sesky

The person you are replying to is trying to make the following argument.

Tao is intelligent. Intelligent people have higher standards for understanding the world, such as assuming that the mechanism behind medicine are well understood. But most people are not intelligent, so they don’t understand things like medicine at the level Tao presumes.

I don’t agree with this argument, just explaining it.

But the quality of code was already very bad due to market forces. Most code at large companies is notoriously poor despite the talent density, because the incentives are not there to tackle tech debt or improve code quality.

With such a low baseline, there is an optimistic perspective that LLMs could improve the situation. LLMs can produce excellent code when prompted or reviewed well. Unlike human employees, the model does not worry about getting a 'partially meets expectations' rating or avoid the drudgery of cleaning up other people's code.

The purpose of a stock buyback is to increase the shares value. This allows investors to choose to realize profits, but this is not a "pump and dump" because having less outstanding shares fundamentally drives the price up. There is nothing wrong with stock buybacks.

The reason this is often done instead of a special dividend is that dividends create an immediate taxable event for all investors, which is considered less flexible than the capital gains tax associated with a stock buyback.

Besides the tax treatment difference, it's mostly a signalling/communication choice: share buybacks increase EPS which is a nice story, whereas dividends signal reliable profits.

This is not true. A walled garden only works well when it applies universally.

When app developers have the ability to bypass the walled garden, they have many incentives to do so ranging from financial to wishing to circumvent scrutiny. This will include an increasing amount of popular and useful apps, decreasing the options available to those who want to stay in the walled garden. For less technical users they will blindly follow instructions to leave the walled garden.

You are removing the choice of users who want a walled garden by supporting legislation forcing these ecosystems open.

If you consume any chess media, you would know there's a fair amount of crossover in chess players who enjoy playing poker.

That is because although chess appears to be a game of perfect information, it is impossible to calculate anything but a small fraction of possible future game states in a limited time. So skilled chess players must make educated guesses as to which lines are worth calculating, whether their opponent has already studied the current line, and what moves to play to get them out of their memorization.

This is effectively a game of limited information where solid Bayesian reasoning wins, just like poker.

That seem like a reductive take on why people live in HCOL areas. Those areas cost a lot because most people believe the quality of life is better, which raises the cost of living due to competition for real estate.

If every part of the US became equally expensive and convenient for work, VHCOL areas like the Bay Area would still be immediately oversubscribed for reasons unrelated to work.

The Bay Area has arguably the best climate (cool Mediterranean) of any major city, unique proximity to a diverse set of outdoor recreation (Big Sur, Napa, Yosemite, Tahoe just to name a few), and all the desirable amenities of a major metro area.

That’s not to say you can’t have a perfectly happy life in other areas if you have different preferences, but the cost of living is ultimately a market, driven by the aggregate preferences of all people.

To clarify, this was new information added to the release within the past hour or so, which seems like the company responding to criticism. The original article gave no indication 2FA was anything but mandatory.

So to mitigate lockout risk, you keep multiple Yubikeys, store recovery codes in multiple physical locations including presumably a fire-proof safe bolted into your home (at your expense), and use obscurity to store the TOTP secret on random places in the internet, presumably relying to external services or a self-hosted solution, which are themselves dependent on regular credit card payments going through.

Okay, I grant that you've reasonably mitigated the lockout risk. But I don't want to do any of this, and is it really reasonable to expect the everyday person to understand or implement all this? What happens in practice is that many users will not realize anything is wrong until they get locked out with no recourse.

This makes it hard for me to recommend Bitwarden to my friends who use typical insecure practices like password reuse or post-it notes.

Agreed. There is no way to rely on the simple model of 'my master password is the single point of failure' now. With any form of 2FA, there is now lockout risk in a way that cannot be mitigated fully. Bitwarden itself recommends printing out a recovery code and storing it in a safe, but what happens if you lose access to that safe? Or if you're traveling and need emergency access to your accounts after your phone gets stolen?

On the reddit post announcing this, Bitwarden added a response saying they will provide an opt-out option. It's unclear if this opt-out is temporary or not. It would be a huge step back for their product if 2FA becomes mandatory.