Eleven quick links for Saturday morning

Passkeys: A Shattered Dream. This matches my experience using passkeys. It was hard enough getting my family to use a a password manager. Harder still to get them to use a different password for every service. Passkeys are so far the worst of all worlds.

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware. Due to the way GitHub comments work, a malicious actor can upload malware and have it appear to come from the owner of the repository, even after the comment has been deleted.

Cultures of Growth - Mary C. Murphy. Mindsets are environmental/cultural as much if not more so than individual. Genius mindset cultures can crush (too soon?) even the strongest growth mindsets. I enjoyed this enough that I’m now reading her book.

Notes on Complexity - Neil Theise. Negative feedback loops are necessary to achieve adaptability in complex systems. Unconstrained positive feedback loops (like those we see in companies going for hyper-growth) lead to collapse.

Gaining depth perception. Someone regained depth perception with the help of prism glasses. Imagine not having depth perception in the first place?!

Navigating the symmetry of trust. Trust-building is intricately linked to risk symmetry: trust flourishes when perceived risks are roughly equal; is difficult to cultivate when risk is highly asymmetric; is hard to maintain when risk symmetry is ambiguous.

Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose. Novel in the sense that it’s been feasible since about 2002 but only recently discovered by researchers.

Hierarchy is Good. Hierarchy is Essential. And Less Isn’t Always Better. I’ve been skeptical of this current trend to “flatten” organisational hierarchies. It has seemed to me more about cost-cutting and command-and-control than effectiveness. Research suggests I’m not wrong.

Seeing like a CEO. CEOs (much like administrative states) often attempt to make everything legible, to them. In doing so, they can overlook important characteristics of complex systems that make their organisation effective, adaptable, and safe.

Transformations That Work. If you’re going to continually disrupt your workforce with change, you’d better be sure it’s worth it.

The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco. Confirming all my biases about Silicon Valley. Srinivasan seems like the latest (and presumably not the last) in a long line of Musks and Andreesens.