maxt

Namecheap are doing dollar domains for cyber monday. I usually buy about five or six at this time of the year with frivolous keywords like issomethingcool.com whattimeisit.com etc

I never renew these BTW

> Authentication security: Do they use 2 factor or other tech?

Sorry for sniping this specific one, but 2FA is (more often than not), security theater. It gives the illusion of security like how TSA baggage check is a big dance of scanning, pat-downs, and key ceremonies.

For context, consider Yahoo Mail, where emails are read by intelligence agencies before the user even gets them. Does my 2FA help here? Probably not.

I can understand that 2FA does have its uses, but frequently I'm seeing it being used like those 'Secured by Comodo SSL' with a picture of a shield to make a would-be shopper feel like the transaction is more secure. It can be theater.

Thanks for clarifying. I have to remember this quote:

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged"

What I mean is that I can decide to not encrypt and have my emails under public scrutiny, but as I said, most people are not scared enough because it doesn't happen on their watch.

It doesn't matter what the content is, or how non-libelous - if it's encrypted with PGP, it's private.

I am highly skeptical of any claim that an email provider is more private than other providers. E-mail is fundamentally not secure and not private, unless you enhance it with PGP, which requires you to, of course, have something you want private.

Most people don't encrypt because they're not scared enough. It usually takes some time before their wordlview is repeatedly shattered enough that encryption is the only choice they have.

> I actually can't name a single person who uses social media in a highly productive way.

I'm talking about mining, say, Twitter's firehose for nuggets of gold using, let's say, R[1] or finding other clever ways to separate the signal from the noise.

It's well known that Twitter and even Facebook's firehose are a cluttered, un-curated mess which are crying out to be analyzed with things like R[1], if you are so inclined, or finding other ways to do signal analysis on other social networks like Facebook.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)

This article assumes we are at the whim of social when infact many people have tamed social and, for lack of better phrasing, made social their bitch.

Read The Distraction Addiction: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16131064-the-distraction...

> When will AI systems become more intelligent than people?

Human intelligence is a sort of 'field awareness' as described by Alan Watts. Think more waveforms than digital bits. I think strong AI will happen when the intelligence is given enough free will. We might one day have to throw out the rulebook regarding AI harming us.

I think we lack a real metaphysics yet for what Strong AI is allowed to do. Aleister Crowley's[1] 'do what thou wilt' is the only well thought out metaphysics for free will we have now, and something we could teach the machines.

Putting them in sandboxes is a nonsense as it has been demonstrated even in modern computing that breaking out of sandboxes can be done. Even the most hardened air gapped VMs can be bridged to the public Internet, more often than not, by accident.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley#Beliefs_and_t...

Classic case of Career FOMO https://rachsmith.com/2016/career-fomo

This is why more programmers need to code defensively:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_programming

Also worth mentioning is input/data validation[1] which is currently an even bigger problem than the 2038 problem, as badly constrained input is rampant and operating in the world right now causing a lot of problems

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_validation

Github isn't just for code. It took me a while to get around that fact, and I genuinely thought I would be banned for uploading a bunch of meme GIFs to it, but they're still there.

This is why I quite admire initiatives like Hypothesis[1] where we can annotate the web by overlaying an abstraction on top of it which can give a page more depth and context.

Similar projects like the Genius web annotator[2] tries to achieve the same.

It doesn't mean the commenters (or annotators) will be any less mean, but it certainly is preferable to a Disqus widget dangling on the end of a page, or the default Wordpress commenting engine which allows seemingly anyone to comment regardless of whether they signed up or not.

[1]: http://hypothes.is/

[2]: https://genius.com/web-annotator

> Dr. Srikumar created a life changing business school course so powerful that it has its own alumni association. He is the author of Happiness at Work and has helped thousands of executives find greater fulfillment in both life and work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGBoXTaitr0

Worth watching because his words of advice did help me when trying to grow my own business. I didn't reach my numbers, but having a goal gave me a sense of direction, and there was a sense of movement. I think we're only at a loss in business when everything falls still. I'm no expert, but I don't sense that Twitter is falling still just yet, and there's still movement.

As you said: "Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter". I can't imagine the web without Twitter and it still feels like some sort of plumbing, or public utility at this stage. Twitter is there like water (hopefully). You turn on the tap, and it's there like water.

Honorable mention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization

> I submitted an update which was rejected by Apple because I used Google Sign-In

Friendly reminder you are at the whim of Apple Store admins who like to play the role of gatekeeper. I got tired of developing apps for them only to have them rejected for pithy reasons. I stress the word 'for', because it really felt like I was trying to please the Apple Store, and not my users.

There is an old proverb my grandmother used to say: "My house is my castle, my cheap cotton silken, my wooden chair, made of gold". My take from that saying was that our current economics is all gold-backed economics, and that we express the value of something only in terms of how much we value gold. The moment you unlearn that gold is valuable, or has some innate intrinsic value is the moment you can replace gold with your own version of value. That is to say, the currency you use is the language you are speaking in your society. If nobody speaks your language, the task is on you to disseminate your language and propagate it, and this can be tough. This is where the 'hard work' ethic does apply. It's easy to talk gold; not so easy to convince us of silver being more valuable.

Some might argue that gold merely enables us to create these abstract forms of currencies, or in some cases, economies, in the first place, but actually they could form in pirate utopias that have little or no scaffolding at all, or exist cybernetically, for example, like Bitcoin or Ethereum. A bit of a chicken and egg situation, of course, where gold bootstraps /enables the other alternatives. But frankly I think we are left with no other choice. We either innovate our way out of gold backed economics (using gold) or we don't prosper and thrive.

If you accidentally delete the Google 2FA app, or your phone is stolen / lost, you have to regenerate all the tokens, which can be quite a pain. This happened to me once, and I was lucky I had several 'recovery codes' which I then used to reset the tokens. Personally I would stay clear from a Google-issued 2FA app as they have more reason to track you and the services you use.

Go for something like FreeOTP: https://freeotp.github.io/

Also 2FA can sometimes be overkill, especially if you're constantly logging into accounts which you know will get old and dusty over time (think Yahoo Mail for example)