Before Google maps, map services used to be super expensive. You can't compete with free beer. You would need to disrupt Googles main business first in order to even out the playing field.
When I was a child I trained Athletics. In a training session the older kids pranked us or whatever, they measured our long jump and everyone jumped crazy lenghts. We could not believe it! I jumped one meter over my personal best. But they assured us, it was correct. As a naive and autistic kid I didn't question it, it's now as an adult I think back and analyze (i have good memory) it must have been the case... Anyway two days later there was a meet and I first jumped my ordinary length, but I now believed I could jump longer, I just needed to use more force, so I did, a bit longer, added even more force and speed, until I got the same result as the training session two days prior.
In micro economics theory they call this price elasticity where you try lowering the price to see how much more customers buy and you plot that to a graph calculator to get a curve and the bend on the curve is the price elasticity. Then you can calculate the optimal price to maximize sales.
In Sweden where I live you need to use the digital national ID whenever you make a credit card transaction via some app, for example when buying a bus ticket, so you need to have it with you at all times. But with the ID you can also take a quick loan and transfer all the money to a foreign bank basically ruining your life as the bank take no responsibility if the ID is used during the transaction.
The issue is that someone can look over your shoulder and memorize your code, if you use a pin in public.
Some people will use the same pin for screen lock and BankID, and if someone gets their code and their phone they can cause a huge amount of trouble in a very short time.
Technically yes, but it seems like people's intuition for safe behaviour is worse across the board with modern technology, than it is with old technology.
Maybe it will improve by itself over time, but maybe not? There are a lot of things that humans generally suck at, and successful, human-friendly design must take that into account and work around it systematically.
Maybe phones/it/banking/payments/identity/authorization needs to be radically changed, in order to serve society well.
Passwords are "protected content" that may be hidden in a web form, but usernames are not. Your username won't be routinely hidden by any ordinary password manager.
You may have difficulty when the need arises to share a long string of random digits with another human, or in writing. This may not ordinarily be a thing if more LLMs and chatbots are doing customer service, but if it's a government service, one day we find ourselves at a field office speaking with a civil servant at a window that is armored with Plexiglas, and nobody has a pen to write with, or scratch paper.
One of my colleagues said he was so clever that all his "security question" answers were random hex strings. So I imitated him, and it was very easy with the KeePassXC password generator parameters to generate a hex string of 32 characters, and so "my first grade teacher" was 0xf7a83392b12b1029ac3be7e029acbe7e; my "favorite color" was 0xa83392ac3be7e029acbe7f7a83392b17, etc.
This turned comical because security questions are particularly designed to be asked and answered in human conversations. Over the phone, the pharmacy CSR was not amused, and I lost a few accounts thanks to this ultra-paranoiac attitude and activity.
My username doesn't fit in the web form. Instead of seeing "Symbiote" (which can be read and remembered immediately) someone sees "Sym-065c7d6c-e0b3-4d——" with half of the random characters not visible.
People in Denmark are expected to use this system to authenticate money transfers and to digitally sign documents (e.g. buy a house!).
My investment account allows up to 5,000,000DKK (€670,000) to be transferred with this digital signature.
Interesting. I've actually never enabled biometrics on it just as a precaution, and it's a different passcode than the phone, plus I use a random set of chars as the username like many others do.
The app is owned by a consortium of Swedish banks, so you are using a bank app to approve the credit card / bank transaction.
At least in my experience, I only needed to authenticate with the app the first time I bought a train ticket, but I don't buy bus/train tickets in Sweden very often.
(But this authentication is annoying for trivial online purchases like this, so given the choice I prefer to use a physical card.)
BankID (which is the one I assume he's talking about, and not Freja eID) is owned by several banks, but you aren't forced to use it. You can use a "bankdosa" (a separate physical device for auth)
The thing with programming a computer is that the computer does exactly what you tell it to, so in order to implement something well you need to have a very deep understanding of the problem. And it's that understanding that is valuable.
You should use a user directory (AD) and then use single sign on (SSO) or or the like. It feels kinda stupid at first, but when you have many users and many apps the AD will make life easier and with SSO users can sign in with one click of a button.
Using Claude Code is like asking questions in online forums, if anyone remember that, we still have sites like Stack overflow. The difference now is that those asking the questions are actually paying for the answers.
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