TheGrumpyBrit

You can make the exact same argument about employers paying different rates depending on the country the employee is based in, and for all the same reasons.

Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.

Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.

I'd disagree. The users of OPs tool certainly are, but it doesn't seem like that's the responsibility of the developer.

UK here, and we don't print return labels for Amazon. We just take the package to the local store, and they scan the returns barcode on my phone which then prints a shipping label right there, and also doubles as an electronic receipt of where I handed over the parcel.

Dislike of a particular aspect of a product doesn't need to be concrete/provable - a vague feeling of "I don't like this so I won't use it" is all it takes.

With Pocket in particular, the bundling with Firefox moved my impression of it from "this is a potentially useful tool" to "this company feels like they need to force their product down my throat by bundling it with a browser - I don't know why they're doing that but it makes me not want to keep any data with them"

In the early 00s there were a number of text services providing the same function. I got banned from one for the questions "What is the collective noun for a clitoris?" and "What is the resonant frequency of a clitoris?"

I imagine they were a fun place to work at 2am.

A net?

Great write up! While this one probably isn't for me, it's planted the seed of an idea. I have a new kitten who we've just started allowing free roam of the house at night, which is fine until dawn when she thinks we all need to be awake and starts running around like a mad thing at half past stupid in the morning.

If I can make one of her noisier toys smart, maybe I can get Alexa to call her downstairs by turning it on, thereby giving us some peace without locking her away all night.

...over multiple decades

Their long term product vision is based on an incorrect core belief.

This seems pointless. The fact that it's not primarily a chat app means nobody is going to use it for day-to-day messaging - you already have to have payments in mind before you start a conversation. So if you want to use it to request payments for an existing group chat, you've got to switch context and invite everyone into this separate chat app just to allow payments.

Or you can just drop a paypal.me link into the chat you're already having.

For me, it's become too clunky for a basic blog, and the fact that it stores your content in a database makes managing it a pain. It ties me to Wordpress and only Wordpress - anything I want to do requires logging in and navigating the admin interface, which I'm not a fan of.

By comparison, flat-file CMS's allow me to edit, search and process my content using whatever tool I like. I can update my blog directly in the terminal, or in Github from work and have the changes pushed out automatically by CI. They're not making hundreds of database calls every time I want a page, so they're blazing fast. I can have simple scripts output to a text file and have it rendered as a status page. And if I want to migrate to another solution, my content is literally a bunch of text files that I can just copy to whatever shiny new thing just caught my eye.

I'm quite liking https://getgrav.org. With the admin plugin it's a neat combo of flat file and actual CMS.

Also, they're seedless grapes. Planting them would be kind of pointless.

Because there's a global pandemic in progress and it helps with contact tracing. Privacy concerns and public good are not mutually exclusive.

Sure, and when the entire business has the lease terminated because they failed to deal with this, they can all claim that society failed them.

Doesn't this effectively make all your number keys unusable, since they're now mapped to other functions?

If Alphabet just "decided" to shut down - i.e. they didn't go bust, they weren't attacked, they just woke up one day and said "We're ceasing trading with immediate effect"?

In all likelihood, the internet as we know it would immediately cease to exist. Huge chunks of infrastructure would immediately go down because they're hosted on GCP. DNS servers which use Google as their root would stop updating. The other FAANG companies would most likely go down too due to various codependent services.

In other news, the stock market would collapse, cable and broadcast services would go off the air, and we'd very quickly discover just how incredibly reliant we are on this stuff. I don't think it would be a stretch to say that governments would fall.

Hayne's manuals are always a traditional go-to: https://haynes.com/en-gb/baby-manual-3rd-edition

The problem is, we're not testing people until they're already in hospital. So that 4% mortality rate is very much skewed. The vast majority of people who show symptoms are just self isolating and getting better without ever being tested. We have no clue how many of those people actual had COVID-19 and how many had something else, although the spread we have observed would suggest that it's probably on the higher side.

Given the lack of availability of testing, and the fact the the available testing is (rightly) being reserved for those most in need, I don't believe we can rely on the current mortality figures as any measure of accuracy. They're probably more like 0.5% at best.

As someone who works in finance/banking, I can assure you that this is not uncommon.

Your assurance is not reassuring.

I'm not 100% sure of the law, but I wouldn't expect that to make a difference. The manufacturer may not be legally required to include the document if the vehicle isn't new, but if they choose to include one, I expect that it would still be required to be accurate and would still be legally binding.

The Monroney paperwork is provided by the manufacturer as a legally binding assertion of the features the vehicle was sold with - there's a copy of that in the article.

I agree, but I do wonder if the developers ideology will make it unsustainable.

I currently maintain two federated services - https://pixelfed.uk, which hasn't yet grown beyond a few people but costs next to nothing to host, and https://peertube.co.uk, which has a bit of a tendency for exponential growth. While it's not especially expensive right now, I'll only be able to allow it to grow so far before hosting costs will make it unsustainable.

I don't want to include any advertising, primarily because I don't want to deviate from the standard PeerTube experience, but because the developers provide no way for instance administrators to cover their hosting costs, the size of any one instance is self limiting. That may be a good or a bad thing depending on your position, but either way, I think the Fediverse will have difficulty becoming mainstream while running an instance can only really be viewed as a hobby rather than a potential income stream.

Very early days yet, but I'm currently using Django for the API, and React to knock up a basic sample front end.

The fact that this was a lemon law buyback suggests to me that the original owner did pay for the feature, but then got a full refund. Tesla intended to restore it to standard features but accidentally sold it on before doing so, and in doing so asserted that it still included that feature.

Legally, I think that leaves them in the same position as if they'd intended to remove the premium interior but sold it on before doing so - tough.

Removing it after it was returned to them, and restoring it to a standard model as far as possible for maximum resale opportunity, fine. Selling it on to a dealer, including the additional features as part of the package, and then revoking those features them after the sale, is incredibly stupid and sounds illegal.

Which honestly doesn't sound relevant to the purchaser. My understanding is that the Monroney sticker stipulates exactly what features are included in the vehicle, as provided by the manufacturer. By purchasing the vehicle, the customer has paid for exactly those features.

This is like them saying "Oh, we forgot to charge your dealer you for the premium interior and lighting" (which is listed on the same sheet as a $5000 option) - your response would quite rightly be "Tough, I bought it from the dealer at the agreed price based on the features listed, it's mine now"

It sounds like it was returned due to lemon law, which I imagine means the original buyer received a full refund. That's probably also the reason the feature was removed - they probably meant to disable it before selling it on. However, they didn't, and that's their mistake to accept - they can't just revoke features after they've already sold it without agreement from the buyer.

He purchased a car which was advertised as including autopilot. That sounds a lot like paying for autopilot to me.

I'm not familiar with US laws around these stickers, but that doesn't sound like a get out for Tesla. Not being legally required to provide a sticker doesn't (or shouldn't) change the fact that, if the manufacturer provides a sticker anyway, it must be accurate.