AJRF

I keep seeing people working on Passkeys get real defensive when told they don't make sense to people.

I've worked in tech 12+ years and I _hate_ when a Passkey prompt comes up, its only ever slowed me down.

But the devs who work on them are quite rabid, and keep dismissing real criticism of their implementation.

I read this as deeply embarrassing for OpenAI - they can't securely contain a program, even with their apparently amazing AI.

I don't think the parallels are quite as clear for a few reasons:

1. Lock in - with an LLM, there is practically no lock in because of the inputs & outputs being text. You can move easily

2. Motivation - I think you underestimate just how high some of these bills are for companies. Finance departments are already getting mandates to reign in spending even at the high level of subsidization.

3. Political Meddling - we're now at the point where the US strategy seems to be to artificially limit access to powerful models. If China continues its trajectory they will have models as good as Fable in 6 months to a year, and they won't lock it off. So cheaper, better models that are available is a massive incentive to switch. China is much less motivated to ratchet prices up if it's winning them marketshare. I do think David Sacks + AI strategy for US Gov are being very short sighted and it's going to blow up in their faces.

I present article A: https://x.com/asha_shar/status/2074124008795369482

This is matching your phone's location

But what is getting that?

wait - so you think that the map is made up of people who are all sitting on that website using the Find My Train demo?

I think you are missing the point - what is collecting data on all those trains.

Few questions, wonder if anyone knows the answers:

1. So it's Trainline on a persons phone that is tracking this info and using it to enrich this service? I use Trainline and didn't know it was doing that, but I do have location permissions on because I was told that powered the search picker when I started using the app.

2. What did they use _before_ Trainline? Or was Trainline selling user location data to them?

Signalbox's technology identifies the train a device is on by matching a snapshot of smartphone data to a train’s trajectory data. The technology uses advanced algorithms works even with severely degraded data. We are able to pinpoint a smartphone to any type of train without background location tracking or hardware.

Hmm, that's...interesting?

Everyone I know who owns a flipper almost immediately installs some 3rd party firmware like Momentum on it.

I don't remember minecraft being a driver of this - I do remember Patio11 on here being very influential in start ups doing subscription software instead of "finished" desktop applications.

That is not to blame him, but I remember his writing being very influential with start up founders.

If I didn't laugh i'd cry.

I sound conspiratorial - but everything happening in the US around AI + Crypto has the fingerprints of David Sacks and Theil on it. You can hear them talk about these things and then they happen.

Sacks has talked extensively about the US government having stakes in tech companies for months and months on the All In pod.

It seems like saw Russian Oligarchs and instead of being morally repulsed they thought "hmm that is quite nice, I would like that"

If you don't think Playstation and Xbox are dying I would suggest looking at their performance and statements from the past 24 months.

Xbox hardware sales down 30%, 5% on services and revenue. Sony PlayStation operating revenue is down -41%.

These are not healthy businesses, and the future looks even more bleak.

Years away from new hardware sales, and the franchise front is desperately bad - which means when hardware eventually does land, the drivers to buy them don't look like they are going to be there.

I'd love to bet against you on these businesses dying.

I have a HHKB Professional Hybrid. I like it. Quiet enough to use in work. It is bloody expensive though

I wonder if the leadership at Playstation and Xbox understands they are killing themselves.

Fair enough, i'm off to use GLM. Let's see how this plays out US gov

And this is why we are where we are

You miss the point - they are stitching it all together in a way that deanonymize you to your ISP under the guise of save the kids and then convenience

The path ahead in the next few years (at least for the UK)

1. Age gating + VPN ban under the guise of protecting children from social media

2. Few years pass, Identity Passport gets ushered in under guise of convenience of not having to repeat those pesky age verification checks.

3. Utilities start to require ID Passport. Including signing up with an ISP.

4. Renting starts to require ID Passport.

5. Work requires ID Passport.

6. Well done, you built the torment nexus!

Article just posted by the NYTimes on Z.ai (maker and operator of GLM 5.2) gaining ground in US: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/technology/zai-china-arti...

So you are believing Anthropic's claim here, and it's not as if Anthropic didn't steal the data to train the model in the first place. I think the original sin doesn't give them any ability to complain.

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/05/anthropic...

There is so much hot air and guff around AI, so please if you don't believe me verify yourself, but GLM 5.2 is "good enough" to replace Claude Code / Codex.

No it's not frontier, but it's beyond that point that Opus 4.5 hit where people started to really depend on Claude Code around last November time. It's also a fraction of the cost of a Claude Code subscription especially when you account for how high the usage limits are.

You get more usage than Claude Code $2400 a year tier for $1344.

That is a real threat (as opposed to the BS anthropic is trying to sell you in the article in the original post) to the western AI industry. Similar performance for half the cost and it's NOT ran by a US company - uh oh.

I suspect America is going to do what it always does, play a very dirty and underhanded game of blocking competition by trying to front some moral high ground as the reason.

I read the article - and many articles touting what Reid said - but my question remains - why in the name of god is he relevant.

He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he?

Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.

How is Reid Hoffman relevant?

Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction.

Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything

I'm gonna do it! A dream come true!

Former Googler here...nah just kidding, I just felt left out.

Seeing this article and seeing the replies. Oof. Maybe Thoughtworks did some good work in traditional software engineering (not sure) - but why would you trust them to touch anything related to LLMs. They don't seem to know what they are doing.

Two paragraph section on Evaluation after 30 paragraphs explaining the most bog standard rag system you've ever heard of.

Hmm...

Am I right in thinking that the EFF doesn't launch any legal campaigns inside the UK (but they offer support to those who do)

Is there a UK version of the EFF that fights in the courts against this lunacy or does it not quite work the same in the UK as it does in the US.

I don't know how large a group who will do this is - but if the UK bans VPNs I can see Graphene having a very large target on its back.

  - Buy Pixel, Get Graphene
  - Use FDroid, don't sign up for Google Play, download Tor browser
  - Censorship resistant access to the internet without handing over your ID.

The squeeze on the free internet happened so quick by the UK (well it took years of indifference and a failure to enshrine protections - but once they started moving the did so super fast)

Realistically we're speed running ID being tied to internet usage - create your escape hatch while you can!