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Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月29日

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  • What an absolute failure of the legal system to understand the issue at hand and appropriately assign liability.

    Here’s an article with more context, but tl;dr the “hackers” used credential stuffing, meaning that they used username and password combos that were breached from other sites. The users were reusing weak password combinations and 23andme only had visibility into legitimate login attempts with accurate username and password combos.

    Arguably 23andme should not have built out their internal data sharing service quite so broadly, but presumably many users are looking to find long lost relatives, so I understand the rationale for it.

    Thus continues the long, sorrowful, swan song of the password.



  • Yes, this is not uncommon in US politics.

    Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

    In U.S. politics, the period between (presidential and congressional) elections in November and the inauguration of officials early in the following year is commonly called the “lame-duck period”.

    A president elected to a second term is sometimes seen as a lame duck from early in the second term, since term limits prevent them from contesting re-election four years later. However, not personally having to face the electorate again makes a second-term president more powerful than they were in their first term as they are thus freer to take politically unpopular actions. However, this comes with caveats; as the de facto leader of their political party, the president’s actions affect how the party performs in the midterm elections two years into the second term, and, to some extent, the success of that party’s nominee in the next presidential election four years in the future. For these reasons, it can be argued that a president in their second term is not a lame duck at all.

    So while you’re right that the assertion the author is making is misguided, it’s a fallacy that is made often enough that some might conflate it with reality.









  • Respectfully, you were the one who pointed out the impact of the Network Effect.

    The adoption of a product by an additional user can be broken into two effects: an increase in the value to all other users (total effect) and also the enhancement of other non-users’ motivation for using the product (marginal effect).

    Thus, users don’t need to understand the credentials of the platform if the network effect is strong enough, but as users leave the network, the value (credentials) of the platform as a whole decreases.

    Another way to think about it is that the amount Twitter “matters” is directly related to how much we collectively agree it matters. While not directly transferable, I’d suggest that Keynes’ Animal Spirits concept can help us to understand why this might be the case - prevailing attitudes towards a platform can have a profound impact on their value.






  • Ah, racist thought police won’t let you use a word that has a meaning that’s a slur. That’s fun.

    Agreed about Trump being a wild card and this being among his biggest weaknesses. If he presented cohesive plans for even a medium term policy horizon (10 years?) that aligned with conservative interests, he’d probably be able to keep a lot of their support.

    I imagine it’s tough to spend your whole career working to implement conservative policies that are centrist enough that the down-ballot races aren’t negatively affected and run headlong into Trump, whose actions have created so many antis that Congressional races are being impacted and weakening the party more broadly.