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You seem concerned with a “moral failures” aspect of debt, which doesn’t make for an interesting discussion. If you’re not interested in the complex system of algorithmic finance and its intersection with poverty and generational wealth, I’m not sure there’s much of a discussion here.

I already mentioned that some well paying jobs (the kind that people stuck in debt traps would most benefit from) require an active credit score to obtain. So “not using credit” is not an option. As well, credit is a primary way that the people who hold generational wealth got that wealth. Oh, and they run the system.

You’ve created a straw “poor person” and insist on shadow boxing it. If you ever decide to confront the complex systems that these fellow humans face, I encourage you to read up on the modern credit system. Wikipedia has a good rundown with active sources.

And you can opt out. Don’t use credit at all.

Nope. Whether you use credit or not, the credit bureaus collect information about you and share that with all manner of other companies, including employers.

Also these systems have inherent racial biases.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/from-inherent-ra...

Yep. It’s all a secret. You are measured by an invisible system that you can’t opt-out of, can’t question… oh and just in case you thought you could learn from experience, here comes a newer “version” of the score that determines whether you’re allowed to build equity or whether you’re relegated to paying someone else’s mortgage.

A reasonable take if you ignore how this system reinforces existing inequality + the ways this system is used outside its original scope.

Also you have to admit it’s kind of fucked up that there’s no total opt out mechanism.

This is absolutely sensible and also impossible for the patchwork of systems that an individual has to navigate. These systems would have to talk to eachother, and they don’t.

That’s why I’m in favor of a straight cash subsidy through the negative income tax.

Yeah. I’m a bit confused on how an article on layoffs misses the massive increase in cost of capital. The entire market has changed.

The existence of parents addicted to heroin doesn’t make having another kid to get a lighter sentence any less fucked up, rich or poor

You really should read Bad Blood. Theranos misdiagnosed cancer patients.

A woman, all women, absolutely ought to have the right to choose when and if they become pregnant. Even women who are charged with crimes.

But if you’re her child 12 or so years from now, what is it going to look like that you were conceived under such circumstances?

As the article notes, US and Mex have bilateral extradition so it’s doubtful she intended to stay there to escape prison. She was likely going on to another country after that.

Who built the API and who pays to maintain it? These are not public goods in the traditional sense. The incentives must align or else the benefit is only maintained through benign neglect.

It was always odd to me that entire businesses relied on what was essentially the goodwill of a corporation. I think the same about things like microG in the Android world. They just… use Google’s API without paying and yet we think it’ll all work out?

It is not very healthy for the baby in the womb.

Sucks to be a parasite I guess

That you don’t think the possibility of governments prosecuting vulnerable women seeking health care in the US using surveillance capitalist tools is a story says more about you than the article.

I hope they work for you. They did not for me, unfortunately. The text was too fuzzy to not give me a headache and something about it gave me motion sickness.

Agreed. The “risk” here is that you won’t get to stay with the same company your whole life and collect a pension. The “risk” is also that you’ll need to retrain yourself to match the change in the industry. This is different from the expectations that people have for other industries, though job security certainly isn’t what it used to be outside of tech either.

Not used to seeing it but surely even the youngest in our cohort are aware that we’ve been here twice before.

Tech is a big risk, big reward business. Charge ye Teslas while ye may.

If your friend told you they lost $10,000 in the stock market today, would you feel bad for them? What if they then told you that they're up $500,000 over the past year? How about then?

These layoff articles are incomplete without mentioning how many they hired and when. This brings Microsoft back to their staffing levels of when exactly? March 2021?

Edit: the-ebook-reader.com is a much better source for information about about this change. https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2023/01/13/amazon-has-disa...

Is there a source for this that isn’t goodereader? The writing on that site is badly in need of an editor. It consistently gets basic facts about stories wrong.

For example, right in the first sentence is a factual error, as pointed out by many people in this thread:

“Amazon announced it has made some changes with regard to the e-books purchased via the Kindle Unlimited program.“

Books are not “purchased” through the Kindle Unlimited program.

Amazon doesn't allow "personal documents" sent via email to have covers

This doesn’t appear to be true. I have several non Amazon epubs that I sent using the web interface, all with covers.

You still can't load or read epubs directly on Kindles

To the average reader, does this have an negative impact?

Onyx violates GPL2 by refusing to release source code. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962

It’s already getting that way with things like grammarly. It makes me sad. I know my colleagues who speak English as an additional language use it and find it helpful, but I much prefer whatever English they speak with be the same when they write. It makes engagement more interesting

This is how the elevators work at Apple Park. I have never seen it work anywhere else, but I've never tried in Japan.

The US is Apple’s primary market and the focus of this campaign.

For the purposes of this discussion, this is a distinction without a difference. “Black voice” is a term of art, meant to convey that the voices in question were trained on features commonly associated with African American English. The voices in the example are US English voices.

Race, ethnicity, accent, language — all of these are complex topics with plenty of nuances. Short of writing a dissertation, no simple reply on a web forum will appropriately capture them. The good news is, we don’t need to, since most Americans are familiar with African American English, whether they know the term itself or not, because African Americans have constituted a distinct culture in the US for all of the country’s history.

Speakers of African American English have distinct timbre, rhythm, and cadences in their speech. There has long been a lack of these distinct features in TTS. Apple appears to have added a “Black voice” (though to be clear, there are speakers of African American English who are not Black) in 2021:

https://www.consumerreports.org/digital-assistants/apples-ne...

Apple is big enough to have the EU dictate what port to ship their phones with, too. The regulatory landscape requires careful navigating.

Huh? The professionally narrated audiobooks don’t get memory hole’d from the earth because Apple announced this service. The sentence you quoted is intended to emphasize that professionally narrated audiobooks will continue to be available on the platform.