With such a low baseline, there is an optimistic perspective that LLMs could improve the situation. LLMs can produce excellent code when prompted or reviewed well. Unlike human employees, the model does not worry about getting a 'partially meets expectations' rating or avoid the drudgery of cleaning up other people's code.

The reason this is often done instead of a special dividend is that dividends create an immediate taxable event for all investors, which is considered less flexible than the capital gains tax associated with a stock buyback.

Besides the tax treatment difference, it's mostly a signalling/communication choice: share buybacks increase EPS which is a nice story, whereas dividends signal reliable profits.

When app developers have the ability to bypass the walled garden, they have many incentives to do so ranging from financial to wishing to circumvent scrutiny. This will include an increasing amount of popular and useful apps, decreasing the options available to those who want to stay in the walled garden. For less technical users they will blindly follow instructions to leave the walled garden.

You are removing the choice of users who want a walled garden by supporting legislation forcing these ecosystems open.

That is because although chess appears to be a game of perfect information, it is impossible to calculate anything but a small fraction of possible future game states in a limited time. So skilled chess players must make educated guesses as to which lines are worth calculating, whether their opponent has already studied the current line, and what moves to play to get them out of their memorization.

This is effectively a game of limited information where solid Bayesian reasoning wins, just like poker.

If every part of the US became equally expensive and convenient for work, VHCOL areas like the Bay Area would still be immediately oversubscribed for reasons unrelated to work.

The Bay Area has arguably the best climate (cool Mediterranean) of any major city, unique proximity to a diverse set of outdoor recreation (Big Sur, Napa, Yosemite, Tahoe just to name a few), and all the desirable amenities of a major metro area.

That’s not to say you can’t have a perfectly happy life in other areas if you have different preferences, but the cost of living is ultimately a market, driven by the aggregate preferences of all people.

Okay, I grant that you've reasonably mitigated the lockout risk. But I don't want to do any of this, and is it really reasonable to expect the everyday person to understand or implement all this? What happens in practice is that many users will not realize anything is wrong until they get locked out with no recourse.

This makes it hard for me to recommend Bitwarden to my friends who use typical insecure practices like password reuse or post-it notes.

On the reddit post announcing this, Bitwarden added a response saying they will provide an opt-out option. It's unclear if this opt-out is temporary or not. It would be a huge step back for their product if 2FA becomes mandatory.