md_'s comments

Lots of "glide"-style floss is PTFE tape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-B_Glide.

You can buy non-PTFE floss, like https://www.test.de/Zahnseide-Faedeln-ohne-schaedliche-Chemi....

It's not really about "waxed" vs non-waxed, though.

I'm reminded of how long it took Garmin to add touchscreens to their sports watches, and how controversial it was in the user community.

If you want to check your heart-rate while sitting at your desk, scrolling through the touchscreen on an Apple Watch is great. But if you're wearing gloves while skiing, or your hands are covered in mud and sweat during a trail run, a touchscreen is not a great option.

Garmin's modern sport line now has optional touchscreens, but all major functionality is still accessible via physical controls alone. Their lifestyle models are touchscreen-first, though, which really demonstrates the different requirements for different use-cases. I suspect the same is true in the camera world.

I can't say how it compares to other translations, but A. S. Kline's translations of both are available for free online and, I found, easy and fun to read: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odhome.php.

You needn't have responded. Pretty sure the poster you're replying to was just taking the piss.

Your answer is totally reasonable, but I admit I don't have time for that in most cases.

1. Most services are not Passkey-only--most people are using it as a password alternative (e.g. eBay) or a second-factor alternative. So losing it won't lock me out.

2. A very small number (e.g. Google) let you configure Passkey as your sole second factor. For those, I am indeed careful to do what you do and have duplicates.

I do think this is kind of bad? So the grandparent totally has a point here: services find it hard to do only Passkeys (and thus realize the security benefits).

But, as a user, it's not something I worry about a lot, to be honest.

To be clear, I don't work for Apple. :) And I'm not discounting that there are usage patterns that might lead to persistent bad experiences (like your example with Numbers).

But the implication that Keychain just kind of forgets saved Passkeys once in a while seems alarmist and probably unfounded.

Definitely this. I think the worst aspect of Passkeys is that the noble goals (public key crypto! unphisability!) seem to somewhat unavoidably wipe out one of the--in hindsight--really valuable aspects of passwords-in-a-password-manager:

That you can always just copy them out, put them in a different password manager, or write them on a post-it.

That said, I think this is a byproduct of the design space being complex (as you suggest) and not, as the author seems to feel, "thought leaders" or malice.

I use iCloud's Passkeys extensively and have never had saved Passkeys "wiped out". I am not disputing that data loss bugs can happen, but three times for one user sounds pretty weird given the maturity of the ecosystem.

The most obvious explanations seem to me to be:

a) Apple loses data (presumably not just Passkeys, but also photos, passwords, and other highly noticeable stuff) all the time, and I've been lucky for the last ten years. Hundreds of millions of Apple users just learn to live with this.

b) The author is doing something weird.

c) This is hyperbole.

I'm probably picking nits, but it's like an article raising a bunch of legitimate criticisms of the internal combustion engine mentioning that the author's car has, while sitting in the parking lot, simply exploded on three separate occasions. Like, maybe?

Maybe? I dunno.

The design of this is pretty clever: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet....

I presume somewhere you can turn this off for real, but the defaults seem sensible to me.

Beats me. I can't find anything definitive on this. Since Apple devices continue to broadcast Find My signals even when powered off (as long as they have a little bit of battery left), I assume they continue to do so in airplane mode.

It wouldn't do a lot of good if thieves could just turn off Bluetooth, right?

On Apple's devices, you cannot disable that BLE broadcast. The same is true on the Pixel 8: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/8/24123909/google-pixel-8-pr.... That's the whole point of this design, and fundamentally different than just having some app ping a server once in a while so long as it has network access.

But that doesn't use the "find my device" netowrk. I think the parent wasn't saying, "I want an app that continually reports its location to my server so I can monitor my phone's location." Indeed, that's fairly trivial to build, but is useless if, say, your phone doesn't have internet access (like, someone turns it off or it runs out of battery).

The thing Google is announcing here is like the Apple "find my" network--it seems to allow you to use other people's devices to find your lost device simply based on a BLE ping.

That is something that is hard to build by yourself, and would benefit greatly from an industry-wide standard (more peer devices reporting locations!).

Isn't people who don't know enough about Dunning-Kruger confidently spouting off about it...sort of evidence of Dunning-Kruger?

I kid of course. Or do I?

Hmm, let me put it this way:

I have often run into people who seem to think management is stupid for not accepting their idea, which they then explain--and which I also think is a bad idea.

Maybe I'm also just dumb, though!

Lots of comments about "I’m no lawyer" and "But is this illegal? Once again, I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know," which makes the conclusion a bit, um, weird:

"A lot of this feels yucky, and none of the things mentioned in the case should be a surprise to anyone who has been following the Apple space for years. That said, it’s one thing for me to blog that Apple should change something, it’s another thing when the DOJ says it’s illegal. I think the DOJ has an uphill battle in winning this case..."

At the risk of seeming like an asshole:

I think for every highly competent person who just lacks a bit of social graces and is unfairly punished by a defensive bureaucracy, I have encountered many more incompetent people who, due to Dunning-Kruger, don't recognize their own incompetence, and instead ascribe the rejection of their (mediocre) ideas to the unfair defensiveness of the bureaucracy above them.

Or, in meme form: https://imgflip.com/i/8ks5kq.

Yeah, as the other reply here said, that's what I was referring to with "giving advice."

As in, his rep seems (from my distant POV) to be about his acumen as a mentor, not investor. Maybe that's bullshit! Maybe he's just great at picking the right horses! And that's totally a talent on its own, and one deserving of a lot of respect.

But it seems like his star was really made on the perception that he knows how to give good advice, which as I said above has a bit of a weird "those who can, do..." vibe to it.

He's clearly smart.

I am not sure I get the "failed in the right way", though. From one point of view, I think it's a great story here that, given how much of a role is played by luck and external factors, someone who might have proven himself to have great instincts and intelligence can get ahead even if, due to external factors, his particular startup failed.

But from another point of view, Sam is just an example of "those who can, do; those who can't...", only in this case it's "become hugely successful VCs and CEOs."

Which is weird! But maybe the wrong interpretation. I don't know.

I always found it a bit weird how Altman leveraged Loopt (which AFAICT did not make his investors money and was basically a failure) into giving advice to aspiring founders, which he leveraged into, um, whatever he's doing now.

Apparently a smart guy, but it's always hard to distinguish "smart at selling himself" from "smart at building good things."

I have not yet read the above linked article, so maybe it already says (or refutes) this, but the long-held rumor was that Wirecard was a useful mechanism for Russians to move around dark money--e.g. for sanctions evasion or payola.