HN user
http://bencz.com
"But that's just a bad implementation, many other sites do it right!"
And many sites block paste from password managers. Passkeys have so many ways to do them wrong that we're going to see all kinds of new and exciting failure modes that lock you out of your account in the future.
They might be the same thing cryptographically, but passkeys remove your ability to manage, move, or back them up at will. I can trivially move any single SSH key I want between my Mac, my iPhone, my PC, my Raspberry Pi, and my backup media. Can I do that with passkeys? It seems to depend on which storage mechanism I choose, and even then it's often a matter of dumping the entire password database to plaintext first.
Edit:
Oh yeah, I can also share SSH keys with friends and co-workers. I can freely choose which SSH key to use when authenticating and I can have an arbitrary number of SSH keys for a given server on each machine. Some of this stuff is esoteric, but some is not. Most of the stuff I can do with SSH keys I can also do with passwords but not with passkeys (or at least not always). Finally, as many others have mentioned, the attestation stuff is really ugly and takes control away from the user entirely.
My elderly mother accidentally created a passkey (in Chrome) for one of her accounts. Normally, I try to keep a copy of her accounts and passwords in case she forgets them so I can help her out. With the passkey, this is impossible.
She doesn't know how she created one, she doesn't know what it is, and I don't know how to explain to her that if her PC dies I won't be able to help her log back into her account. I'm not even sure how I'm going to migrate this thing to a new PC for her.
Password managers for passkeys have a huge problem when dealing with any kind of remote support or working on someone else's hardware - you can't just copy/paste or type in the passkey so you're forced to install the password manager on a family member's/stranger's/employer's PC or do what? I'm not even sure. At least SSH keys have forwarding when you ssh to a remote machine, how do you "forward" a passkey?
The Yubikey is the "one device". But most people don't buy Yubikeys so the "one device" is, in practice, a smartphone.
They were also saying that AGI is just around the corner[1] and humans will soon be obsolete. Every prediction coming out of these guys is in the realm of hyperbole and it's impossible to know if it's extreme hyperbole or just a small exaggeration. So when they say these models are dangerous, what level of exaggeration am I supposed to assume?
Basically you can't spend your credibility on wild marketing claims and then turn around and insist that people take you seriously this time.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-i...
Jensen Huang wants to sell more hardware, he doesn't care whether it's Anthropic, OpenAI, or some Chinese company that wins. So he has a vested interest in AI being perceived positively so that the construction of datacenter continues unopposed.
OpenAI and Anthropic have completely different motives, they're in a zero-sum game with each other and with cheap Chinese models. Regulatory capture that results in artificial barriers of entry is their best bet at healthy profit margins even if it comes at the cost of less overall AI buildout.
It's not like "the AI industry" is a single entity with a single purpose, these are different companies with different objectives.
Edit: Google pretty much spells out the problem that AI labs are faced with in the leaked "We have no moat" memo[1]:
People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. We should consider where our value add really is.
And
All this talk of open source can feel unfair given OpenAI’s current closed policy. Why do we have to share, if they won’t? But the fact of the matter is, we are already sharing everything with them in the form of the steady flow of poached senior researchers. Until we stem that tide, secrecy is a moot point.
And in the end, OpenAI doesn’t matter. They are making the same mistakes we are in their posture relative to open source, and their ability to maintain an edge is necessarily in question. Open source alternatives can and will eventually eclipse them unless they change their stance. In this respect, at least, we can make the first move.
[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat...
A better analogy is a storage locker. AFAIK police need a warrant to search "your" storage locker even though it's on someone else's property. I don't see why data in the cloud should be any different. Pre-emptively scanning everyone's data is equivalent to officers rummaging through all the storage lockers in a facility "just in case" they find something illegal.
And how is US doing on digitally totalitarian and hostile towards its own people?
Seemingly better than everywhere else in the world, including where I live (Canada). Whataboutism doesn't really work when you use the least bad option as an example.
3) The "attack" part of "distillation attack" refers to distillers creating tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts, using proxies to bypass georestrictions, deepfaked IDs, and paying real people to pass biometric KYC checks. Who then blended this in with real user traffic to conceal their behavior.
Lol. Isn't this literally many of the same tactics OpenAI and Anthropic used to scrape the internet? So now it's an "attack", but previously it was just "training".
Interesting article, and I agree that ECC needs to be more widely available. But I think this is a major overreach:
We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expensive when bought new than ECC RAM.
ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily. 99% of the time it's also not a "cost to society" but a cost to whoever owns/uses that machine. If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them.
The increase in atmospheric CO2 in the coming decades is nothing compared to how much CO2 increases in a closed room - for example a bedroom that you spend 8 hours in[1]. The paper you linked even notes this (exerpt below). This kind of alarmism just gives more ammunition to folks who want to entirely dismiss CO2 as a problem, but sure, let's keep ringing that bell.
For example, The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS) found that Americans spent an average of 87% of their time in enclosed buildings and ~ 6% of their time in enclosed vehicles in 1992–1994 (Klepeis et al., 2001). This has potentially increased since the COVID-19 pandemic (Young et al., 2024), with many people working-from-home in environments with poor mechanical air-ventilation (Nazaroff, 2021). The proportion of time spent in indoor, CO2 enriched environments could also contribute to the changes in blood chemistry noted in the NHANES data and is an important consideration in interpreting changes over time, and forecasts for the future.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
I love the idea of building more housing, but I think a lot of homeless people have an income of literally 0, so wouldn't they be homeless regardless of how cheap housing is?
There's research that shows why increased housing prices cause increased homelessness. One of the mechanisms is that the family and friends of the homeless can no longer afford the additional space to house the folks who have literally $0 because they themselves are priced out of larger homes or have to rent space to make ends meet.[1]
Unlike Diona’s mom, Sherman’s parents had extra space. That’s very common among homeowning, empty-nest parents, meaning that a great deal of vacant housing is in the hands of the two people who are most likely to love and forgive an adult child in dire circumstances. But in more expensive regions, fewer parents (or other loving figures) have that resource, either because they couldn’t afford to buy a house in the first place or because there are demands from multiple family members to share the legacy residence.
[1] https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/posts/2025-01-16-homelessnes...
You're reaching for the easy answer ("capitalism bad"). Look at all the students cheating with AI, folks using AI to write personal greetings to family, etc. On some level, it's human nature to take shortcuts. I don't know how you even begin to address that.
The ability of Silicon Valley to hype itself up into a frenzy is unparalleled. Apparently nothing was learned from "blockchain for everything" and "we're going to live in the metaverse".
If/when the AI bubble pops, this website will be really funny. I guess it's already funny. This is what it shows for Apr 2026:
Reliable Agent copies thinking at 13x human speed
Still waiting for a reliable agent to think at any speed.
How can their internal representation represent "concepts" when the training data is all words? There's no possible experience of the world there. No input other than a bunch of imperfect labels we created for stuff.
It's not the voice. It's the repetition.
/s
What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230. This has always seemed like a huge loophole. Once social media feeds are picking and choosing what to show users based on opaque criteria they are no longer neutral carriers of information but more like newspaper editors. They should be liable for what the users see.
Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy
This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while the amount of physical food being produced remains flat year after year. That's sort of what's happening with housing, education, and healthcare already.
I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.
Engineering? What's that? Modern development best practice is to have the AI make some changes, then have another AI review the changes, and finally "ship it".
A subscription model isn't needed to kill software.
It's not needed, but it sure helps!
I think you vastly underestimate how much people like their cars. Sure there are corporate interests who benefit, but they don't force folks to change cars every 3 years or make big "crossovers" and SUVs the most popular car type in the US and, now, Europe[1].
Cars are just really convenient to have when you need them and folks will put up with all kind of costs and other inconveniences to own one.
I think it's really important to have robust and safe public transit so car use can be minimized when it's unnecessary, but I don't have illusions that this will lead to some kind of car-free utopia.
[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/707655/suvs-more-popular-europe-...
In theory, yes. In practice it's just used as an epithet against specific groups. For instance, you almost never hear folks from South America being called colonizers despite how Spain and Portugal carved up that continent, meanwhile Jews are frequently called colonizers of their own ancestral homeland.
Being objective doesn't mean laser focusing on the negatives. For instance:
Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved?
You know how many movies the average peasant watched in the 1800s? 0. The closest equivalent was live theatre and that was an expensive luxury. You'd also likely get see one or more of your children die to diseases that are trivially treatable or preventable today.
Joe Rogan's Comedy Mothership does something similar[1]. The worst part about these systems is that the lack of accountability and appeals process. If you end up on the "bad" list, you're banned and probably SOL.
[1] https://www.cracked.com/article_38944_joe-rogans-comedy-club...
Not to worry, Flock, Palantir, and whoever else has use for it will keep it very safe once they buy it from the car company for $1/driver/month.
Edit: Oh maybe MindGeek too, since some car companies reserve the right[1] to record "sexual activity" in the car.
[1] https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
The implication here is that schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it? As many on the left would say: "everything is political". So what we're discussing is (yet another) front in the "culture war", this time about what ideas and values children should be exposed to.
Let's just be honest about that at least.
You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
It went south around this point:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.