lazyvar

joined 1 year ago
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[–] lazyvar 2 points 1 year ago

Most likely different incentives and platform culture.

Customization isn’t that big on iOS, other than the occasional viral fad, so there’s less interest for custom keyboards and in return less development spent on it.

Monetization of custom keyboards is also really hard and due to limitations on tracking and collecting data the incentives that Android has don’t really exists on iOS.

So what you end up with is a handful of custom keyboards often by big players that have bags of money to throw at it or as a companion to a regular app (e.g. Grammarly, GIF apps) to fulfill a specific function.

[–] lazyvar 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They’re right about browsers, but jumped the shark on keyboards.

Custom keyboards come with some rules and limitations for obvious reasons, but they’re by no means the system keyboard in disguise like how browsers are all WebKit under the hood.

Here’s documentation on custom keyboards: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/CustomKeyboard.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014214-CH16

[–] lazyvar 21 points 1 year ago

Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.

Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.

In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.

For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.

Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.

As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.

[–] lazyvar 1 points 1 year ago

Sorry to hear.

I’m pretty content with the pacing in which we get answers, but mainly feel that the episodes feel too short because of lost momentum.

[–] lazyvar 1 points 1 year ago

I kind of like that we’re getting resolution on bits and pieces and that the episodes end on a soft cliff hanger.

The Dubai people are resolved, we now know there’s some sort of powerful cabal in play and get some insights in the motivations of the hijackers.

[–] lazyvar 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@[email protected] was talking about European companies doing fine despite strong unions in Europe and there being a lack of companies toppling over due to the strong unions.

They actually undersold it, because in many Western-European countries everyone benefits from union negotiations, even people that aren’t members of a union because the collective bargaining agreements unions manage to negotiate will affect everyone working in the relevant industry by virtue of laws deferring to those collective bargaining agreements.

You in turn decided to reframe the discussion at hand from companies doing well to unemployment numbers and not just general unemployment numbers, but youth unemployment numbers because you felt it would serve your argument best.

But if you look at the trends for unemployment then the story isn’t as bleak as you’d make it out to be. For starters general unemployment averages under 6% with only two countries being above 10% (and below 15%).
Average youth unemployment sits at 13.9% with a hand full over 20%.

However, both general and youth unemployment are on a steady downwards trend since 2013.
One exception to this trend for general unemployment is during the pandemic, where it shows a bump and for youth unemployment there's an additional minor bump in 2022, which suggests a correlation with the influx of refugees from Ukraine. This is the European source on these statistics.

There will always be a higher unemployment rate in the EU compared to the US, especially when it comes to youth unemployment.

This lies mainly in the fact that most European countries have a civil registry system that automatically keeps track of certain data, unemployment being one of them, whereas in the US this data is collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by conducting a survey of roughly 60,000 households.
Another factor is a difference in definitions. A good example is the one from the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Garrett is 16 years old, and he has no job from which he receives any pay or profit. However, Garrett does help with the regular chores around his parents’ farm and spends about 20 hours each week doing so.

Lisa spends most of her time taking care of her home and children, but she helps in her husband's computer software business all day Friday and Saturday.

Both Garrett and Lisa are considered employed.

Neither of them would be considered employed in most European countries. There are other such discrepancies, for example the US doesn't include people under 16, whereas Europe looks at 15-24 for youth unemployment.

And then there's the cultural difference between the two markets about when people are expected to start working and subsequently the jobs that will be available.

Which makes sense. Companies still need people, but if it’s more expensive to get low-end workers you just won’t hire entry level workers unless they’ve proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Your hypothesis is quite lacking.
As stated, the trends have been going down for a decade now, if your hypothesis was true we'd see an upwards trend.
Additionally, these labor protections, including protections against being laid off, have been around for decades, your hypothesis doesn't offer an explanation why, despite these protections, unemployment is going down.
Also, minimum wage, as is often paid for these kinds of jobs, is lower in most EU countries than in many US states, making it comparably cheaper to hire those kind of jobs in Europe than it is in the US, your hypothesis doesn't explain why, despite this, the unemployment rate is higher in Europe than it is in the US.

In short, your hypothesis nor the unemployment rate is relevant to what @[email protected] was positing, so lets refocus to the topic at hand: the lack of companies toppling over like domino bricks despite the copious amounts of employee protection facilitated by strong unions.

Perhaps afterwards, we can talk about the lack of landlords, corporate or otherwise, going bankrupt despite the strong tenant protections as well as the lack of companies selling merchandise to consumers pulling out of the market despite the strong consumer protections, and so and so forth.

And then, maybe, just maybe, we can afterwards all come to the conclusion that these QoL improvements are attainable without some kind of economic doom scenario.

[–] lazyvar 3 points 1 year ago

Like some have pointed out there are ways to circumvent this, but it doesn’t make for a great experience, might cause issues down the line in particular with updates and there’s no guarantee it’ll keep working.

If you’ve purchased this form your company’s surplus and they refuse to unenroll from MDM I’d just give it back and ask for my money back, it’s not worth the hassle and the warranty is a nonsense reason since they can take the MBP off of their warranty service plan.

[–] lazyvar 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The point is that “6 months free ink” is misleading whichever way you look at it because it’s ambiguous since ink isn’t measured in months.

Even if your reading of it would be the intended reading, then it’s still misleading because it’s just a 6 month trial for a per page subscription. Or put differently: if you surpass the monthly allocation of pages, you would have to pay, making it not free.

Given that neither the trial component nor the per page component is mentioned in the image and given the fact that the offer is ambiguous, there isn’t much to like or dislike about the deal because the deal as presented is false and non-existent.

Moreover, you conveniently sidestep all the other issues I’ve mentioned.

Like the fact that people receive cartridges with their printer that will be rendered useless with no clear warning on the box that this will happen or how to prevent this, instead they’re listed on the box in the same fashion other printer manufacturers list their cartridges that don’t get rendered useless.

[–] lazyvar 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fair point, thought it was a little over the top with him at times as well.

Despite that, have been enjoying it so far. I just try to take it as it’s presented, a goofy whodunnit played for laughs.

[–] lazyvar 35 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Can’t speak for the article because all it leads me to is a photo disguised as a video without much context and pop-up galore.

That said, it’s a bit more nuanced that you make it out to be. HP uses some very shitty dark patterns.

Used to be that printers came with a set of starter ink cartridges.

HP nowadays uses Schrödinger’s ink called “HP Instant Ink Ready” cartridges.
If you never sign up for the HP Instant Ink subscription (incl. trials), then the cartridges that in the box will just be like the starter cartridges you’re used to.

If you however sign up for the subscription **or its ** trial, then the cartridges are changed into Instant Ink cartridges and will refuse to work once the trial is up and/or cancel the subscription.

I can see how people would expect to be able to use the cartridges that came with the printer like they always have been able to before HP pulled this nonsense.

It’s bad enough that this isn’t clearly and explicitly communicated with the customers.

What’s worse is that during setup of the printer (and in the marketing materials for the printer) customers are offered and asked if they want X months ink for free, without much indication that this is a trial for a subscription service.

Even worse that is not ink based, but per pages printed. Or to put it more bluntly: it’s a subscription that, depending on the tier chosen, gives you X amount of pages to print per month (paper needs to be provided by yourself) and HP will automatically send you ink to ensure you can print that amount of pages.

However, in all the marketing HP emphasizes ink and ink subscriptions (or “free” ink), and only after spending time looking into details can you figure out that you don’t pay for the ink, but for pages.

Here’s an example of how they market it as “6 months free ink”:

That ink is not free, because if after 6 months you cancel the trial, that ink is unusable.

Of course they can’t get a full cartridge and then just cancel the subscription

Is that so self-evident?
Classically (and HP also still has this as an option somewhere hidden away I believe) these kind of subscriptions used to be supply subscriptions.

For X amount a month we’ll send you Y amount of supply and it was yours to keep and do as you see fit, nowadays it’s often marketed as “auto-ship” across many web shops and comes with a marginal discount, but there are also plenty of examples that just call it a subscription (e.g. razor blade subscriptions).

[–] lazyvar 3 points 1 year ago

Seems like this season is on track to be as fun as the last season.

[–] lazyvar 2 points 1 year ago

Kai seems to have been taken, on the ground they know the identity of the hijackers, demands have been delivered, so it seems like all the pieces are setup for the climax, kind of weird because it feels like it’s a bit too early for that (assuming 8-10 episodes this season).

I’m guessing next episode we’ll learn more about the motives based on the demands, but I wonder how they’re going to develop the story onboard because with the way they’ve set everything up it’s easy to have the plane become the passive story of the two settings.

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