Glad this is (at the moment at least) the top comment. Add another to the infinitely growing pile of HN news posts that are either out of date, massively misleading in making a calamity out of a non-issue, or both. Not that it's HN's fault. This is just modern "media." Yeck.
A lot of people joined HN searching for a higher level of discussion and thought. And HN is powered by submissions from its users.
What would be nice is if we could get more high-quality submissions to drown out the bots and other low-grade content.
Perhaps if users could filter out submissions by domain. For example, I don't mind seeing nytimes.com submissions, but I don't want to see anything from youtube.com.
But then we're just back to building yet another social media echo chamber. Yuck. Life is hard.
2. Google DOES require 2FA on an account, but only requires the second auth if "suspicious activity" crops up.
3. Google requires 2 auths on each and every login.
On 1, if a bad actor picks up your phone and tries to log in, they will fail if you haven't saved your login, or succeed if you've been lazy and saved it. In the latter case, that's really on you (and you might still be able to get your account back even then, if they didn't fully and quickly reset password and other details!)
On 2 however, they will try to log in, fail, and trigger a lock-down that can only be lifted with both auths. One of which you don't have anymore. Congrads, you've just lost your account!
3 is the same as 2, just for different reasons. As soon as that phone disappears, you don't have the second auth, and you're screwed.
And don't even bother with anything that isn't a phone. We both know nobody in the general public is using anything other than text for this. And some older folks don't even have that! Add on to this that SMS can be easily hacked, and it's pretty clear this whole system is a joke.
You just put in your back up codes to restore access. That’s why the backup codes/words exist. If I lose my crypto wallet or it gets stolen, I go to my bank, get the words from my safe deposit box, and use those words to seed my new wallet. Doesn’t have to be a bank — a home safe or filing cabinet will work, but when my phone broke I had zero problem restoring my 2FA on my new phone using the backup words.
GOOGLE is literally forcing people to use their products. Their entire business strategy is based around it, gobbling up or destroying every competitor, advertising and promoting their own services on search above others, illegally collaborating with other giant tech companies, and on and on. That's how monopolies work. That's the whole point.
Is this the standard answer now every time someone complains of beating treated like shit? "I was walking down the street in broad daylight and someone beat me and threw me in the gutter!"
"Nobody is obligated to teach you self-defense."
"I tried to stop while driving but my breaks failed and I crashed into a house!"
"Nobody is obligated to teach you proper car maintenance."
"My wife's surgeon lied about his qualifications and now she's dead!"
"Nobody is obligated to teach you how to spot a quack."
IT'S NOT OUR OBLIGATION EITHER. It's Google's, to make products that don't abuse and exploit their users. Stop this bizarre gaslighting tactic. 2FA is a shitty scam system that increases complexity and failure rates, radically decreases privacy, and DOESN'T increase security because the vast majority of users will just use SMS, which is easily hacked.
SMS excludes people who live in places where cell phone carriers choose not to cover. I've had to drive 2 miles from my house to receive an SMS, and I live just 20 minutes from a major research university.
Something nobody seems to be mentioning: the 2008 crash happened.
The "cool" internet was largely populated by two things: People screwing around creating content in their spare time, with no expectation of profit ("Hobbyists"), and eager entrepreneurs burning through tons of money trying to find the "one weird trick" that would make them rich on the net. Most of #2 failed, but while it was happening it provided a host of interesting things to see, and spaces to hang out in online.
Then 2008 happened and it all came tumbling down. People tend to think more of the 90s ".com" crash, but there was another after the "recession." Suddenly there wasn't as much money to throw around, so #2 became more and more rare, and those that did exist were less casual and more dogged in their attempts to extract money. At the same time, #1 also collapsed, because people were losing their jobs, downgrading to worse paying jobs, working longer hours etc. People didn't have time for hobbies, and self-starters didn't have money for wild new experiments.
So innovation and expression on the web kind of ground to a halt. This happened culture-wide by the way, but certainly it was obvious on the net. What had once been a space for fun and experimentation became a wasteland ruled over by the handful of tyrannical companies that could survive the harsh conditions. That's why there are only 6 sites. Outside of SV, people aren't doing so well. They haven't been doing so well in a while. Maybe you noticed the protests and riots and crazy elections? People have other things on their minds besides having fun on the internet these days.
Was that really correlated? It feels to me that change more strongly correlates with the rise of Facebook for everything and the Appstorification/mobile. 2008-2012 were the golden age of mobile apps and games like Farmville, for instance…
This trend also applies to music. 2008 put a hamper on the DIY scene. It's harder to find the time and resources to make music, let alone tour, since many artists, and would-be artists, have to work multiple jobs just to pay rent.
This is a good first step. The second would be for them to remain out after walking off their jobs and never return, so that Netflix could regain something resembling sanity. Maybe then they could stop manipulating ratings, censoring 30 year old movies and pumping out deranged propaganda instead of entertainment. Sadly, this will not happen.
Frankly, I agree with the leftists that Chappelle should retire, or at least stop performing in big left wing cities and states. The disaster America has become doesn't deserve solid comedians like him anymore.
It's really amazing how far Firefox has fallen. This used to be a browser people bought TSHIRTS for. TSHIRTS! And wore them! And not just in SV: I'd see them in the wild in small cities too.
The discussion is always the same, I'm not sure what can be added at this point. Yes the way they're actively destroying it is mystifying, yes, maybe money issues are part of that but god can't you just make your own browser? Mozilla's problem, more than any specific incident like this, is that they've become completely incapable of thinking for themselves. Everything is a follower move, trying to find something popular and than emulating it.
I'll continue to use FF, but only because it's easier to massively "tweak" into a usable product than chrome.
They fired Eich and turned from a company of smart engineers and users of their product to randos who work on weird projects using their big paycheck from Google.
Their products suck because they don’t care about them. They don’t genuinely want to compete with or anger Google for fear of losing funding.
They’d be better off cutting down to a lean $5/year spend and just making a browser.
A lot of their lack of focus predated Brendan Eich's 11 day CEO tenure. By 2014 Firefox had already lost a ton of mindshare and Mozilla was working on their unsuccessful Firefox Phone.
In retrospect it seems firefox phone was actually a good idea, it’s been reborn as KaiOS and doing great. Pretty embarrassing for Mozilla to fail and cancel the project and then have another company take it and succeed…
Eichs short lived reign was a symptom, not a cause. The decision to put him there was certainly a decision made by an executive board that is out of touch.
What else could it be? Almost all these "clever" new "AI" products are just people taking a particular "trick" for interacting with GPT and obscuring it behind a slick interface. Hilariously, AI Dungeon was probably the most impressive, but even that could be entirely recreated by just interacting with GPT in the raw if you knew the right tricks. The interface just made it more convenient and "magic" feeling because you didn't see the moving parts.
None of the "products" that came after have been as impressive, including copilot. Using GPT as a font for new writing ideas is probably the only "practical" thing it's good for, at least until the tech advances significantly, but charging for a service like this that essentially adds 0 value is pure rent-seeking.
copilot has surprised me on multiple occasions. If I code in an unfamiliar language, copilot was super quick at writing the code I needed based on the method name (instead of needing to fallback to stack overflow).
There is no "selection process." The only people eligible to participate in federal "democracy" are already rich, powerful, and well-connected. The voters then "choose," in primaries and elections, based mostly on who has the best marketing, which is again a function of wealth and power. Occasionally participants in this process will throw ordinary citizens a bone as part of the marketing, but even these gestures are largely emaciated and performative. There's not some solemn exercise of civic duty going on.
2,000 years ago people born into wealth and power fought amongst each other for leadership and control while the population simply learned to live with the results. The only thing that has changed since is that the process has been optimized: less bloodshed, less constant dramatic upheaval, the hills and valleys leveled a bit. This benefits everyone, including those on top. But let's not pretend we're engaged in some grand experiment for the betterment of mankind. We're living in a plutocracy. Always have, always will.
> 2,000 years ago people born into wealth and power fought amongst each other for leadership and control while the population simply learned to live with the results.
2,000 years ago even the plebeians had the right to vote.
>2,000 years ago even the plebeians had the right to vote
2,000 years ago they voted in meaningless elections while the emperor was nondemocratic. And before that when the elections weren't meaningless, the plebians of Rome could vote while anyone outside if Rome was barred.
The idea that politics is a function of wealth, power, and marketing is cheap cynicism.
Also, the idea that being rich is bad pervades your post. I see this idea expressed more and more commonly. The truth is that, unlike you, the populace doesn't view politics as class warfare. Middle class American does not feel that only a middle class politician can represent them. As far as I'm concerned, this is a good thing.
> Middle class American does not feel that only a middle class politician can represent them
I've been hearing about the destruction of the middle class from middle class Americans since the Clinton era. In many ways, they were right, as I can look at some of those same people 30 years later and see how housing and medical debt, wage stagnation and the restructuring of the economy post-2008 have put those once middle class Americans into the lower class.
Are middle class Americans given a choice between being represented by people from their social and economic strata, versus representation from upper classes? Most middle class Americans have to work, they don't have the time, money or connections for effective political campaigns, especially at the national level.
Clinton and Obama were both middle class presidents.
You're adopting this class warfare perspective and it's simply not how normal people look at things. To a man on the street, being rich is not bad, it doesn't mark one as an exploiter. Normal people have also not accepted this theory, oh-so-common on internet message boards, that rich people are responsible for everything bad.
Politics is about making the country a better place FOR YOUR GROUP, whatever that group may be. There are many groups, with competing, incompatible definitions of "better." That's why "politics" exists in the first place. It's not a bunch of enlightened scholars competing to find the best solutions to hard problems, it's any number of tribes fighting to secure a piece of the pie for their people.
So yes, it's absolutely about winning. Losing means that your group suffers, and eventually that your group (ideologic, geographic, economic or, grimly, even ethnic) ceases to exist.
Still, worth griping about 2FA while we're here.