard the hen house.

> 1) Does expertise atrophy if you are just a human-in-the-loop

Well I guess you use the same technique as for muscle athrophy. I sit all day at work and and drive to places using machines, so my body athrophies due to lack of movement. We built gyms where you go to to fight that athrophy. And we invented jogging and hiking where you go to places without the intent to actually travel somewhere. Same thing applies: You will have to program without AI on projects, that are not your real end product to keep your skills in training.

> 2) How do junior engineers develop the so-called expertise if they have not gone through all the steps and suffered repeatedly?

Same as above. The training + education will take longer, we will have to create training products for the juniors to practice and gain experience. The products will not necessarily be used in production, but should only be seen as sparring rigs.

Ah yes, let yourself become a meat proxy, embrace it, love it, you will surely become better this way!

After ~10 years with ProtonMail I have gone back to hosting my own email and, with the help of Claude, I now have the email setup I've always wanted. I'm actually kinda glad now to have been forced to finally solve email for myself so, thanks ProtonMail, it was a good run.

It seems nothing is safe from enshittification.

How has proton enshittified? Honest question as I am a yearly proton business subscriber.

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