• 2 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • If they have a great meta-search algorithm, users would be able to search without an account and see how great the results are. Then, when a user wants to personalize ranking and block sites, they can create an account.

    I always assumed that they make you create an account to track search usage and cut you off once you hit the free tier limit.





  • It would be a nice gesture, but I will believe those promises of support when they have teeth to them.

    What happens if they stop doing it? Do I have to sue them for breach of contract, have to prove actual damages, and settle the class action lawsuit for $5 in store credit?

    What happens if the company goes bankrupt or creates a new subsidiary to service the product and the subsidiary folds?

    What level of support are they obligated to provide? What issues must be fixed and how promptly?







  • I would go a step further and say that it should not be a stock purchase but partial nationalization. The government is not getting shares that will be sold later. The government is getting a right to appoint part of the board of directors. Every time the company issues a dividend, buys back stock, or engages in other activities to return value back to the shareholders, a proportional amount of money must be paid to the treasury. It only makes sense that if a company is so big that its failure is going to hurt society as a whole, it should be owned by society.




  • That reminds me of the time, quite a few years ago, Amazon tried to automate resume screening. They trained a machine learning model with anonymized resumes and whether the candidate was hired. Then they looked at what the AI was looking at. The model had trained itself on how to reject women.


  • Unfortunately, living in the US, I would not take a job with a pension because the (private) pension system cannot be trusted. I remember the 00s when many company pension accounts went bankrupt, because companies were no longer offering it as a benefit and it was easy enough to screw over retired past employees. Companies would take poorly performing divisions and their pension plans, spin them off as a new company that would quickly file for bankruptcy.

    I would not trust a pension without it being insured by an organization like the FDIC. Even then, I would be afraid that my pension would not cover living costs due to inflation.

    Luckily there are alternatives. I have a 401k, which should give me a steady flow of inflation proof dividends… until a market downturn wipes it out. If that happens, I can fall back to Social Security. Don’t believe the baloney that the government will ever let Social Security go bankrupt. They will just cut down benefits.



  • The model only works if users are forced to subscribe to a battery swapping service for the full life of the vehicle (or there is a large upfront fee to join with a used vehicle). Otherwise it would be too easy for a consumer with a worn out battery to do a one-time swap and get a like-new battery as a cheap alternative to very costly battery repairs. The dumped battery is likely to have very poor range and the battery swap company will need to dispose of it.


  • I am a little disgusted by this because now both major browser engines are being developed by an advertising company, creating more incentives for future web technologies that strengthen tracking and undermine ad blocking.

    From what I understand, this is an anonymized targeted ad company. In other words, ads are still targeted to the individual user, it is just harder for the advertiser to track (or profile) an individual user. Are there any companies still doing untargeted ads, ads where the advertiser might pick what site their ad goes on but cannot target a specific user demographic?