GamingChairModel

What passkeys can't overcome is people dismissing the popups asking if they want to switch to passkeys or create them.

I think it'd actually be pretty easy. Just ask:

Trust this device, with biometrics?

Most people will say yes on their Apple/Samsung/Google devices.

It's been like 25 years since the security world basically moved on from assuming that users could be trusted to act securely. We gotta design processes and protocols that keep things secure even with people who have bad habits.

I can secure my email, but every email I send or receive touches at least one other mailbox I don't control, of some other user. Same with text messages, social media posts, etc. The digital world we use has a billion overlapping people, some with escalated privileges as employees or admins or mods or whatever. We can't make them perfect, so we should design systems that work well even with imperfect people.

I think you're mixing up compromise of an account with compromise of the data associated with that account.

If a particular piece of data is accessible to people of a dozen accounts, compromise of any of those accounts potentially compromises the data. That's a legitimate concern for people who want certain data secured, whether other accounts with access are also secure. In some cases, it may be best to have an authentication policy that provides a baseline level of protection even for the most clueless users, rather than a system where you're able to secure your own account.

They don't need to. It just works to log them in when they're using one of their own trusted devices. Being able to unlock their phone gives them full access to the services (apps, websites) that are authenticated to that device.

TOTP tokens are often distributed as QR codes, where you can store in more than one place, store/copy/transfer in plaintext between people or places. Compromise of that token gives permanent access to all TOTP codes generated.

I'm not a fan of how most TOTP apps and implementations actually work right now.

I have a secure password manager, offline, nowhere shared, even the passwords are encrypted.

How can the service provider tell, though?

The point of passkeys is to create an authentication flow that is easier for users to keep secure. The question, then, becomes whether a service provider should make user authentication decisions based on the worst case scenario, best case scenario, or average case scenario. Passkeys are a reasonable way to make sure almost all of your users have secure login credentials, even if the best of the best users would have just as secure login credentials with traditional passphrases.

Apple mainstreamed tech tribalism

I assure you, from car brands to shoe brands to soda brands, brand tribalism by consumers has always been with us. On the tech side, we saw it with console wars of every generation, PC/accessory brand tribalism, even OS/software tribalism. TVs, radios, portable music players, AV equipment of all types, etc. When cell phones came on the scene, you had significant brand rivalries there, even before smartphones. (You see remnants in this when people get nostalgic about Nokias or Blackberries or Razrs).

plagiarism

outright theft

It frustrates me to see that people are suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property right of people to control creations after they've been created.

I'm pretty skeptical of AI and have my doubts that it will be a net good, but I'm definitely not gonna suddenly be pro-copyright as part of that fight. Copyright has traditionally been used to entrench corporate interests, and strengthening those protections isn't going to suddenly win a fight against some kind of AI dystopia.

Chip industry, both potato and RAM

That's basically what AI is best at: incorporating lots and lots of data points (every single pixel on an image, many trillions of pixels on previous images used to train the model) to determine the best answer to a question with clear definitions of what is better or worse on a single-dimensional quality axis that most people would agree on. In this case, whether a de-noised photo looks good and accurately represents the image that could have been captured of the exact same scene using more light or a better sensor or whatever.

It's generative AI where things fall apart. The analogy I always use is that these math techniques are great for inferring what is between pixels in a low res image, but starts going off the rails when it starts guessing what's beyond the edges of the image. These AI algorithms are just math, and math with this many data points needs to start considering the limitations described by chaos theory (in the mathematical sense).

Once there's a public expectation for profit from the two biggest AI labs

I don't think that it's necessarily the order things will go.

Anthropic and OpenAI have bills to pay, including obligations to pay a ton of money to partners/vendors in the coming years. They need cash to do that. And the cash can come from 3 main places: revenue from customers, loans from lenders (usually in the form of issuing bonds), and issuing new stock/equity to raise funds.

The IPOs are basically their last chance to raise funds by issuing new equity. Even if each of them raise $100 billion, that's probably not enough to hit self sustaining profitability. As lenders start to get more skeptical, in a macroeconomic environment with high interest rates and high energy prices, they start to run into a very real possibility that they hit illiquidity issues, even if their core business model actually works by then (and I don't think it will). There's just not enough runway for them, even in the most optimistic long term projections.

I want a convertible, a laptop that folds all the way back and gives a tablet/stylus interface, but has stiff enough hinges to hold the screen like a laptop at any angle with a keyboard, and that closes and covers the screen like a laptop. They played around with some form factors like that 10 years ago but they never really took off. Plus they tended to be Windows only, with poor Linux support on the hardware.