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It's unfortunate, but to come across as genuine now I think you have to actively avoid AI-isms.

In this case it feels AI generated with human polish, or vice versa. A couple tells are "One caveat worth stating up front..." and of course, "...the shape of the language itself...".


> It's unfortunate, but to come across as genuine now I think you have to actively avoid AI-isms.

I actually think this might be a good thing? I'm way more aware of cliches and filler in my writing these days, and it almost always reads better when I just remove them and plainly say the thing.


But it takes so little effort to wade through an LLM readme and cut out or edit it down to something palatable.

Just the bare minimum effort to do that would be nice.


Fanfiction is already an extreme niche.

Fanfiction is such an "extreme niche" that AO3 is #53 globally, FanFiction.net is #572, and Wattpad is #323 by Semrush lmao.

I'm not sure what your argument is. I don't have anything against fanfiction, but a couple of sites with a few million users falls under my definition of niche. "Extreme" might be taking it a bit far, but it's a long distance from mainstream.

If you don't have the authenticator backup codes and you didn't turn on cloud sync in the app, you might be out of luck.

You can get a replacement SIM though and use it with a new phone, so the phone number recovery option should work.


Happened to me, I was able to get SMS and recovery codes, but Google still required additional verification on now lost phone :D. On the end I acutely found the phone and was able to restore access. So what they do after couple of days of failed attempts the require additional verification, lets call it 3 step.

I have passkeys, authenticator etc... and everything except phone number, and now i am unable to login my account in other device.

Google sucks, they are randomly denying access because their dumb model can't figure out not everyone is trying to steal account.


This feels objectively worse than writing down a password somewhere

This. Can't you get your number moved to a new phone? I have never don't anything magic when upgrading my phone other than move contacts.

How would moving your number to a new phone help? We're talking TOTP here, not SMS "auth".

does google not offer a backup via sms? it's a common enough recovery flow elsewhere. (i dont use google stuff, so i am genuinely asking)

Any less secure backup method, means others are less secure.

Google actually puts effort into security for "normal" people who don't want to earn a PhD in cryptography just to have a damn free email account or watch Mr. Beast

That's why they had powerful and effective account takeover protection even 15 years ago. The kind that will prevent the hacker from taking over your account even though they got access to all your factors, because it shouldn't take expertise to know that if you logged in from Oregon twenty minutes ago, you definitely aren't also logging in from Ecuador.

Which of course makes it all the more stupid that your credit card company, all your medical service providers, and Facebook don't meet that absurdly low bar. Facebook will happily hand control to the scammer in Laos who got one of your factors and somehow that gave them access to change your password and recovery email


The best backup method doesn't need any computer knowledge, it's writing down or printing a few passwords and putting that piece of paper in the same box as your taxes or birth certificate.

A required “more secure” method is less secure if it means you can be locked out by not-exactly-uncommon real-life situations.

Denial of service is a security issue.


I’ve repeated it a hundred times security = confidentiality, integrity and availability.

One reason to strongly prefer Apple over Google is that (as I understand it) you can still walk into a store with ID and recover your online identity.


> One reason to strongly prefer Apple over Google is that (as I understand it) you can still walk into a store with ID and recover your online identity.

Is this true? If so, in what countries? (Poland has no Apple stores, for example, for inexplicable reasons Apple has been giving the middle finger to this market)

That would be a huge difference.


I think Google’s own textbook on SRE has an example in its very first chapter where everyone gets locked out of their bus fleet WiFi thanks to their secure system reaching an unforeseen state

yes, i understand. i was asking specifically whether google has sms recovery flow, not how secure sms recovery flow is compared to other options.

You can export from Google Authenticator to another device just fine.

How do you export from a phone you no longer have?

I misread your comment, you're right.

I don't think that's true. Domain experts with the desire to create and experiment aren't going away any time soon.

Sure we are free to tinker, like the guys doing model railways. With about the same impact.

We'll have to check back in 5 or 10 years to see if anything new has been created.

It is getting a lot harder for those people to justify using OpenAI to assist such endeavours. Afterall, OpenAI might just front-run you if they hear a rumor you solved some marquee problem that they can brag about in PR campaigns.

The feedback loop is too long, it's not like a software development harness that can direct the model to write some tests for complex behavior, and iterate until they pass.

There a lots of things that can be subtly wrong, and it gets much worse as your signal frequency increases, or you have to deal with high power/radio/etc. The model (agent) has no way to validate its work.


America is partly guilty, but TikTok censorship is a big part of the younger generation's tendency toward self censorship.

As much as I personally dislike TikTok, I don't think it is fair to it: cultural willingness for more sensor sheep on Internet started years before TikTok's popularity in the west.

It's not the sole cause, but I believe it's the main driver behind a bunch of specific substitutions that are mainstream now or nearly so. For example, dih, ahh, and unalive. They may not have been invented on tiktok, but that's where they incubated.

There's no such censorship on TikTok, it's entirely groupthink based on people saying "when I use that word my video is seen less so therefore it's being censored".

Youtube is a lot more guilty of it though, as well as demonetizing.


How is that not a form of censorship? It is direct suppression of certain forms of speech.

YouTube has its problems but I don't think it's had quite as strong of an effect on language.


It sounds like there is a documented policy or proven that TikTok does it. Just people thinking it does leading them to self-censor. Then people see others doing it and copy it. So, I guess it is censorship but not by TikTok.

well_ackshually, tik tok has a well known, long, and rich history of suppressing certain search keywords.

I randomly had a conversation with a guy at a bar in Taipei who was an administrator during the transition to self rule, and he said basically the same thing.

He said about many of the tribes modernized within a generation or two, and the ones that didn't still dropped the cannibalism stuff in the 50s.


What's your criteria for mundane? Basically every decent sized island in that part of the world is going to have beautiful beaches, coral reefs, mountains, and jungles.

I'm sure that's part of it, but I run it side by side in my review bot, and Astra medium effort consistently catches more issues than Sol 5.6, using fewer tokens.

For coding it's a little harder to tell, but at least the prose feels a little better.


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