Thankfully, he was mostly wrong...

Um, when was the last time you stayed at a hotel?

There's a microprocessor in every doorknob.

I'm self-hosting Vaultwarden on my LAN, a Bitwarden-compatible backend written in Rust. I have it running inside a jail on TrueNAS Core (which, alas, is now end-of-life). It hosts its own Web interface, but also is compatible with Bitwarden's Android app and browser plugins.

So far, it's worked out pretty well for me.

I'm OK with the new path, as long as the FinTech companies are allowed the forward the data charges back to the consumer. It'd make a nice page on their website:
Access Charges by Bank
Bank of Assholes: 6.9%
Podunk FCU: 0.5%

There's nothing better than sunshine for reducing stink. I'd really love to see the same thing for Merchant fees for credit cards:
Credit Card Surcharge:
Visa: 4.3%
Mastercard: 4.1%
Discover: 6%
Amex: 10%
(Note that I've got no idea what the real percentages are)

...Because no one uses Edge.

Clearly you have never worked in a large corporate environment that has shackled itself to the entire Micros~1 ecosystem -- Office, Outlook, Exchange, OneDrive, Teams, Engage, SharePoint... The whole ball of earwax.

>>> What do you mean by "investors"? VCs are the investors, or represent a private pool of investors.

By investors, I meant the "private pool of investors". Andreesen Horowitz claims $42 billion of "assets under management". How much of that is AH assets, and how much is "private pool of investors" assets?

>>> No. They are the investor buying shovels and pans up front for the miners for a percentage. They are not manufacturing shovels and pans, nor or they the merchant's selling shovels and pans.

For most VC firms, my belief is that they're selling shovels and pans TO THE INVESTORS, who are trying to get in on the gold rush. The startup companies are almost immaterial, other than they can be sold as a shovel or a pan. Most VC firms aren't paying their CEO from investment returns; they're paying their CEO (and the researchers, salesmen, and janitors) from Investor's money. Perhaps the economics changes after the VC firm has been around for 10 years and has successes under it's belt, but until then they're a middleman vulture, scraping money off the investor side and the investment side without necessarily having any of their own money invested.

Exactly.

You're absolutely right that an individual Venture Capitalist makes or loses money off their portfolio. Long term, their financial success is based on both luck and how well they can judge future success of a venture.

You're absolutely wrong in that generally a Venture Capital Firm, especially one staffed with non-successful professionals, is NOT focused on making money off their portfolio. They exist to take capital from investors and distribute it to new ventures. And, of course, they need a percentage of that incoming capital to pay for rent and salaries and bonuses because return from the ventures is years out, and eventually they skim a bit off the top of any ventures that actually make money (even though the firm itself may not have any money invested in the venture). They are the company selling shovels and pans to gold miners, not the gold miners themselves.

I've always told people in relation to "investment advisors" that if the advisors were any good, they wouldn't have a day job. I would take investment advice from Warren Buffett, not so much from the drone trying to reach me from Fidelity Investment Services.

Sounds like Venture Capital has the same problem - most of them make their money off of you, not off of their massive portfolio of successful venture investments. Kinda like There are venture capital firms that have shown good success over the long haul, but that ain't most of them. I'd invest with Andreesen Horowitz long before I'd invest with Affinity Partners.

I thought that's what the front page was. It keeps wasting space with things I'm not interested in, or actively dislike.

New Video from The Primagen!
<block channel>

NotAIHonestly Gets Rare Interview with The Primagen!
<block channel>

FrierenFan04 Reacts to !AIH's Interview with Primagen!
<smashes keyboard>

is exactly the reason that I have all alerts silenced on my phone. I support the concept of Amber alerts, but when there are 20 different colored alerts all operating under the same umbrella, and when non-custodial parent issues get lumped under the same umbrella as "child snatched from the playground", I just don't want to hear about it anymore.

But it points out an issue that should be addressed. If I lived in an area with tornados or flash floods, I want a warning - but I don't want a warning aimed at people 10 miles away. We need to move away from the broadcast radio mindset, and into a "We know where you are, we know where and what the hazard is, we're going to inform the people who need to know about this".

I live in Phoenix, which has some summer thunderstorms, some quite spectacular. It's not uncommon for the NWS to issue a "flash flood advisory" covering 100 square miles. Frankly, I live on a rise 100' above the lowlands; if I have to worry about a flash flood, then I'm terribly late in building an ark. The County has weather stations in an array all over the city; the County has topographic maps and historical data about where water likes to go in heavy rains. Marrying those two to decide which ravines are going to (or are getting) filled should be easily do-able, as is notifying people in danger from those specific ravines. I want that alert, not the "sometime today it's possible that a thunderstorm will fill a ravine somewhere in the county" alert.

This is how I've come to understand it. I welcome any and all corrections.

Passkeys are a cryptographic key stored in a Secure Element. This is usually a private key inside a small cryptographic engine. You feed it some plaintext along with the key ID, and it encrypts it using that key. The outer software then decrypts the ciphertext using the public key. If the decrypted text matches the original plaintext, then that proves you're holding a valid private key, and authentication proceeds.

The private key can be written to and erased from the Secure Element, but never read back out. All it can do is perform operations using the secret key to prove that it is indeed holding the correct secret key.

On phones, the Secure Element is in the hardware of your handset. On PCs, this is most often the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip. In both cases, the platform will ask for your PC's/phone's password/fingerprint/whatever before forwarding the request to the Secure Element.

Yubikeys can also serve as a Secure Element for Passkeys; the private key is stored in the Yubikey itself. Further, the Yubikey's stored credentials may be further protected with a PIN, so even if someone steals your Yubikey, they'll still need to know the PIN before it will accept and perform authentication checks. You get eight tries with the PIN; after that, it bricks itself.

The latest series 5 Yubikeys can store up to 100 Passkeys, and Passkeys may be individually deleted when no longer needed. Older series 5 Yubikeys can store only 25 Passkeys, and can only be deleted by erasing all of them.

Theoretically, you can have multiple Passkeys for a given account (one for everyday access; others as emergency backups). Not all sites support creating these, however.

In the modern world, Right to Repair doesn't mean a whole lot without access to the parts necessary to do so.
Access to the parts doesn't mean a whole lot without access to the diagnostic, calibration, and other hardware/software tools necessary to make the unit work after installing the parts.

There is no way in hell that the US Government, and especially the DOD, should be buying any bespoke equipment WITHOUT getting a full delivery of the software and hardware necessary to repair the equipment. That doesn't mean that there can't be a service contract if the DOD believes that having a civilian contractor come aboard and repair an item is more effective than doing it themselves; but a CVN or an F-35 or an SSBN is going to find itself in places at times where doing it themselves is more effective, and they should be perfectly capable of doing so.

What do YOU think would happen if Ukraine simply capitulated three years ago when the Russians rolled in? How many more countries would be subjugated, men killed, women and children raped, in the name of Greater Glory to Mother Russia? Or do you believe that appeasing Russia would stop them.

Consider reviewing the Budapest Memorandum, Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, Ukraine in 2022.