You'd be surprised. I've worked on a municipal/local-area webapp that launched with auth and a create-account form. Userbase in the low 100ks, a few interactions a year. It was an ordinary create-account form: name, address, email/phone, no payment info or government ID. The only alternative to this service--and I do mean only--was to go into a city office and wait in line/fill out forms. Failure to do either resulted in a fine (I forget how much; in USD it would have been less than $50 I'm pretty sure).

Before we added SSO, huge numbers of users would enter but never complete the signup flow. We assumed they were making the (baffling) choice to take time to go to an office and wait inline over filling out a web form. A year later, we added Google and Facebook login. Failures to finish signup dropped to almost zero (a lot of folks were still bailing out of the manual create-account form without finishing, but they were then falling back to Google/Facebook).

More surprising, that year the net number of signups (across web and brick and mortar) more than tripled.

People weren't choosing in-person over a filling out the create-account form. They were choosing to pay a fine instead of filling out the create-account form.

So ... I don't know about "less valuable than TikTok", but a lot of folks' decisionmaking sure is wild.

This is a wild story! Thanks for sharing.

It's a few things (source: I've worked on some large online B2B systems and seen signup flow funnel data for some even larger B2C systems):

1. Ease/laziness as others have mentioned. Even for a service that answers a real need, many users will bail out of the signup flow and just ... leave that need unsatisfied when they see a web form.

2. Underreported: google/apple sign-in buttons make it feel like you already have an account. The fact that the "grant access" new-signup request is a second screen and that "sign up" and "sign in" (with Google/Apple/Github/Facebook/etc.) are the same buttons to enter the funnel is huge. It's not that users are confused/forgetting whether they already have accounts (though some are); rather, it's psychological momentum created by the ambiguous language.

3. Trust and consistency. Nontechnical users just trust the recognizable brand buttons more. They don't necessarily know why/know how auth works, but they know that a lot of data breaches happen and are scared. The fact that the embed button almost always looks the same/familiar is massive. I suspect that it would also be a conversion killer if the "sign in with apple/google" buttons were styled to look totally different and not contain logos.

4. A lot of semi-technical folks don't like remembering passwords (and password managers--even good device-integrated ones--aren't as reliable at autofilling as a lot of casual users would like). Others know that it's a bad idea to reuse passwords. As a result, people use the button that doesn't require them to pick a password they'd have to remember.

5. Impression of privacy. Some (especially older) nontechnical users have a significant aversion to typing in their personal info (name/address/CC number) into online forms, so they pick the option that doesn't require that.

6. Technical people who prefer SSO because it gives (on the SSO provider side) a list of every integrated account; better permissions control (for services that integrate with e.g. Google for more than just login); a marginal chance of a little less data being stored on a service's servers versus the regular make-an-account option; somewhat fewer opportunities for a service to screw up auth by building it themselves wrong. This demographic is small compared to less technical users.

That's all presented without comment. Some of those points are based on exploitative provider behavior, or user ignorance. I'm just explaining the decisionmaking factors, not defending them.

Add all those up, and you definitely get a conversion killer.

This might seem too suspicious, but that SOUL.md seems … almost as though it was written by a few different people/AIs. There are a few very different tones and styles in there.

Then again, it’s not a large sample and Occam’s Razor is a thing.

> _This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it._

The agent was told to edit it.

In the very first section, "you're", "you're" and "your". The first two used correctly and the third incorrectly.

It was modified by the agent.

I know. I'm surprised that the modifications were each so different in tone. Some seem opinionated, some seem like "typical AI voice", some seem like a teenager typing, some seem like a pushy/angry person.

> Do not enable container scanning, it just increases your bill, nobody ever looks at the scan results.

God I wish that were true. Unfortunately, ECR scanning is often cheaper and easier to start consuming than buying $giant_enterprise_scanner_du_jour, and plenty of people consider free/OSS scanners insufficient.

Stupid self inflicted problems to be sure, but far from “nobody uses ECR scanning”.

I hope this is a troll.

The best, or cheapest, or most-loved, or most extensible software is often written to be as small as is practical in the problem.

Huge codebases are necessarily going to be harder to process by humans (LoC -> hours in the day) and LLMs (LoC -> tokens/context growth) alike.

Or train (and appropriately credential) more teachers and pay them like the critical specialists they are.

If teacher pay made a big difference in outcomes, expensive private schools would have very well paid teachers. But private schools typically have lower teacher pay than public schools.

Teacher pay doesn't have as large an influence on student success as it does on how many people are willing to enter the occupation and stay there. Private school teachers typically deal with far fewer students in the classroom and in much better conditions. They also don't typically have to spend as much of their own money on basic school supplies. Improving conditions at public schools and lowering classroom sizes would help to attract teachers too.

Washington state has the highest public school teacher pay in the country (over 100k/yr). It also has educational outcomes which are middle of the pack. That correlation doesn't hold in many cases. Oh, and the fact that half of the funding for the district goes to administration doesn't help either.

You need to have both. Training/credentialing and pay. Just one is insufficient.

Longer/better educator training both increases skills/outcomes and is a gate for the poorly-suited. Higher pay makes the training seem worthwhile and increases stickiness/tenure.

Say more?

Unreal C++ uses reference counting for anything that gets exposed to the Blueprints development environemnt, Blueprints themselves have automatic resource management and the new addition to the family for Fortnight levels, Verve, also uses automatic memory management.

All of which fall under the point of view of GC implementations as per CS papers and scientific research.

Go well, it could have been a Modula-3/Active Oberon language, instead it became something only a little better than Oberon-07 and Limbo, and even then it still misses features from Limbo, as its plugin package is half backed.

Possible, yes, but certainly not easier—especially not if the test harness doesn’t manage filesystems anywhere else.

And even then, that’s still a behavior mock, of a kind. There are lots of ways in which a dummy ISO mount behaves much unlike filesystems your deployed code might run on. You could address those issues, but doing so is very laborious and starts requiring more and more specialized code. Unless the code under test is part of a database storage engine or something, it’s likely even less worth it.

I thought lots of data indicated that millennials were drinking less than previous generations?

Maybe, but that precedent has been set before for other types of loans, and in a limited way for student loans, and the sky didn’t fall. The upward price pressure on university prices is far more influenced by other factors (which should be fixed!). Loan forgiveness probably is a drop in the bucket, I suspect.

>Maybe, but that precedent has been set before for other types of loans.

what is this referring to?