The light source tech was pivotal, but the supply chain mastery of 100,000 parts and patience to invest "200 billion dollars" in development over decades is deserves massive respect for the Europeans, no? This effort did not start in 2013.

This does not work if your communication enpoint is the same as your encryption endpoint.

Or you don't control your key material.

Or your tech supply chain.

Or leave your device unattended.

Or aren't susceptible to the same "five dollar wrench" attacks used by certain in-person Bitcoin wallet thievestgat are also available to state actors.

I could go on...

You may never be able to completely protect yourself, but you can make an attack much more costly. For example, I use Heads with a hardware key to defend myself from an Evil Maid.

You raise a good point.

Skimming the original article, I didn't really understand why the author didn't discuss "WITH" CTEs (for SQL newbies, common table expressions, see https://modern-sql.com/feature/with ) as alternative composition mechanisms.

Or even SQL views. But your ergonomics comment makes sense to me.

The hidden problem many password managers gloss over is how unbelievably insecure the Windows copy-n-paste is in Windows for decades.

IIRC (corrections welcome) Windows's window manager broadcasts the contents of the "copy" operation to any application that requests to receive the ? WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE event... so any windows malware or even legit application with legal fineprint basically gets a plaintext message with the contents even before the "paste" occurs. All running apps are trusted.

Here's an example blog entry from "grumpy-sec"(?) laying this out (2018): https://share.google/0til1YzbF4xFRY7ls

Not to mention newer Microsoft conveniences like logging your clipboard history to your disk so it doesn't go away when your computer reboots, and/or syncing it to the cloud.

I have a related question, is anyone developing standards on how agents can proxy the requestor identity to backend database or application layers? (short lived oauth tokens perhaps, not long lived credentials like the ShowHN seems to focus on?)

Well, there's the token exchange RFC, which defines on-behalf-of/delegation and impersonation semantics.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8693 has all the details, but here's an example:

   {
      "aud":"https://consumer.example.com",
      "iss":"https://issuer.example.com",
      "exp":1443904177,
      "nbf":1443904077,
      "sub":"user@example.com",
      "act":
      {
        "sub":"admin@example.com"
      }
   }

In this case, the user is user@example.com, but the actor is admin@example.com. (In the agentic case, the actor would be the AI agent.)

Is this kinda what you are looking for?

I heard about this feature first from Snowflake but there are similar options around in other ecosystems which may be of interest to someone here and one thing to keep in mind with even Snowflake's implementation...

Snowflake's implementation only works within a single Snowflake account, not cross-account, which implies if you want to clone across dev/qa/prod you must manage those environments within a single Snowflake account.

BigQuery has a very similar "table clone" feature. It works across GCP projects (accounts) but not across organizations.

Redshift and Azure Synapse do not really have this feature at all.

Databricks, Microsoft Fabric and the Iceberg Nessie-only catalog do support something similar, often called shallow cloning.

(Nobody really supports cross-region cloning... which makes sense if you think about it.)

Who says it started in 2011? I find that hard to believe.

Gates was having interviews with John Brockman's edge.org in 1996: https://www.edge.org/conversation/bill_gates-digerati-chapte...

Gates was at The Edge dinners in 2010: https://michaelshermer.com/articles/my-dinner-with-bill-gate...

Jeffrey Epstein funded The Edge in the late 90s early 2000s, then not around 2008/9 during his first trial and prison, then again after he got out:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep...

https://epsteinweb.org/john-brockman/

I throw out this observation more to be provactive than persuasive, but I haven't seen it elsewhere..

People before me have observed how Trump's moves all are ego driven, or self serving or serve Putin or Israel or gas companies, and I'm here to add to the mix a different conjecture.

Trump's moves all tend to increase inflation in a plausibly deniable way. Tarrifs, fed-fighting, wars, etc.

And that is a deeply unpopular but elite-viewed necessity for handling America's national debt.

Inflation allows the wealthy class to get away with extending government spending without admitting/pursuing austerity which was political suicide under Carter.

The wealthy shelter in their land and stock portfolios which keep growing unlike cash and also benefit from said spending, while ordinary people pay the extra regressive tax that is inflation. The elite can then turn around and blame the little guy for supporting Trump and their hands are clean.

Easier to repay loans. Who has lots of that to repay ?

You articulate your case well, thank you!

I always warn people (particularly junior people) though that blindly dropping duplicates is a dangerous habit because it helps you and others in your organization ignore the causes of bad data quickly without getting them fixed at the source. Over time, that breeds a lot of complexity and inefficiency. And it can easily mask flaws in one's own logic or understanding of the data and its properties.

When I'm in pandas (or was, I don't use it anymore) I'm always downstream of some weird data process that ultimately exported to a CSV from a team that I know has very lax standards for data wrangling, or it is just not their core competency. I agree that duplicates are a smell but they happen often in the use-cases that I'm specifically reaching to pandas for.

Exactly. It’s not that getting rid of duplicates is bad, is that they may be a symptom of something worse. E.g. incorrect aggregation logic

MS SQL Server was a cheaper, friendlier plugin replacement for Sybase in the early 2000s.

I built apps in an active-active bidirectional replication telecom Sybase environment and was deeply involved in migrating it to MS SQL server in the early 2000s. I remember a fair amount of paranoia and effort around the transition as our entire business and customers' phone calls depended on it (for "reasons") but in hindsight it went quite smoothly and there were no regrets afterwards.

The Microsoft went and added a nice BI stack to the whole thing which added a new dimension of value creation at a new low price point.