Passkeys are somehow 100% seamless for me, except for two services that have somehow screwed up the implementation: Google, and Okta. In Google's case, they have made it so that if you _ever_ add a passkey to their password manager, it somehow refuses to work with a third-party password manager going forward. In Okta's case, the admin policy UI makes it next to impossible to have passkey-only login without their Fastpass app or an oldschool password login.
> How much will you love them when you're locked out of something you can't do without?
I certainly wouldn't be happy if this did happen, but it would be my stupidity (or the stupidity of those who implemented it on the service/platform where the problem occurred) which I would blame more than the fault of the tool. I do keep all passkeys in Bitwarden now so that's something at least.
Security benefit appears strongly overstated. Compared to using a password manager (including generated secure passwords for each account), there isn't a significant security benefit. passkeys require using a manager as well, so there isn't much point.
> ...but it would be my stupidity...
All people are stupid sometimes. A security flow that doesn't account for this very well isn't a very good security flow.
(Related: everyone tends to be unlucky eventually, and, unfortunately, everyone becomes incapacitated/dies eventually. Security flows need to account for these as well. Not to mention that in my experience, no software company continues to offer a quality service at a reasonable price forever. You're lucky to get 10 years. Having access to my accounts tied to a single piece of software is likely to become a big pain at some point.)
If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].
There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.
You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.
> The [Congress] explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like [Google] and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the [current political agenda] instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.
I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.
Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.
In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.
Only very partially free, though. The govt still has massive control over the markets, and especially the banks. They still plan a lot of their economy.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed
The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.
> None of this is settled
The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
Soviet Russia and early communist China both went from mostly-illiterate peasant economies to mostly-literate, partially industrialized, with home-grown heavy industry and weapons technology in the span of like 15-20 years.
Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.
The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment. If I tell an AI to start producing paperclips, it might start producing paperclips by doing unintended things. Technically, recycling the metal from all the world's bridges would assist in making more paperclips, but I never intended that. That's where my analogy to the post comes from- Openai intended the model to hack, but did not intend for it to hack HF. Do you think the fact 'recycling metal into paperclips' may have been in the training data is relevant to the thought experiment? Similarly here, it's orthogonal to the lessons from the HF hack and only brought up here seemingly to make it a fight over whether the models are really "autonomous"
That is all that Ed Zitron deserves lol. Completely unserious person. Really on the same intellectual level as the flat earthers at this point. And at both we may simply point and laugh.
Yeah, basically any human group has some shared social context. Most cults and fascists probably eat together sometimes too, but that doesn't make it a red flag.
Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development.
By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism.
The paid templates extend the approach to components. The business model is that the credibility they establish with the free high-quality CSS/class system makes people willing to pay for the templates, which then goes over well because the templates are good and useful, saving a lot of development time. BTW, their templates solves a different problem than native components -- I suspect you're dismissive of their business model due to not actually understanding it.
Of course, it's all moot now. AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates. (Plus, tailwindcss probably doesn't build the credibility as much anymore either because devs aren't using it (their AI might be, but without the direct contact it doesn't have a chance to build that open-the-wallet credibility.)
Tailwind templates give you a quick way to get good, functional, customizable components. LLMs give you a quicker way to get good-enough, functional customizable components. You have to pay for LLMs too, but you aren’t getting the LLM just for the components, and component generation is included.
Looking ahead, maybe LLM subscription prices will eventually have to go way up to justify the huge valuations AI companies have. So maybe this could change, but it won’t be until anyone making a living from template has had to move on, so we aren’t going back to when that was a thing.
It seems to me that this is the way the market is heading. Strange bleeding edge perf or sprawling complexity feels like the last niche of front end engineers. The rest will move further down the stack or be replaced.
It's a weird article. Despite the title and some of the text, much of the article makes the point that LLMs are next-token predictors, where the predictions are based on both training data and various reinforcement learning techniques.
I’m open to being convinced, but if you’re claiming mainstream media has no accountability, I think you need to substantiate that.
I realize there are information bubbles on the internet where this is accepted as truth, but unexamined. Nonsense is everywhere on the internet. I’d be curious how you’d substantiate this.
You can just watch or read the mainstream news for a few days and see for yourself, really. They may not outright lie that much, but they constantly lie by omission - all of them. And when they are called out, it's like screaming into the void since they just ignore it and carry on their merry way. Hence, very little if any accountability, and usually because the people that rely on these sources aren't the ones calling them out, and so refuse to believe they were lied to since it challenges what they think they know.
One way to gauge how close to viable local inference is the quality of the arguments against it are.
$100/mo for ten years is $12K. $200/mo is $24K. When you look at the valuations of the companies providing these tokens, you don't necessarily see these rates going down.
Your argument against privacy is so obviously bad I don't think it needs a response.
Today, most companies and individuals (including me) are still going to be buying tokens from the cloud. But for many it makes sense to go local today, and it seems pretty clear the day where we turn the corner isn't that far away. E.g., suppose the RAMpocalyse eases in 3 years and Apple releases the M7 ultra, which has actually been designed for local inference (and other players are making their moves as well). I suspect it will become something of a no-brainer to do most inference locally, perhaps supplemented by lighter usage of per-token plans from the cloud for access to specialized models.
And yet you love passkeys? How much will you love them when you're locked out of something you can't do without?
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