Huh, this was an absolutely fascinating read. Kind of feel like the Vatican nailed it with this one lol. Did not have that statement on my 2026 bingo card. Wise words and perspective.
Welp, would have been a more useful post if he provided some context as to why he feels contempt for Karpathy rather than a post that is likely to come across as the parent interpreted.
successful how? the only metric i see is # of pull requests which means nothing. hell, $dayJob has hundreds of PRs generated weekly from renovate, i18n integrations, etc. with no LLM in the mix!
I assume your circle is mostly tech people? Outside that bubble, it's pretty obvious. People just want easy, don't understand security in many cases, it's the simplest path.
Even absent the above. Imagine a signup flow. I can either click <Sign Up With Google> or I can go through a manual flow with input fields. The former is much faster than the latter. It surprises you people choose the path of least resistance?
It does not surprise me that people choose the path of least resistance. I find it sad that they happily connect everything to Google/Apple.
What surprises me is that it is a "conversion killer". So if you ask people to create an account, it's sooooo very hard for them that they will just leave. And spend the next 30 minutes scrolling TikTok, I guess?
How many services do you have subscribed to? from simple PHPBB boards to very much official product and online shops? How do you manage all those username/password? The single point of failure of relying on Google/Apple is real, but so is the manual and laborious process to auth via email/password and the managment that goes with it.
Each password is a PGP-encrypted file, encrypted to security keys. The files are backed up in different places, including my laptop and my phone. The password manager app runs offline, so it has no reason to suddenly fail, but even if it did, my passwords are just encrypted with PGP, so I will never be "locked out".
I find it very unlikely that it would get compromised: again it's encrypted to security keys. If my device is compromised, the attacker can extract the passwords that I decrypt while the attacker has control, but not the whole database.
To lose my passwords, I would need to simultaneously lose all the copies (on my devices, and on the cloud). To lose access to my passwords, I would need to simultaneously lose all security keys.
Doesn't feel like a single point of failure. Or do I misunderstand what you mean by that?
It definitely surprised me just how lazy humans are on average. The amount of effort people are willing to exert on sign ups, etc... The drop off with each additional field blew my mind.
You'd be surprised. I've worked on a municipal/local-area webapp that launched with auth and a create-account form. Userbase in the low 100ks, a few interactions a year. It was an ordinary create-account form: name, address, email/phone, no payment info or government ID. The only alternative to this service--and I do mean only--was to go into a city office and wait in line/fill out forms. Failure to do either resulted in a fine (I forget how much; in USD it would have been less than $50 I'm pretty sure).
Before we added SSO, huge numbers of users would enter but never complete the signup flow. We assumed they were making the (baffling) choice to take time to go to an office and wait inline over filling out a web form. A year later, we added Google and Facebook login. Failures to finish signup dropped to almost zero (a lot of folks were still bailing out of the manual create-account form without finishing, but they were then falling back to Google/Facebook).
More surprising, that year the net number of signups (across web and brick and mortar) more than tripled.
People weren't choosing in-person over a filling out the create-account form. They were choosing to pay a fine instead of filling out the create-account form.
So ... I don't know about "less valuable than TikTok", but a lot of folks' decisionmaking sure is wild.
I said in another reply, that’s actually a real Plan B. We are going to stay in Costa Rica for 5 weeks starting next week and my wife and I are both learning Spanish now. I’m at around an A2 CEFR level.
I’ve already researched the residency requirements for both there and Panama
Costa Rica doesn’t tax foreign income. But logically it only makes sense to establish residence there if I am not working. CAJA - their healthcare system would be about the same price as my employer provided healthcare.
I already don’t pay state tax living in Florida and I would pay federal tax either way.
Ego is truly wild. I had one last bastion of ego that echoes a bit. It was my ability to code the machine. Im that guy that really loves to code. It fills me with joy in ways that I cant describe. It was the only status I really had... until AI.
AI has freed me.
I am free to fully enjoy life as a nut case. Its fantastic as im living a second childhood right now.
Yeah, I have a pet theory that I give about a 0.01% chance of coming to fruition... Next couple decades, AI, etc is going to force humanity to confront it's sense of self and priorities and wake up. A man can dream lol.
There's a difference in intention between ex-pat and immigrant. Ex-pat's tend to think of themselves as being wherever they are temporarily, but intending to return to their home country. Immigrants desire is to make wherever they are their new home country.
If you're saying that people who have permanently left the US call themselves ex-pats, that is news to me, and I can understand the confusion.
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