A 2FA app that tells you when you get `314159` (2024)

That this-can't-be-correct reaction can be useful in emergencies, if it gets your attention, and activates a mode in which you can focus and act decisively in an instant.

I once was applying a spray-can anti-slip treatment to a bathroom floor, when I might've heard a whoosh, looked up, and had a thought (that I remembered afterwards as) "fire shouldn't be coming from that direction".

From the adjacent room, there was this flash fire shooting across the floor at me.

That got my attention, and activated an emergency mode, parts of which I had no recollection. I somehow leapt backwards up onto the tub edge in an instant. Then the floor was on fire and lapping at the walls of the small bathroom I was in. The next thing I knew, I'd leapt over the flame, into the next room, somehow gotten the fire extinguisher from inside a cabinet, and was putting out the fire. Which worked nicely.

Then, I guess, as that mode was winding down, without really thinking about it, I put the exhausted fire extinguished back in its spot in the cabinet. As I went to call the fire department to check out that there were no lingering problems.

(Turned out that the floor treatment application also emitted a highly flammable gas, which rolled across the floor, into the next room, until it hit the pilot light in an old nat-gas oven.)

Now, if we had an adrenaline reaction every time we saw unlikely numbers, that would be a problem. But, however the cognitive scientists deconstruct it, I'm fond of having what I'll call a good emergency mode feature.

Based on NOAA weather data, a rough estimate for the probability of experiencing exactly 55°F at any given time in temperate U.S. cities is around 2-5% on average

It's not?

There's a (1**6-1)/1**6 chance of not getting it on any given try, so there's a ~1/10**4 chance of getting it within 100 tries. So quite unlikely, but of course possible and bound to happen among millions of users.

I got 100 actuations has 1 chance in 10,000, which is unlikely, but not maybe not as unlikely as it seemed at first glance.

    1   actuation  has 1   chance  in 1e6
    1e2 actuations has 1e2 chances in 1e6
    1e2 actuations has 1   chance  in 1e4

This doesn’t mean every app has to be fun. If I want to have fun, I’ll go play with something specifically built for fun. If I’m balls deep in an incident and suddenly my MDM security policy login TTL expires and I have to reauthenticate, the last thing I want to see is yet another interstitial with some cutesy BS to nuke my working memory.

I feel like sometimes I’m the only person in the world not shipping ultraniche paywall aso slop

I very much meant it as a nitpick. This is a single comment labeled as a tangent, how is it "drama"? Chill.

Confidently wrong while being a dick to the person who was right. Classic HN.

I'm literally French. I'm sorry you don't know the passé simple.

https://la-conjugaison.nouvelobs.com/du/verbe/violer.php

You know the meme. /b/ was never good.

As the other poster pointed out, /b/ was never good;).

But:

>A 2010 edgelord may say "pool's closed" while a 2025 edgelord may say "it was a Roman salute", but the spirit behind is probably the same.

I think I disagree. I don't think "pool's closed" was ever boosted into the mainstream, nor was it legitimized across truly fascist or racist communities; it was an internet meme for internet people. "It was a roman salute" is a phrase of normies that likely have limited experience with computers and online communities; without getting into the politics, a certain class of people actually believe "it was a roman salute". "pool's closed" meant nothing outside of specific communities.

All of this 100%. And on a more personal level, while I had a grand old time as a 3edgy5me t(w)eenage boy on the early, "free" internet, that time has left me with numerous mental scars I carry with me every day.

- Thanks to shock sites, for showing me things a 13 year old kid really should not be seeing, and I wish I meant something as banal as pornography. I'm still occasionally haunted by images I've seen to such a degree where I have to take short breaks at work to compose myself.

- Thanks to political discussion boards, which turned important, real life issues and global problems that have genuine life or death stakes for people who weren't me into an alternative to sports that also let me pretend I was in any way intellectually superior to my peers for simply being willing and able to regurgitate conservative political propaganda that I barely comprehended.

- Thanks to the entire thing, for helping me nurture a shut-in mentality, that other people were too much work to be worth it, that my peers were dumb and not worth my time, that they wouldn't understand me at all and so involving myself in school was completely pointless, ensuring I would have no social life or skills whatsoever when I graduated high school and later college. Instead you gave me an entire other world of similarly uninformed, loud assholes to live in that would completely dissolve by the year 2009, leaving me 20 years old with no idea who the fuck I was, or what I believed in, ripe for recruitment into reactionary politics that would make me an insufferable douchebag for the next 10 years or so until I managed to pull my head out of my ass.

“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.“ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082)

Having been an early user of 4chan back in late 2003, from what I saw, the tone shift of nazi stuff just being edgy belligerence for the shock value to people saying “no really, this is my serious political ideology” really got traction somewhere around 2012-2014. Prior to that, there was still pushback. Much like how the idea of having a “waifu” was originally a derisive joke, but somehow turned into actual practice.

This coincided with a few things, massive increase in internet use, raids having increased 4chans notoriety, but most importantly it was the timeframe when Russia prepared for and invaded invaded crimea, which included ramping up “active measures” to shift conversation with troll farms/propaganda. 4chan (and later, 8chan, which had a huge population of boomers buying into “qanon” nonsense) became an ideal host to try to amplify disruptive propaganda.

I didn’t quite notice what was going on, since by that time I was mostly only on select boards like /tg/ or alt chans like operatorchan, but the Russian influence became obvious in the lead up to the 2016 election.

And it wasn’t just nazi stuff, it was all sorts of bullshit like Marxism, esoteric magic and conspiracy shit that was being thrown around to see what stuck. And they were active across every social media site. Though as bad as 4chan was, I’d argue russian presence on Facebook and twitter was especially harmful and far reaching. They didn’t even need to be subtle or target groups: https://qz.com/1284222/russian-facebook-ads-were-barely-targ...

Well said, and I think it extends to many communities which are founded on negativity of some sort: eventually people move on, except for those so-filled with negativity, it is all they have.

There was even an old 4chan joke for this:

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." -Rene Descartes

Dubz get!!!

Particularly ironic since it mentions nazis...

The echo chamber on Instagram is deep. Even when there are a ton of comments, they’re sorted beginning with the most “relevant” (i.e. worldview affirming). So if you’re viewing a controversial video, you’ll see comments echoing your own beliefs, and others will see the opposite. You’ll both move onto the next video thinking “wow, everyone agrees with me!”

I deleted instagram last year and haven’t reinstalled it. Those reels are so addicting. I’m glad I never installed TikTok because I imagine it’s just as bad. I still suffer from YouTube Shorts but at least the mobile web UI is janky enough to eventually push me out of its trance.

TOTP seeds are only useful if you have the account they are associated with. How would the 2fa app by some random guy discern the identity associated with the seed?

What if one bad actor does it not initially do that, but only after the app has enough users, with a random upgrade? Not that _you_ would do that, of course. But it makes sense that people are wary about where they trust their TOTPs.

Some time ago people were locked out of their TOTPs because some guy bought their app from its creator and turned it into ransomware having them pay to not lose their codes.

The obvious solution here is to discover an important natural or mathematical constant that happens to match your birthday in its first six digits.