codalan
- No tokens to exfiltrate off a computer
- Avoids keylogger style attacks
- More durable than cell phones
That said, for people that have high amounts of money in certain accounts (> 1m), it might also present physical dangers (e.g. kidnapping, home invasion) for thieves attempting to get access to the hardware key.
The great thing about Yubikeys is that I can associate backup keys for accounts (when they are supported), so if I lose one key, I can deactivate the lost key and use a backup key in its place.
With heavily locked-down 2FA apps, I have to hope I can do a full recovery on a new device, or go through the recovery code process, or start all over again w/ new 2FA codes. If I'm lucky, the app allowed me to have it installed onto a backup device.
It's way more complicated that just swapping in a new Yubikey.
Google Authenticator and some other 2FA apps allow the user to export their tokens to other apps so you don't need to redo TOTP on every website.
The most secure method is to only have tokens on the 2FA device and to avoid using TOTP backup/restore altogether (or manually copy the tokens on a secondary 2FA device). It's a tradeoff between security vs. convenience.
They also stopped supporting their desktop app, forcing users back onto a single point of failure: the mobile app.
If Twilio isn't going to support Authy in good faith, they should stop holding their remaining users hostage.
Or apps that you pay for (Spotify Premium, Tidal) that will constantly bombard you with marketing in-app popups at random times. So instead of listening and enjoying my music, I can accidentally click on one of these landmines and get redirected to something I do not want.
I cancelled Spotify because of this. Will also cancel Tidal after my trial because they just copying the same ugly tactics as Spotify.
For a $1200 phone.
Had a bizarrely similar experience with the Pixel Watch.
The screen just failed to respond to touch. Wasted an hour figuring out how to get into fast boot mode. After a factory reset, it started working, but it doesn't get much more than 12-16 hours of battery time before needing a charge.
After losing a lot of money, time, and patience, I'm done with Google anything. Their hardware is garbage and they seem to have failed to address these issues with newer Pixel releases. Not sure what the point is of having 7 years of updates when the phone's hardware will barely last one of those years. And good luck with support.
Switched to a Samsung A54, and although it is slower and laggier in some aspects, the hardware is solid and I've been impressed at how clean OneUI is.
Tip: When your Pixel screen fails to respond to touch, you can at least plug in a USB mouse and recover what you can before tossing it into the dead gadget drawer.
It seems like it might be bad to use a competitor for cloud services, although Kagi is small enough right now to not be on Google's radar...
I also have issues with the sluggish interface. Some of my third-party email apps takes several seconds to just load the list of messages. They take milliseconds to load on a Pixel.
My lock screen can sometimes take a bit more than a second to unlock.
The browser dropdown will occasionally load the wrong page when I touch the URL.
The keyboard is more wrong than right, most of the time. Out of all the bugs and problems that make the iPhone almost unusable, it would be the terrible, auto-incorrect keyboard.
The analogy that comes to mind is when the auto industry consolidated to just three large players. Quality was never great to begin with, but it steeply declined after that. It took foreign companies to add real competition to the market.
Apple has been in decline for years now, especially since their only other competitors are Samsung and Google.
And there's no incentive to stop this. When email inboxes turn into marketing dumpsters, it just drives users to WhatsApp/Discord/FB Messenger/Slack/etc. for communication, which is good for those affiliated companies, but is bad for open platforms.
Maybe their mindset should really be, "Hey, we're annoying 99.95% of our users who did not consent to these emails, and > 50% will be turned off to our product and will associate our brand to that of a needy, attention-grabbing parasite".
If I wanted these emails, I would have opted in.
Instead, not only do they automatically opt you in, but they'll re-opt you in after you've unsubscribed. I've had it happen a year or two later; suddenly, I'm back on their spam list.
It's become so bad now that I can't even let a shopping cart sit anymore without getting a nagmail saying "HEY YOU NEED TO FINISH CHECKING OUT NOW1!!!".
That email is the reminder to empty my cart and never do business with them again.
Seriously, STFU and leave me alone. If your sales and marketing team insist on these tactics, you need to fire them and hire people who get it.
It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window.
It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the window.
It's the way that tabbing between text boxes either doesn't behave the way you'd expect, or doesn't work at all.
It's all the tooltips that interrupt and litter the interface and, at times, block out things that you are looking at. And 95% of the time, the information provided in these tooltips are redundant or useless.
It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people.
Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets.
The biggest sin is that this would be a non-issue if these things were configurable at the windowing system level and could not be overriden by app developers. But the trend has gone in the opposite direction; instead of providing more configurability, Windows and Gnome/GTK are actually taking away options that have existed before.
Had a lot of hope and goodwill lost on this phone. I feel like I paid a premium price (over $1100) only to get shoddy service and a shoddy product that will fail just outside the warranty period. As much as I dislike the iPhone, at least I can walk into an Apple store and get support right away, and not the Google runaround.
I don't really game, but I would like to have a separate eGPU to hook up to my laptop for ML stuff, rather than have a GPU dedicated to a single box.
I'll probably revisit that computer and install Linux Mint with KDE Plasma, and do the same on their W10 machine.
If push comes to shove and they need some Linux incompatible app that I can't get to work with Wine, I'll just buy a used Macbook.
W10 is bad enough and W11 is not a viable option.
VS Code is like milk, but with an unknown expiration date. At some point, it will be spoiled by MSFT injecting their marketing garbage into the experience. This will take priority over improving performance and fixing bugs. And they've already added spyware into the software by default.
I've realized I would have been better off just sticking to Emacs/Vim entirely, where I can rely on my tools for decades to come. They're not constantly changing the UI/UX, because the maintainers of those products are actually doing useful work, rather than busy work.
I get nagged to backup my Android phone. It's a thinly-veiled upsell to their Google Drive product. There is no way to tell it to STOP ASKING ME. I have an alternative backup system that I use. I will never pay for Google Drive.
The same is true for the iPhone. If you forget to turn off the Apple iCloud stuff on your phone, you'll hit the free limit at some point, then get an endless amount of nagging to BUY THE ICLOUD UPGRADE.
How is this not any different than a popup in Windows nagging me to switch to Edge? Or to buy O365?
The worst part is that none of this stuff have a permanent opt-out. Everyone has adopted the dark pattern of only providing Yes or Remind Me Later as options. It's just endless harassment from these large, bloated companies seeking more rent, rather than actually doing any substantial innovation.
Running Mint on an old MSFT Surface Pro 4 has also worked out very well for me. I was pleasantly surprised when the touchscreen just worked after installation.
If I was looking for a new Intel-based laptop today, I would probably be looking at Framework or System 76. That said, I'm hoping to see more high-performance ARM platforms hit the market in the next 2-3 years, so I'm holding off for now.
If I know the orientation of the map, then I can usually figure out what my starting direction is. Otherwise, I stuck with Google Maps fumbling direction until I start moving my vehicle, and by that point, it's already mis-navigated me.
I also hate the way their maps are constantly hiding information, like street names, unless you zoom waaaaaay in.
MapQuest provided so much detail at similar scales vs. Google Maps.
In terms of artifacts for future maintainers? Maybe not as helpful. As previous posters have mentioned, the diagrams go stale very quickly if the engineering department isn't disciplined about keeping documentation up to date. But this is true for any documentation.
Some diagrams (class and activity, in particular) are less valuable as time passes. I can get the idea of the class structure by just looking at the code itself. The class diagram just ends up being a stale representation of the code.
It is unfortunate that UML has developed a reputation as being overly complex. Now I see more ad-hoc diagrams being created, with whatever notation/symbols make sense to author, rather than using a common diagram system that can be read by many.
I view it as more of an addition to Reddit, rather than a replacement.