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This is an important article. I hadn’t realized it was already getting this bad. Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath ... > Most people do not switch their op
by solarkraft 2mo ago
This is an important article. I hadn’t realized it was already getting this bad. Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath ...
> Most people do not switch their operating system or phone provider every week either. But even if you do not utilize that freedom, it matters because it changes the relationship you have with the provider and the provider has with you.
This is why it’s important to utilize your freedoms. Do NOT let yourself get locked into a particular ecosystem (this is why I’m building a phone app for OpenCode).
This article makes me reconsider using my recently acquired Codex sub in my home setup. I never liked that they hide the reasoning, but somehow overrode the cognitive dissonance because the performance is so good. But the inauditability is already a huge problem.
- agilek 2mo agoAnd yet people still go with Sign in with Google as the only login method.
- dd8601fn 2mo agoIt’s odd, I just saw my first one of these today. Some former Figma person linked an AI site comp designer. I was going to give it a shot, but the only choice was a Google login. So very weird.
- mike_hearn 2mo agoIt's not that weird. Building a modern accounts system is a lot of work and people don't like creating new accounts. So it's the path of least resistance for developers and users.
- noduerme 2mo agoIt's not even that it's hard to build a modern account system. It's that if you put your site behind a private / custom account system, and you post a link to it on HN (for example), everyone and their mother complains that it's requiring an email address and password. But if you put the same site behind a Google auth, most people wouldn't think twice to click the button.
- mike_hearn 2mo agoI worked on the Google account system for a few years. I'd say it's a lot of work to beat it. Not necessarily "hard" for a team with the right skills, but certainly a lot of sweat, blood and tears. A modern account system is expected to have, in rough implementation order: email confirmations, password strength checks, password reset emails, forgot password flows (=advanced ID verification as otherwise this becomes a backdoor into accounts), user profiles (+avatar image upload/recompression/hosting), usernames independent of email addresses along with ability to change usernames later, password brute forcing blockers, bulk signup prevention (=solid bot detection), abuse controls (can easily become a team of people), 2FA (SMS), 2FA (authenticator apps), 2FA (backup codes), 2FA (voice calls), 2FA (passkeys), 2FA: recovery when both factors are lost, enterprise SSO integration (SAML), enterprise SSO (Active Directory), fast global signout support (much harder than it looks), cookie theft mitigations, heuristic online login risk analysis to catch cases where an attacker knows the right password via phishing, support for signing the user in to multiple domains, audit logging so users can review their own sign-in history, age verification and restriction support, and possibly support for being logged in to multiple accounts in a single browser session. Oh, that all has to be HA, and the account system is the keys to the kingdom so the security requirements are the strictest of any part of your system. You might say we don't need all of that, but expectations rise over time. Maybe 20 years ago you could get away with a simple account system and an automatic forgot password flow that just assumes the user still has access to their email. Maybe today you still can write a simple system, if you don't expect to have many users and are willing to implicitly delegate identity to webmail providers anyway (the moment you assume the user has access to a secure email account you're basically doing Sign In With Google anyway for 90% of users). But if you roll your own accounts, and then the user gets phished and someone logs in from an obviously suspicious place with the right password, they won't say "yes that's my fault" anymore, they'll say "Google could block that log in, why didn't you?" or maybe "Why didn't you support 2FA? It's your fault".
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoThank you for this. The whole attitude of "it's just [complex thing we take for granted], how hard could it be?" is exhausting.
- dd8601fn 2mo agoI dunno, I’d say it’s never been easier. If you’re building a paid service you’re probably already using cognito or supabase or something. That puts you a few clicks aways from 5+ other identity providers and normal accounts.
- qurren 2mo agoBecause with the alternative they'll require you to "confirm your e-mail" instead of just picking a password
- eru 2mo agoI'm actually more annoyed by having to pick passwords than confirming my email.
- hotelsacher 2mo agoPicking passwords is a job best left to password managers. You don't use a hand crank when riding an elevator, do you?
- eru 2mo agoI am using a password manager.
- mystifyingpoi 2mo agoI'm opposite. If my email goes down, or I do not have access to it, I cannot login. With passwords I still can.
- eru 2mo agoMy email is with Google. They are less likely to go down than my password manager.
- jurgenburgen 2mo agoThen what’s the point of it all? Just use Google login.
- eru 2mo agoYes, that's what I'm doing, when it's available. But it's not always an option, so a password manager is still a good idea.
- msdz 2mo agoI’ve actually started ignoring services where that’s the only login possibility. Sorry even if your platform is the greatest thing ever, but I’ll find a different tool. I’ve read one too many stories about Google (or Apple!) closing the entire account over some bullshit unnecessary reason like “fraudulent” gift card issues or whatever. I’m certain the affected people would’ve preferred to just pay back the amount in question instead of losing their entire Google Drive, or their 20 years of iCloud Photos or whatever.
- n6242 2mo agoIt's the only reason I want to replace Tailscale with something else or look into self-host when have a bit of time during my vacation. They only allow login through a third party, which is a big no for me.
- aidos 2mo agoI think you can use a passkey now.
- stavros 2mo agoOnly for people invited to the Tailnet. To create your own account, you still need a third party.
- eddythompson80 2mo agoYou can host your own identity provider. Authentik, Keycloak, authelia or Zitadel work. I don’t fully agree with tailscale’s decision to not want to be an identity provider but I understand it on some level. It simplifies their service greatly and the amount of asks for that will essentially have them build a full enterprise Entra-like solution that would be a constant maintain headache and they are not interested in that.
- dolmen 2mo agoBeyond simplifying their service, it allows Tailscale to have reduced responsibilities (because of reduced collection of sensible data), and makes them a less interesting target for people wanting access to the data (wether illagally by hacking, or legally from government agencies). This probably makes them less attractive as targets for censorship.
- wwind123 2mo agoI am guessing that's because Sign in with Google is the least of the evil, as compared to other popular OAuth Sign-in options like Facebook, X...
- stavros 2mo agoIt's the least evil of the evil options? Why not use one of the good options then?
- pcthrowaway 2mo agoGoogle is more evil than X or Meta by some assessments
- ulrikrasmussen 2mo agoA password manager has an almost as efficient UX
- the_mitsuhiko 2mo agoI guess the good aspect of sign in with Google is that it falls back nicely to sign-in via email which is very portable.
- eddythompson80 2mo agoIt’s funny how the tides shift. I remember the more dominant online position in the early 2010s being “I don’t want to create yet-another-account for your website. Just let me sign in with my google account”. I’m with you though
- theshrike79 2mo agohttps://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE This is the way.
- placebo 2mo ago>Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath... Exactly :-) Call me naive but I think dark patterns are a short term strategy for winning and I'm optimistic that in the long run they will be replaced with those that are more respectful and oriented to the greater good (granted, the long run might take more time than one hopes for). Given that the pendulum can sometime swing back fast enough to be able leverage it, it might be a good time to focus on models that are both open weights and economically viable to run to build the next great thing.
- blauditore 2mo ago> [...] dark patterns are a short term strategy for winning and I'm optimistic that in the long run they will be replaced with those that are more respectful and oriented to the greater good This is definitely not the way most software has been going in the past decades. It's rather the opposite: Companies play friendly to obtain a user base, then start applying more and more dark patters to further increase their profit. Facebook, Evernote, Instagram, Komoot... The list goes on and on.
- pcthrowaway 2mo agoAlso, see Android and iOS which have a monopoly on the mobile OS market
- falcor84 2mo agoSorry about the nitpicking, but s/monopoly/duopoly/
- chrisweekly 2mo agonot nitpicking; huge difference between 0 and 1 competitor
- jmathai 2mo agoHuge difference while both are competing. But it’s a huge risk in a market with such high cost of entering. If either divests then it rapidly degrades.
- tcfhgj 2mo agoYou are building a phone app for open code? You mean like fossify phone or?
- NamlchakKhandro 2mo agono he means he's locked him self into a bloated and slow react based terminal ui. waste of time. should be using pi mono
- solarkraft 2mo agoNo, it means that I’m building a fast alternative to the stock solid based web UI. Pi (isn’t the “mono” just about it being a monorepo?) has no features and no defined server-client API.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> This article makes me reconsider using my recently acquired Codex sub in my home setup. I never liked that they hide the reasoning, but somehow overrode the cognitive dissonance because the performance is so good. But the inauditability is already a huge problem. Same, I dislike it so much I've acquired 96GB of VRAM to run local models, but sadly nothing so far, even with that amount of VRAM, comes even close to running Codex with GPT models. I really, really, really want local models to be ready, and things like Laguna S2.1 NVFP4 gets really close of almost being there, when it comes to coding specifically. But still feels like we have a long way to go for local models to be serious general purpose alternatives.
- solarkraft 2mo agoThe open models are good! Even when hosted, they buy you a lot of portability.
- rkuska 2mo agoI am waiting for prices to get down and in the meanwhile I am gathering as much session data from claude/codex as possible so I can then later use them to fine tune open models. I've built my own session parser/archiver for this.
- sdoering 2mo agoSame. And I built a search tool for that repository of older sessions, so that I can search through those on all my machines. This helps me to be able to pick something up on a machine I did not originally start the convo on.
- gb2d_hn 2mo agoIt was with the transience of valuable agent session dialogue in mind that I built https://www.agentkanban.io https://www.agentkanban.io - A key feature is context capture in the tasks which you create on the board and then progress in agent sessions. Supported agents are currently Claude and Github CoPilot in VS Code. All of your context is captured in the task and can be reloaded into new agent sessions at any point in the future. Tool use is intentionally discarded because it is proprietary in nature and therefore breaks the promise of session portability.
- benob 2mo agoPeople will keep hiding reasoning because it allows prompt injection https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12277 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12277, in addition to facilitating distillation (you don't pay the full cost of RL)
- jurgenburgen 2mo agoToken-based reasoning also seems like it would be inefficient, there’s no reason it has to be English or even human understandable.
- UltraSane 2mo agoThere have been models trained for latent space reasoning. It has a lot of advantages but the big drawback is the reasoning is completely opaque.
- skinfaxi 2mo agoWhat use is the reasoning if its unintelligible to a human?
- miki123211 2mo agoEven if it is intelligible, reasoning styles (and hence reasoning effectiveness) differ between models. For example, gpt-oss loves reasoning in the style of "I be caveman, hungry, need food, need coconut, will search coconut now, eat when find." Giving that to a model unaccustomed to that style could cause it to respond like that. Reasoning interpretability helps debug why models fail (and some labs will give it to you if they trust you not to distill or be hacked), but there are also conflicting goals like token-efficiency, so interpretable reasoning doesn't always mean "pretty sentences".
- jurgenburgen 2mo agoReasoning improves the output of the model. Originally it was a prompting method called chain of thought but later models were trained to do the reasoning steps without the human prompting for it. Being able to see the reasoning steps is just an accidental benefit. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903
- Geezus_42 2mo ago> This is why it’s important to utilize your freedoms. Do NOT let yourself get locked into a particular ecosystem. I wish people would apply this same logic to governments.
- wren6991 2mo agoAs a frog I'm happy to report the water is comfortably warm today, the same as it was yesterday.
- AtlasBarfed 2mo agoAt this point you should realize there are now tech executives that have 30 to 35 years of experience in all the dark patterns. Anything new is going to be an extremely rapid race to the bottom.
- quietbritishjim 2mo agoThis analogy doesn't make sense to me. Once I've had a conversation, it may be useful to refer back to it shortly afterwards, but typically the output is some code (or maybe a recipe or instructions for something or whatever). It's certainly important to me that I can use that code elsewhere. That's the thing that, to me, is analogous to being able to switch operating system and still access my files or use my favourite word processing program. But being able to decode the blobs that subagents returned in a conversation I've already forgotten about? That doesn't affect my ability to switch at all! I can't even imagine what trivial detail of an operating system this is analogous to. Maybe an undo buffer of a document that gets cleared on exit anyway? I can still pass all my code, and any associated documentation, to any other agent at any time. What am I missing?
- Ferret7446 2mo agoI've never considered the conversation and reasoning to be more than transient. If you want to carry forward a session, you must produce a context artifact. IMO this is like wanting to dump the intermediate state of an LLVM compilation and expecting to reliably resume it across platforms.