I also have a /simplification-check skill I run after pretty much every large change, and that already helps surface the murky areas of the code and sometimes remove complexity before I even start reviewing, thus accelerating the review.
207 karma · joined September 14, 2017
I also have a /simplification-check skill I run after pretty much every large change, and that already helps surface the murky areas of the code and sometimes remove complexity before I even start reviewing, thus accelerating the review.
Offering loss-leading products is a common business strategy and I'm perfectly okay taking advantage of this for hosting needs that fit a vendor's free tier.
Static hosting is very cheap to offer and gathering free tier users will gain developer mind-share, which helps the vendor can sell their truly money-making products. To pick a clear-cut example: AWS Lambda does not collect any additional data on free tier usage compared to paid usage.
> "[They] placed too much weight on the introspections that they generated at that moment in time, and thus lost sight of their more enduring attitudes.” [1]
The quote refers to this study [2] in which subjects had to chose a poster to take home. The group who was instructed to think about their reasons for their initial choice, and had the option to change it, were less satisfied with it three weeks later. As the abstract says:
> When people think about reasons, they appear to focus on attributes of the stimulus that are easy to verbalize and seem like plausible reasons but may not be important causes of their initial evaluations.
This suggests that satisfaction is more correlated with initial gut feeling than reasoning, at least for aesthetic choices, but I think in many other cases as well.
[1] https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00401-2
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616729319301...
Individualkex also has a couple videos on the high level ideas: https://youtu.be/GQXDjzNWuPc?si=zlAN7dO9STGATKad
With your suggested approach, the attacker is free to use the account to impersonate the victim until they get a new SIM card, which could easily take days or weeks.
This seems like a degredation compared to the current abuse potential which is mostly limited to logging you out.
On top of that, if a specific account is targeted at the rate-limit, a flag could be put in place to let support disable the automation for that account.
I agree with you in principle, but I still don’t understand how else to mitigate this: WhatsApp must get a lot of cases of stolen unprotected phones. The victim can ask their operator to lock the SIM card, but their WhatsApp account would still be out in the open.
With the continuous improvements in mobile OS security defaults, I’d expect this scenario to become less and less of a problem, but it must still be accounted for.
The process still goes through support ticketing, so I’d expect a spike to be noticed and stopped.
- The inconvenience to the deactivated account is minor: one SMS verification code and the account is back, queued messages get received, etc.
- Persons who lost their phones probably don't have a good fast way of proving their identity, as their identity is tied to their phone number in WhatsApp's model.
- Needing to quickly lock out spammers, thiefs or hackers is probably far more frequent than abuse of this feature.
- If abuse of this feature becomes a recurring problem, I'd expect WhatsApp to react and adjust the flow to place more burden on its user.
The auto-delete part is slightly more worrying, but if you don't use WhatsApp during 30 days, your account and group membership probably isn't very precious. Backups are automated and separate. You can still easily re-create an account with the same number then.
The story might be "Apps should stop using SMS and phones numbers as the source of identity", and while I generally agree, most comments don't seem to be about this and WhatsApp is maybe _the_ one app whose success was based on this very idea.
However, there are so many parameters affecting this result that I wouldn't dare to make a call on which role is more tiring in general at a regular company.
- I'm less experienced as a manager, I have to continuously learn a lot and grow fast.
- This is in a young start-up context.
- This is with a very broad scope of responsibilities.
- I'm me.
- etc.
YMMV
The largest fatigue factor to me seems the amount of context switch I have to do as a manager.
It's something I didn't realized until I started coding it: every detail that you omit from your chat UX is a tragically noticable pain to the user used to WhatsApp and Slack 100 times a day.
And Alt + F4 is bound to a double tap of the right red thumb key :D
When I bought it, I was just looking for a sleeker and more ergonomic keyboard with a split design, but the ability to easily reconfigure every key on the layout brought a new meaning to the word "ergonomic" for me.
It means that when a particular motion or shortcut that I frequently use is puts too much strain on my hands, I can simply change the layout to make the keys more natural too use. And it's just an overall incredibly well made product.