No archive link, and a paywall.

…oh no!

> The speed can be governed

You sure? Applying brakes to someone rolling downhill can make them fall because their body is still in motion, and now the scooter isn't moving at the same speed, and they were not prepared for it.

Plaids terms are really concerning to me as a user and I’m not willing to give them my bank credentials. My main fear is that they get hacked and my credentials are used to drain my accounts. Plaid waives any liability and my bank doesn’t do much if my credentials are used to do stuff like initiate wire transfers.

Venmo is doing this weird thing where for some transactions they are saying they require plaid to get my bank credentials to log in and “verify.” Of course that breaks my first issue. But it also allows them to suck up and use all of my bank transactions forever.

Seems like a shitty tradeoff just to Venmo money to people.

> Specifically, how would a protocol prevent motivated companies from tracking your personal information?

They could still try! But you'd have options.

Take email, for example. I cannot imagine something like that coming into existence today.

I can use my own client to avoid ads and tracking from my service provider—did I download this message? Sure, the server knows that. How long have I looked at the message? Which message did I look at next? Did I follow any links (yes, someone might track that part, but my email provider's going to have a hard time doing that)? What mouse movements did I make while looking at it? No such luck there, and yes websites and closed-platform services do track that stuff.

I can switch providers. Say my email provider starts injecting trackers into all links. I can just dump their ass if I don't like it. I keep using email, and now they receive zero info about me (I mean, they might get a little if I send emails to their users, but you get my point). If I have my own domain name I don't even need to tell anyone I switched.

I can email someone using a different provider. Yes blocklists or whatever might cause a problem but, fundamentally, this does work.

Protocols force providers to act like a telco, at least, except that the situation's even better for software because the barriers to entry in the market are so low... unless all your competitors are giving away access to their strictly closed ecosystem for free, and not supporting open protocols. Then you're screwed, and that's exactly what's happening now and why the Internet protocols are largely frozen in time.

"Social" should be an Internet protocol. The only reason it's not is that we basically stopped making protocols (well, ones that gain any meaningful traction, anyway—I'm aware there are some lightly-used efforts at social protocols) because all the companies in a position to push them to a meaningful number of users are better served by making interoperability difficult. The "free" services spyvertising economy, where captive non-paying user count & eyeball time is what matters, is why things are this way.

In one way, this is exactly the comment I came here to read. The article made my eyes glaze over it was so press-release-y and so I wanted to know what the actual plain language detail is. You delivered that, thank you.

However, in the specific case of Postmates, have they actually used this feature to screw people over? I get what you are saying in the case of a subscription like Netflix. But with Postmates, the user is making a concrete in-the-moment decision to spend money. This actually feels like a minor convenience in that the customer is hungry and can get the order in without having to fish out their credit card details again.

I couldn’t tell, is __strict__ something they’ve implemented in house, or exists in CPython? I can’t find any references to it outside that article.

One bit of useful background knowledge: The technical demands for high frequency trading can vary wildly depending on both what kind of trading strategies you're using, and what market you're in. This translates into real-time needs that vary considerably, depending on context.

At one firm I used to work at, the spread was several orders of magnitude. On one end, people were counting nanoseconds, and even C++ wasn't fast or predictable enough. At the other extreme, some teams didn't care about anything finer than a millisecond, and a big chunk of the stack was written in managed languages. It all counted as high frequency trading.