Removing dependency on SaaS has so far been my favorite use of AI. I hope we kill it off entirely. Software is better off as a tool. Making it a product typically ruins it.

Software is fine as a product, it is when it becomes a service that it sucks

People pay for good tools. Tools help create value, and if they are good at creating value the toolmaker should be compensated.

If so, people can just pay Anthropic or OpenAI directly. They are great toolmakers.

I don't know where all of your shoulds are coming from. I too am having a lot of fun building with AI, but I can see how it might not appeal to everyone.

And I think the people it doesn't appeal to, I think we need perspectives like theirs.

I can't rotate my keys if I lose access to accounts because my computer died and my backup is useless.

Yeah, that's why secure enclaves embedded in complex devices are a bad idea.

Hardware keys are the way:

- Less likely to fail in the first place

- Cheap enough to have several of so you can use one to log in and manage the others in the event of loss

- Easy to move between devices

- Less likely to use the auth handshake as a side channel for things you didn't consent to

Can you clone or sync hardware keys? Maybe they don't fail as much as computers do but they can be lost or stolen like the keys that we use to open (dumb) doors.

My non hardware key is a keypass file that I update only on my laptop and I sync to my other devices. I have plenty of backups. It does also the TOTP required to login into some customers servers.

I have a few yubikeys and it’s a manual process to sync a new key last time I tried

I keep all my TOTP keys on an encrypted usb drive in a safe. When I lose a key, I manually add all the TOTP accounts onto the new key from my safe

Passkeys are a different story. Every account I need to make sure I have multiple yubikeys registered. When I lose one, I get in via a second key and then add the replacement one.

It’s a pain but it’s a model that makes sense to me. Lose the key? Time to reach for my backup key.

Yeah it feels pretty dumb to have to register all of my keys with each service, but as far as I can tell it's the least dumb thing.

This is why H1B needs to be a relatively fast path to citizenship. Without that, the bosses will continue to behave badly.

Why do people always assume that people on H1Bs _want_ a citizenship?

There's tons of things you can do to make people on visas more empowered to push back at work without them become citizens; and in many cases cutting ties to their original countries.

When you're drafting policy, you get to be choosy about who you want in your country. I think that's more or less standard practice.

We should want people who want to stay here long term, because then they have a stake, an incentive to stand up to bosses that want to wreck the place.

As sympathetic as I am to the desires of somebody who wants to come for a while and then leave, I think a better policy would deprioritize such candidates.

Which is why leaving is not enough. If we want to be safe we need to actively interfere.

Little bitty black holes in the LHC

I had four big plastic totes full of cables. I pared them down to just one recently. I'm 90% happy with the move. It's ok to let go sometimes.

Agreed... the realization I had recently was that if I've got boxes that I haven't touched in years, then I won't really miss them as much as I think I will if I get rid of it.

This presupposes that the practice of exchanging things for dollars will remain stable and merely the number of those dollars will go up.

But that model is showing its age. I'd be supprised if, equipped with a heightened ability to develop and evaluate alternatives, we decided that it was worth preserving.

Money is a lousy proxy for consent, yet that's what were using for. Surely we can do better.

AGI for the peasants is cancelled.

Trogdor - the AGInator

Yet still, every now and then, a king is executed.

Get to work.