The Pareto Front Rabbit Chase

I've noticed a pattern that I'd like to call The Ever-swinging Pendulum's evil cousin:

  • Technology A is on the rise of adoption.
  • Smart asses start criticizing Technology A, pointing out its flaws.
  • To address the flaws of Technology A, some people (which could include the smart asses themselves) proposes Technology B.
  • Technology B is on the rise of adoption.
  • Smart asses (which may or may not be the same group of smart asses) start criticizing Technology B, pointing out its flaws.
  • To address the flaws of Technology B, some people (which could include the smart asses themselves) proposes Technology C.
  • Technology C is on the rise of adoption.
  • But this Technology C is actually quite similar to Technology A in spirit, thus it'll have the same sort of problems Technology A has. For this reason, smart asses start criticizing Technology C, pointing out its flaws.
  • And the cycle continues…

I ruminated on it for a bit and thought of 3 outcomes:

  • Things do get improve on the Pareto front and we do get to have technologies that are not the top judged by any single metric but still better overall. The breakthrough technology would see much more adoption than its peers, but soon the cycle would start again.
  • Some people would regress into "it depends"-ism and make judgements case-by-case, which is an honest, technically correct (sometimes the only kind of correct that's actually available), but very boring & unsatisfying answer.
  • Some other people would start being arbiters of technologies, trying to take advantage of people's paranoia and making them chasing one optimum with this metric after another optimum with that metric.

I started thinking about this because I saw someone online complaining about passkeys. To be fair their point stands and I'm definitely not saying they're the "evil arbiters of technology" here:

  • You can't really copy it onto another key;
  • It does have an upper limit, which could be not enough for certain people;
  • It only works on machine that can wire it to the browser;
  • If you lost it you have to get a new one and change all your accounts' settings;
  • And they can be pretty expensive (I know how expensive these things could get, I own an YubiKey).

I was reading about this and be like, "oh I know, I'll just make a device that use traditional physical keys, like those one you use for door locks! You'll have a box which plugs into your computer via USB, and you'd use the normal door key to turn a normal door lock on the box when your computer prompt for a passkey!" But then I realized that's just moving the attack vector onto something that's arguably less secure (anyone who dabbled in locksport could tell you that), not to mention the fact that the box itself could be broken open, unlike in the case of YubiKey where it would just break and refuse to work for the attacker at all.

But that got me thinking. Are passkeys really as useless as enumerating all the little things the approach lacks makes it out to be? Not really - they are genuinely convenient! Without it I'll have to regress into pulling out my phone and use OTP every single time (I know this, I own an YubiKey), and I'm absolutely not going to use whatever their 3rd-party hosted password manager of choice is considering there had been multiple news of them leaking their customers' info. There clearly is a line here, a line along which you have to lose some to gain some should you wish to move to a quote-unquote "better" location since there's no options beyond it: if you choose passkeys, you'll have to live with the shortcomings I mentioned above; if you choose OTP mobile apps, you'll have to live with the inconveniences of having to have a phone with you at all time; if you choose to use a password manager, you'll have to accept the maybe-effectively-miniscule-but-definitely-not-zero risk of it leaking your data. The important thing one must understand here is that he should either try to push the line further beyond or make a fully-conscious judgement every time he thinks about moving on the line; he should be careful not to be forced into a chase for the ill-defined "better", no matter how attractive the alternative may sound.

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Last update: 2026.9.25