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OpenAI did not "bet" on Jony Ive. They bought his company io Products.

Is that not a bet?

It's certainly not a good way of explaining that this is a hire and not an acquisition!

The people complaining about Safari often are running enterprise crapware that requires some esoteric Chrome API or bug to operate correctly and should actually be an app on iOS but cannot be funded as such because its creators don’t care about its users.


Then again, if a company can't polish a web browser app, then the native app they'd produce will be even worse.

Now you have a crappy app that only works on some devices, and now with no tabs, no links, text you cannot select anymore because they used the wrong component, etc.

Ugh.


Well, formerly you would have been right, but WebUSB and whatnot are gaining a lot more traction.

I didn't take WebUSB seriously until I steered someone to flashing a small firmware onto something and they could do it straight from the browser! And it was a nice workflow too, just a few button and a permission click.

Two other examples I can think of are flashing Via (keyboard) firmware and Poweramp using WebADB via WebUSB to make gaining certain permissions very easy for the layman. I imagine it's gonna get more and more user in enterprise too.

Firefox is seriously behind by refusing to implement it.


WebUSB is a giant gaping hole in the browser sandbox. Innocent use cases are really nice, I've used WebUSB to flash GrapheneOS on my device, but the possibilities for users to shoot themselves in the foot with nefarious website are almost endless.

Consider the fact that Chromium has to specifically blacklist Yubikey and other known WebAuthn vendor IDs, otherwise any website could talk to your Yubikey pretending to be a browser and bypass your 2FA on third party domains.

I'm conflicted on WebUSB because it's convenient but on the balance I think it's too dangerous to expose to the general public. I don't know how it could be made safer without sacrificing its utility and convenience.


It really isn't. Chromium (since 67) does USB interface class filtering to prevent access to sensitive devices. Then there is the blacklist you mentioned.

On top of that, straight from Yubico's site:

".. The user must approve access on a per website, per device basis .."

This isn't any more a security hole than people clicking "yes" on UAC prompts that try to install malware.


> ".. The user must approve access on a per website, per device basis .."

Of course, but a phishing website "fake-bank.com" could collect user's username, password, and then prompt them to touch their yubikey. This wouldn't trigger any alarm bells because it's part of the expected flow.

> This isn't any more a security hole than people clicking "yes" on UAC prompts that try to install malware.

Yes it is. The only reason why Yubikeys are immune to phishing and TOTP codes aren't is because a trusted component (the browser) accurately informs the security key about the website origin. When a phishing website at "fake-bank.com" is allowed to directly communicate with the security key there's nothing stopping it from requesting credentials for "bank.com"


Again, that exploit factor is irrelevant now because WebUSB is blacklisted from accessing, among other things, HID class devices. So no site, even with permission, can access U2F devices over WebUSB. There is no special blacklist needed per vendor or anything.

You are right that it was a security hole in Chrome <67. Which is almost a decade in the past by now.


> some esoteric Chrome API or bug

Or simple things like supporting 100vh consistently. Is that estoric?


It’s also strange because I highly doubt Google has manufactured a billion physical units of anything. Most of their consumer hardware is designed and built by partners, including Pixel.


>> I highly doubt Google has manufactured a billion physical units of anything

Technically, there are billions of transistors in every tensor chip manufactured by Google


Even all pixel and nexus models combined must be far off the billion. Apple just hit 3 billion iphones last year.


In case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.


Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.


It took me a while to realize you were using "$WORK" as a shell variable, not as a reference to Slack's stock ticker prior to its acquisition by $CRM.


Now I'm imagining a world where all publicly traded stocks are identified by reverse-order domain names.


You never know. Could be both.


Income isn't wealth. Someone making $62,000/yr in income without working at 55 (i.e. no Social Security) is likely comfortable. That's >$1m in invested assets plus whatever is owed to them as retirement income when they reach retirement age. It's especially unclear if everyone else's payroll taxes should be spent allowing this person to retire a few years earlier.

This is all before including the other large personal expense (housing) for this person is likely imputed rents from homeownership which aren't counted as income but function that way.


If this is your concern, why not oppose all subsidies? There are also early retirees who keep their AGI below 400% FPL.


Surely you are capable of thinking there are tradeoffs here where one can set a level without dealing in absolutes. Put differently why not expand Medicaid to cover every American regardless of income? 400% is just as arbitrary as 1000000%.


I do actually think that universal healthcare is the best policy. But that will mean some wealthy people get coverage paid for by the state, which aggravates some people.

A substantial amount of discussion in early retirement communities is about how to stay below 400% AGI, which is why I found it odd to see a criticism of healthcare subsidies going to early retirees in the context of the expanded subsidies.


Great then you have even bigger problems to wrestle with regarding solvency. Americans won't choose cost effective treatments, and if you force them to pay out of pocket for experimental therapy you will be accused of running death panels. Good luck with that. On top of all that, they are also unhealthy due to a variety of lifestyle factors including that their primary mode of transportation likes maiming them.


Rent control absolutely causes a reduction in supply: there's a reason rent controlled buildings have apartments in poor condition that owners do not renovate (so a reduction in quality supplied) and many are held off market or converted to owner occupancy through condos and TICs (so a reduction in quantity supplied). Not to mention the units underused by long term tenants who maintain them as secondary residences.


>> If this - "High-income job losses are cooling housing demand" is true, doesn't this mean UBI would never work?

I've even see a rent controlled apartment in manhattan being used as a storage unit !!!


Central to the challenge of UBI and housing costs is the law of rent. UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners. There are ways to make that possible.

Rent controlled apartments being held by tenants no longer using them as primary residences is pretty common. A famous case of this was Cleve Jones in San Francisco who tried to make it a huge political deal when his landlord raised his rent to market because he was 1. living in Guerneville full time and 2. subletting the apartment. The media environment is one where it's ok for a master tenant to be a de facto landlord and make money on real estate, as long as it's not the landowner themselves!


>> UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners.

Doesnt this happen now because we're all so tethered to HCOL cities? With UBI presumably people would be geographically free, and there is a lot of inexpensive land and housing around the country. Doesnt the capture problem only happen due to scarcity in HCOL cities and thus not an issue?


Yes but it builds into my argument - it does not counter it. Reduced supply... increases rent. I'm saying "increased rents + rent control not applying = more people should want to build". And the person I'm replying to said rent control makes people not want to build.


> I'm saying "increased rents + rent control not applying = more people should want to build"

This is false. People will want to build more on the margin, but that doesn't mean they want to build. If the profitability requirement (hurdle rate for getting investment from institutions) is greater than the the market rent, people will not build even if market rent is high. Indeed, that's what's happened in the last 5 years as costs have increased much faster than rents.


This comment just indicates the difficulty of making accurate conclusions based on casual analysis like you're doing.


haha i misread casual as causal, but i guess, here are the "accurate conclusions" you are looking for, that is to say, what does rent control cause, as opposed to the vibes and correlations people are talking about?

it's the "credibility revolution" and someone has won a nobel prize for it.

rent control causes limited mobility (read: displacement out of town) by 20 percent; it causes reduced rental housing supply by 15 percent:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20181289

rent control causes reduced property values:

https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/h...


Did you write an entire comment by misreading "casual", the word I used, with "causal"? Otherwise, I have no idea how your reply relates to mine, as I didn't make any claims about the existence of such research.


You called his analysis "casual" so he gave you in-depth research? Otherwise, what was the purpose of calling him casual? Just drive-by insults?


Casual is a perfectly reasonable descriptor of economic conclusions based on vibes and anecdotes about apartment building in Montreal. I don't think it's reasonable to read it as an insult.


You don't need a study to tell you that if you make things more difficult and worse for landlords, the housing supply will decrease.

Courts actually need to do their jobs here for an optimal solution - e.g. it should be easy to punish shitty landlords AND easy to kick out shitty tenants.

It shouldn't take a 1+ year wait (as during COVID) to get a landlord-tenant court date to resolve issues.

The housing issue is multi-faceted however, so that's only 1 piece of the puzzle. But thanks to NIMBYs and building code overreach, it's literally impossible to build affordable housing that would rent at its own depreciation schedule.


> You don't need a study to tell you that if you make things more difficult and worse for landlords, the housing supply will decrease.

That doesn't need to be true. In post WW2 UK the government built lots of rental property. That increased the housing supply and hurt private landlords at the same time.


This is right. More supply is bad for landlords. In particular, housing developers and landlords are different economic actors!


You forgot to include the rest of the abstract:

"Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law."


No, because rent control isn't portable and most people's housing needs change over time. The person who can hold onto a house for 20 years straight is the outlier.


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