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  1. Ryanair heavily advertises on their site that their tickets are refundable

    It turns out, they aren’t - there is a ton of fine print and if you happen to qualify they “refund” you in miles

    Both in the US and Europe, it’d be great if the government used some of their overreaching powers they use to pass laws to spy on us to also pass laws to protect us as consumers for products and services across the board

    It would be a decent consolation prize

    Sort of off topic here but lack of consumer protection AND shitty airlines across the world are both subjects that really trigger me (not really)

  2. It’s naive to think that this is a) the only current use

    Almost everything ever introduced with good intentions gets perverted into something else

    Traffic cameras, facial recognition, phone GPS, social media - all can and are used against you in one way shape or form

    I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any of those things - I’m saying just open your eyes because e sims are no different

  3. This is a longstanding issue we’ve had, not just with Gemini

    Even with something as simple as google workspace - permissioning service accounts and authentication are a pain in the ass

    The docs suck and of course there’s no one to help

  4. Anyone have a way of blocking twitter adds?

    I’ve just been watching streams after they’re done so that I can get rid of them that way

    Edit: nvm author mentions vpns as a solution

  5. That crazy thing is that a knee jerk reaction can still be right

    This IS bad for consumers - we are slowly inching towards the pre streaming world of only a handful of studios who run Hollywood, except now it’s pretentious tech companies

  6. Uh it leaves out one of the more important things that you also get more time for exams
  7. That’s sort of how all this type of policy is pushed through

    Convenience - what you’re describing is convenience

    It’s totally fine if you prioritize that over everything else, but my only thought here is that everyone should be crystal clear in what they are trading off for convenience

    It’s convenient for the government too, tk have a single identifier to thread a persons entire life

    We are, sadly, well beyond any expectation of privacy, but we should at least be aware of it and try to not make it worse

  8. Not this bad of a situation but I’ve successfully gotten them to escalate to the network engineers who were able to help

    Perhaps asking specifically to be escalated to or put in contact with a network engineer would be helpful

    Or at least find one online and send him an email - sometimes they ignore you but sometimes they go out of their way to resolve your issue

  9. Or simple threats of lawsuits directly/indirectly, theres a lot of money at stake here in the end
  10. Ditto for lawyers

    The thing that gets me about AI is that people act like most doctors or most lawyers are not … shitty and your odds of running into a below average one are almost 50/50

    Doctors these days are more like physicists when most of the time you need a mechanic or engineer. I’ve had plenty of encounters wher I had to insist on an MRI or on specific bloodwork to hone in on the root cause of an ailment where the doctor just chalked it up to diet and exercise

    Anything can be misused, including google, but the answer isn’t to take it away from people

    Legal/financial advice is so out of reach for most people, the harsh truth is that ChatGPT is better than nothing and anyone who would follow what it says blindly is bound to fuck up those decisions up in some way anyway

    On the other hand, if you can leverage it same as any other tool it’s a legitimate force multiplier

    The cynic in me thinks this is just being done in the interest of those professions, but that starts to feel a bit tin foil-y

  11. In a different time when different mindsets prevailed, the US government handled this about as well as you could hope

    The Fairness Doctrine is irrelevant today because of the way news is published/broadcast, but was effective in my humble opinion

    From Wikipedia: “ The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters.”

    And without getting too political, the beginning of a lot of our media woes in terms of news correlates nicely with when the doctrine was revoked

  12. Exactly - this is a case where consistency is more important than accuracy

    If everyone is optimizing their GAAP figures, eventually everyone converges on a similar number you can compare across companies

    Downside is that if you don’t play the game you’re sort of screwing yourself

  13. > One provision in particular—Section 24, which made it illegal to publish false information online that was deemed to be “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” or even merely an “annoyance”—has been especially ripe for abuse

    I mean how is this surprising to anyone?

    Grossly offensive is in the eye of the beholder

  14. I wonder if this explains at all why I've never had the need to diagram anything before I build it - whether it be software or something concrete like a cabinet - I just don't

    I work very much like my dad, as I build I just refer to the image in my head

    On the other hand, some people keep meticulous notes and diagrams about what they are going to do

    This isn't a knock - I have some very sharp co-workers that do better work in some areas even than myself who need to compulsively diagram/take notes

    Each has its pros and cons. For me the pros are I can get to building super quickly. It means on a microlevel I can explain things to people who will help with the build in great detail and make sure they "build the right thing"

    On the other hand, the con is communicating at a macro level. I don't have anything diagrammed out typically, or notes even, so sometimes it feels to people like they are working with a black box and I have to make a conscious effort to document and diagram

    Interesting stuff

    For the people here debating whether they have it or not: my take away from many years of therapy is that when it comes to mental stuff like this, it's pretty much just whatever you say it is and how much it impacts your life

    If you think you have OCD but it's not interfering with your day to day life, you're probably fine, even if you feel like it's overboard

    On the other hand, even mild OCD can be devastating to a different person if they feel like it's making their life hell

    So while not quite the same thing, if you think you have aphantasia and you think it's to the point where it's affecting your life in one way or another, than you probably do

    If you think you have it but you don't really notice/care and feel like you get by just fine, then you might or might not

    Moral of the story is that I hope it's just a thought exercise for you and nothing you're sweating about

  15. It makes sense that everything would converge on the same time

    When every company does the same market “research” to figure out what appeals to consumers, over time they are all going to arrive at the same conclusion

    As this particular style becomes familiar to people, it only reinforces the preference and now you’re stuck in a cycle

    This is why imo there will always be room for a startups - eventually someone deviates from the path and strikes gold, eventually a company is *actually* courageous, does something bold, and moves an industry forward

    We are unfortunately getting to a point though where giant tech companies have a stranglehold on resources and it hinders innovation

  16. Also, people don't realize that sometimes it doesn't even matter

    Enough people don't care, don't notice, or in the worst case, even when they do, if the companies band together and don't give people a choice, eventually they will cave and thats what i predict will happen here

    In the future i suspect most people's homes will have ads, except for nerds who will have rooted their devices. and hopefully their moms.

  17. no one actually prefers it, its just the default for ios users and what everyone uses in the US

    this means that i either use ios or i have to be "that guy" always asking everyone to send something in a different format or to please move the conversation to some other app - no one wants to be that guy - apple's got us right where they want us

    and to be honest, when texting other people, it makes a huge difference, believe it or not, if your chat bubbles on their screen are blue vs green. it shouldn't matter - people who would care about this aren't people you would want to talk to anyway blah blah - that's all fun and great but it does matter, unfortunately

  18. Yeah iMessage - over the years there have been “breakthroughs” - people find nifty workarounds or have even reverse engineered the iMessage protocol, but for whatever reason nothing ever sticks

    There are current workarounds, like isn’t your home Mac as a relay, but nothing super elegant that I know of

  19. As someone who jumped in the apple bandwagon at peak apple and hasn’t been through all their ups and downs the way some die hards have been, it’s been super aggravating dealing with apples shit lately - not what I signed up for all those years ago

    It seems to have been degrading for a long time, but for me it’s been in this past year where it’s crossed into that threshold android used to live in where using the phone causes a physiological response from how aggravating it can be sometimes

    I let my guard down and got too deep into the apple ecosystem- I know better and always avoided getting myself into these situations in the last, but here I am

    The phone sucks right now - super buggy and they continue to remove/impose features that should be left as an option to the user By Yes, this has always been the knock on apple, but I typically havent had an issue with their decisions - it’s just so bad now

    Lesson (re)learned and I will stay away from ecosystems - luckily the damage here is only for media

    The minute I can get blue bubbles reliably on an android, I’ll give the pixel a shot again - if that sucks too then maybe I’ll go back to my teenage years and start rooting devices again

  20. If I were a billionaire, one of my many pet projects would basically be a 100% privately-funded-by-me organization that does nothing but test consumer products - either directly or by third party

    It would be so boring - no funding accepted, everything would be freely available, no political initiatives, no recommendations, nothing. Just a treasure trove of data

    A man can dream - kudos to you for actually making it a reality - great inspiration

    Question for you: in general, how much does this stuff cost? what if you wanted to expand to testing beyond plastic, e.g., verifying the potency of ingredients in supplements, verifying cleaning product ingredients, etc., is that possible?

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