I suspect a hidden "benefit" to the companies implementing this is that it makes it much harder to share your account. You are probably happy to share your Netflix password with your mom, but not your email password.
They can present it as a "more secure" login method, obscuring the reason they actually like it.
I'm pretty sure Medium (who was the first implementation of this that I know of) uses it as a way of blocking pay wall bypassers (which on Medium I think manipulated/deleted cookies to get around the 3 article limit).
Yeah that would not surprise me, in general. I don't think that would be 404's goal, since they provide full-text RSS feeds I could share with a friend easily, but I could see that happening with other services.
Still sad that the one ruby conference I spoke at — Steel City Ruby way back in 2014 — left behind no video recordings due to a mixup between the conference organizers and the venue staff.
If you combine Katherine, Catherine, Kat, Kate, Caty, Katy, Katie, and Katheryn (there are SO MANY variants, but most of them have never been popular), peak popularity for girls in the U.S. in the last century is in 1986 at only 1.8% of baby girls.
That's less popular than the single name Matthew for boys, or any one of Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, or Jennifer, in that same year. I expected it would be higher: my own sister is one of these, and I had a friend circle in my 20s that included a Katie, a Katherine (who went by Kat), a Caitlin, and a Kathryn.
Stressing the "always" makes the argument valid only because it's a wordier version of "ideas can always be made more precise and complete, therefore no idea is perfectly precise and complete," which has nothing to do with writing. If we try to salvage the argument by making the assumption that the author obviously meant some ideas are perfect, but only written ideas, this becomes "unwrittendown ideas can always be made more precise and complete, therefore no unwrittendown idea is perfect". Which is vacuously valid in that the antecedent and consequent are identical.
The argument is either merely asserting the conclusion or invalid. I guess it's a matter of judgment which one is the charitable interpretation of the author's meaning.
Perhaps the most charitable interpretation is that the quoted bit isn't intended as an argument at all, just a restatement to cast an already-established conclusion in a different light. It's presented as a "shocking" additional implication, but perhaps it's the shock that's supposed to be novel, not the implication.
Britain is not just an empire, it's one of the paradigmatic empires — an example you'd point to when trying to explain what an empire is. Or do you just mean that it's maybe not much of an empire any more, since, as wikipedia notes, "the handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 symbolised for many the end of the British Empire"?
Yeah, that's where I'd put the symbolic end date. Another candidate would be the US successfully preventing the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956.
My first passport (1970s, before that I traveled on my mum’s passport) was stamped “BRITISH SUBJECT”, though Australia was a supposedly sovereign nation. At least the UK had stopped nuking Australia by then.
'56 is too early, given how much of east Africa was under British colonial control into the 60s, and how much of S/E Asia was still looking for independence. It's likely the population of the empire was still above 100mn at the time. I'd say '56 is more like the start of the very rapid decline of the empire.
It highlighted both to the colonised and the colonisers that the empire was way over-extended.
Another "beginning of the end" moment might be the Ugandan Asians incident of 1972: the Empire had "free movement" of subjects, but only so long as very few of them used it to come to Britain.
Those who had (the right to) British passports were allowed in, right? So similar to the recent situation with regard to BN(O) people in HK.
There was a lot of free movement within the empire other than to the UK too. Many people left India, in particular, for west Africa, SE Asia. Some of my ancestors moved to Sri Lanka.
My grandfather was a "home child", basically a war orphan indentured, his contract sold to a farmer in Canada, while his brother went to Australia, never to be seen again.
But at the time, even for normal moves to Canada or other places, people were worried that their children would not be Subjects of The Empire.
So promises were made, that if subjects moved to a colony, their Grandchildren would be British". This was still a pledge in the 20s when my grandfather arrived in Canada, and thus I am eligible for a UK "Ancestry VISA".
This only works if your grandfather was born in the UK, amd went to a colony, and my point?
Well, eventually the last person capable of exercising this right will be gone. Maybe 30 years?
We've never been able to track him down, or their sister down (she was still at the orphanage, too young to ship off when they were broken up).
My grandfather was lucky in Canada. He worked dawn to dusk, but was fed well, sheltered from the elements, and learned how to manage a farm. He came out of it reasonably well.
People often say there is a history of treating Natives poorly in Canada, colonies. Yet we did it to ourselves, too.
Likewise in Australia, I am eligible for a UK passport since my father was born there, even though he emigrated in 1949 and I wasn't born until 1975.
Was a lot of fun back in the 2000's when England was still part of the Eurozone since the passport allowed me to live/work anywhere in the EU.
> The various ".. of the British Empire" awards are still being issued annually.
Yes, but that is just not changing the names of the awards because people know what they are.
> the King remains "head of state" for Commonwealth nations, including Canada and Australia
He is separately head of state of each of those Commonwealth nations. That shows that those nations are no longer in any sense part of the empire and it places them at the same level as the UK in terms of their relationship to their monarch.
Its a legacy of empire, but not evidence of empire - rather the opposite.
This is just pure speculation, but it kind of looks like the hacker was being ignored by Snowflake, so they somehow got in touch with Hudson Rock and offered them this promotional opportunity (to break the news, more than the throwaway line in the article) with the goal of retaliating against Snowflake for failing to pay the ransom. And Hudson Rock agreed to play along and hype up the story, presenting it as a bigger breach than it really was. One wonders whether Hudson Rock was the first they went to, or just the first to take them up on the offer.
Are you trying to say that the threat actor is just going up to firms they're trying to extort and telling them lies? Criminals just going around lying to people? Don't they know that's against the law?
That's what the article implies, but I think it's overblown. They provide enough information (unfortunately) to identify the employee whose credentials were stolen, and she's a Sales Engineer. The data seems to have come from her own Snowflake account, which was used to build demos for customers or prospective customers. It's quite possible that those customers granted her access to some of their actual data, which was used in those demos, but it's a far cry from unfettered access to the customer's Snowflake database itself. It's also quite possible that the hacker exfiltrated fake-but-realistic data used for demo purposes and doesn't know the difference.
> They provide enough information (unfortunately) to identify the employee whose credentials were stolen, and she's a Sales Engineer.
I'm not previously familiar with Hudson Rock, nor how "standard" disclosures around this work, but identifying the breached employee felt like an extremely shitty move to me. If a single infected laptop of a sales engineer (i.e. not even an admin with extensive access rights) resulted in a breach this large, the root cause problem is not the sales engineer - and I'd note that Hudson Rock says as much in their article.
But don't you see, we fired the problem so no more worries!
Oh, what's that. How did we change our hiring process to avoid hiring a problem again?
Sorry, my phones buzzing and I need to go.
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Although obviously yes the problem isn't with hiring, it's with the system where a what should be fairly untrusted device shouldn't be able to exfiltrate a ton of data without setting a flag off somewhere.
The problem isn't the employee or the hiring process. It's the security infrastructure! One compromised account, supposedly from sales, shouldn't bring down the whole company.
I was just going to post the same thing. The files that they show in the screenshots are things like PROGRESSIVE_BID_CHANGE_202405271129.csv. Looks suspiciously like the Snowflake Sales Engineer's data for their job role closing a deal with Progressive, not Progressive's own data. And there's no reason to think that a SE would have broad access to customer data. There may be some overlap, but I doubt it contains sensitive customer data owned by Progressive.
You’re thinking “bid” is in reference to Snowflake bidding for progressive as a client?
I’d say thats not likely, I work in fintech and the first thing this filename indicates to me is a CSV feed of market data for bid prices (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bid_price)
This is a common type of dataset a firm would dump into a datalake to use as reference data lookups against other more sensitive data (for pricing trades, etc.)
The adult conversation in question being, in a nutshell: "We've decided it's time for you to move on. Would you like the public perception of this event to be that it was a mutual decision, or would you prefer to burn some bridges on your way out?" Sure, in some sense the departing individual chooses to go one way rather than the other.
Or the adult conversation was: you need to pick one thing to focus on, we’d prefer it was YC but obviously we can’t force you to choose YC.
PG’s telling if it, and Occam’s Razer, support that version.
Many people here want to imagine that it was vastly more dramatic than this, or need to reinterpret the word “fired” to support the narrative that Sam is bad. I understand it can be fun to think that way.
For the record I’m no great fan of OpenAI and I think people who are convinced they are about to achieve AGI are, er, mistaken. I mostly just care about correct definitions of words and avoiding sensationalism.
My point is mainly that PG's telling isn't trustworthy, because that's what you agree to say when the person you're "firing" chooses to go quietly. Obviously I have no specific insight into the situation, but given what I have observed about how career changes happen for people who've reached a certain level of power, I have no faith that the people involved have any interest in accurately describing the situation to the public.
All you have to do is look at the fact that PG has been consistently effusive about Sam in his public comments and essays since the mid 00s through till the present day, for it to be clear that Sam wasn’t simply fired.
Of course these situations are always complex behind the scenes, with many factors and considerations at play.
But the no he must really just have been fired against his will claim just doesn’t pass the sniff test to anyone paying attention.
I wonder how much of the impulse to believe (in the face of the evidence) that Altman parted ways with YC/PG on bad terms is really rooted in an impulse to believe that YC/PG couldn't be complicit in enabling the kind of person that it now increasingly appears that Altman is.
If Altman truly is as bad a person as it appears that he might be, that doesn't reflect well on the people who have praised him through the last few decades. If you like those people, then cognitive dissonance forces you to either believe that Altman is being unduly villainized or to believe that the people that you like secretly hate him but just can't say so openly.
Virtually all info that reaches outsiders has a strong PR component, and often is entirely PR. We're left to "read the tea leaves" from our own experience with such statements.
You're not just saying that PG isn't trustworthy. You're making a claim beyond that:
The adult conversation in question being, in a nutshell: "We've decided it's time for you to move on. Would you like the public perception of this event to be that it was a mutual decision, or would you prefer to burn some bridges on your way out?"
I think you're falling into the classic reasoning trap:
1. I have realized someone has an incentive to portray the truth in a specific way.
2. They are portraying it to me in that way.
3. Therefore, they are lying.
But 3 isn't necessarily the case! All you can say is "3. Therefore, I can't tell what the truth is." I think that's what people are reacting to in terms of negativity. You actually don't know that PG is lying. You just know that, if Sam was actually fired, PG would have an incentive to portray it as mutually amicable. You really don't have evidence whether or not it happened.
Except that isn't at all what Paul is claiming here—he says YC offered him the choice between running YC and running OpenAI but not both at once. Altman chose OpenAI. That might have been the obvious choice in the circumstances (it certainly appears so in retrospect), but that doesn't turn the conversation into the kind you're claiming.
History being different than it has been. Like the statements Paul has made to date have been in agreement with the common perception of it being a firing, not very consistent with this newer counter narrative. Obviously just imo and ymmv.
They can present it as a "more secure" login method, obscuring the reason they actually like it.
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