CSSer

Trueee, I just rephrased. Marketing is powerful!

Nolan Bushnell (Atari co-founder) famously declined to invest in Apple early on too.

I mean, at least the way I imagine it, yeah. It instantly made me think of one of those spiky seed pods in my mouth.

I run a (web and native) app that integrates with Apple calendar and the like with per-user feed configuration. Due to the way Apple polls my servers, I am essentially hit with rolling 5 minute requests for every individual (non-negligibly sized) feed. The amount of bandwidth used at scale is not something I can just look at and shrug, and there are plenty of ways it could probably be made more efficient with levels of caching on near vs long-term items. I have to pass that cost on to my customer somehow. I wonder if this is something like that but at grander scale. There’s a lot of HIPAA compliance involved as well. Granted, I’m not charging a line item for that feature like they are here. I just roll it into the cost of the subscription and everyone shrugs because the price is justifiable to them.

I noticed that too. This also seems like a bit of an insult to the intelligence level of the average person. It’s precisely because attestation is a nuclear weapon that I doubt one of the big three will try it outside of their own specialized credentials. If someone tries to change ecosystems and finds that they’re going to have to reset all their passkeys it’s not going to take long for them to tell all their friends that passkeys suck and not to use them. This instantly kills adoption.

Furthermore, the rest of us are the people at the companies implementing passkeys. I did an implementation recently, didn’t require attestation, and can’t imagine why I ever would.

If we’re at this level of trust for all of FIDO, why aren’t we at legislative centers doing something much more dramatic about it instead of navel gazing about how we’re the smart ones who have recognized FIDO’s next big trick? How is attestation the problem here?

Yes, and we’ve told people this for two whole decades now only for them to shrug.

I think a better way to put this is that success with LLMs is guaranteed by defining what success looks like without LLMs first.

It looks nice. I wouldn’t roast it as much as admit that I can tell from some of the content phrasing that an LLM was used. The h1 feels cliche, for example. That comma doesn’t really need to be there.

I think they just meant that it's so many other people that they don't reasonably fit in the UI

But if you don't only surround yourself with people who think exactly like you, how will you ever recruit an army of yes men and women?

Weirdly when I first got my California DL I thought it felt fake compared to my home state because it was so much thinner. Maybe it’s better for the environment.

Do you really need flock cameras to catch low rank criminals in skid row or kids sneaking into the pool after hours? This seems like a massively imbalanced transaction. Moreover, who really cares about these kids doing that? Our justice system is completely overloaded, and the tools it has to deal with one of those kids in the wrong jurisdiction runs an extremely high risk of ruining their life rather than scaring them straight. One of those old people could probably accomplish the same thing by spending a couple of late evenings at the pool with a very bright flashlight if it’s that big of a deal.

Finally, I’m really worried about the parental surveillance we’re sticking everywhere. You are absolutely training your children to never take risks and wondering why they’re an anxious mess. There is a wide gulf between cutting through private property and vandalizing it, and I’m not convinced our current system is properly equipped to handle the nuances of that.

It’s fascinating to me how polished these things can look now. Years ago I recall reading a story of some consultant or new team member remarking how strange it is to start at a company, be given a tour of the codebases, and eventually find some awkward aspect of the architecture no one could really explain the reason for that had slipped under the radar for years. This feels like that but multiplied by a thousand.

I have spent the better part of the last decade of my career being approached by executives asking me how to optimize or automate away services that I felt had reached a local optimum. Each time this was the case I would gently express that our options were to commodify, by offering a kind of template, the service or optimize the process and way we gathered information from clients. Without fail, they hated the latter option. It was hard to do, and it implied that any number of people needed to do a lot better at their job in seemingly abstract ways. No, they’d always go for the template, then be dissatisfied by the fact that it’s, well, a template! Finally, they’d go back to begging me for alternatives.

This feels like them doubling down yet again. It’s like looking at your personal finances and trying to optimize it by canceling Netflix instead of acknowledging that you eat out 7 days a week.