Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company 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.”

In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

This sounds like the most insecure loser statement I’ve ever heard. Andy Yen and the rest of the Proton Execs seem to have fully bought into the man-o-sphere in the same way that every basement incel has.

But how does a control system like that fail?

It seems like a pretty simple system, and one that wouldn’t be very expensive to harden/have redundancy/battery back up/etc.

Can anyone explain to me how this is not the easiest transportation crash in the world to prevent?

Presumably every train knows what track it’s on and what direction it’s going, and presumably that data is being transmitted to some central authority.

Why have a system that even allows 2 trains to be on a collision course within a hundred miles of each other? No human operator should be able to choose to override command.