Well, revoking credentials isn't inhumane. You can fire someone humanely and without compromising security.
286 karma · joined August 31, 2020
I wonder if GraphQL would have been as popular if it was a much smaller shop than facebook launching it. Feels like having a name like FB gets you a tech credibility pass.
Not quite sure about this. Gmail (both personal and company accounts) is IMO a great email client with loads of handy features, and I always felt Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/Drawings were well put together. Are they the best in class? I guess it depends what you are looking for. Could Drive be faster? Yes, that would be nice. But "amateur hour" sounds like we are simply using different products.
Am a being naive with how much is possible without going all-in and building an index of the whole web, or is it possible to have some kind of in-house fallback?
Do the richest tourists contribute to the local economy the most anyway? Or is it more like they spend lots of money with multinational companies (e.g. big fashion brands) that ultimately pay tax/have suppliers elsewhere?
Pretty neat, I didn't know about it before.
(I have a Fairphone 4)
Of course the problem is that most people just use the default search engine on their device, and Google has paid big money for being the default. And if you're not interested in tech, why would you bother setting up an alternative one?
> The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.
Certainly agree with this. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia :
> In January 2023, Ecosia handled 0.29% of European search requests, behind DuckDuckGo's 0.53%, Bing's 3.65%, and Google's 92.23%.
Pretty incredible market shares.
> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
To be fair to Apple, both Google and Meta have loads of apps for iOS that compare to the Apple suite of apps. Although there is definitely a pre-installed advantage for the Apple apps.
Enforcement is on a council-by-council basis, but of course in urban areas I imagine this is pretty hard to enforce. In rural settings it must be pretty much impossible. Having said that, I haven't really seen many people at all washing their car at home. Maybe it depends where you live, if you have neighbours who do it a lot it probably feels like everyone does it.
In the last few years, there have been a load of "wash your own car" car wash stations opening up. They're cheap (you can do the car for <100kr - $10 or so), way less than the drive in station, and have things you wouldn't have at home (e.g. cleaning underneath the car, handy for washing off the salt that has come off the road in winter). Not really enforcement but a pretty effective way of nudging people to doing the "right thing".
Heh. I wrote some code that called log.Fatalf with an error message, and then later added a verbose switch when running the program (kind of an `if !verbose { log.SetOutput(os.DevNull) }` type of thing).
Sure enough, when I ran it with some input that led to run into the log.Fatalf, the program exited, but no error message was written out. Cue quite some head-scratching!
- it is quite common to sub-let ("andrahandsuthyring"/"renting in second-hand") where you rent from another renter (who in turn has the "first hand" contract with the landlord). This is legal and is quite different from other countries where it is common to see "no sub-letting" on every single rental contract you will ever see. So you do not have to sit in this queue (the queue is for first hand contracts) to live in Stockholm as a renter; but you may end up moving fairly often as second hand contracts are very often time limited.
- the quote "93% of swedes live in municipalities with a housing shortage" sounds bad, but what does this exactly mean - how bad are the shortages in each municipality, why is there a shortage, what is the divide of rural vs city municipality shortages. Also, a sizeable chunk of the population lives in Stockholm/Gothenburg/Malmö that are likely some of the key municipalities in this number, so it's likely that much less than 93% of municipalities suffer from a housing shortage.
- the rent that a landlord can ask for depends on many things, including the "modernness" of the apartment (both in terms of e.g. putting in a new floor, and in terms of appliances). This has the downside that the landlord may decide to modernise the apartment and now you have to pay (a bit) more rent without having a say in the matter. On the other hand it means that landlords have an incentive to keep the apartments in decent condition and not just let things get old and not bother replacing them. You could see this as a positive or negative, depending on your point of view and financial situation.
The article says that the rental market in "Sweden is a big mess", but this of course is quite a generalisation and simplification; and how to tackle housing supply and demand in many (all?) countries is a complex and difficult issue. Regarding demand for accommodation outstripping supply in Stockholm & Gothenburg, this is pretty common to other major cities, pretty much everywhere around the globe. Does rent control help or hinder? The article doesn't compare to other countries going through similar conditions that tried other methods, so it's hard to tell.
Some ideas for improving housing supply/demand situation:
- Building more (duh!). For individuals with some spare land there is a class of house called an "Attefallshus" you can build up to 30m2 and rent out if you wish.
- Better public transport late into the night out into suburbs and to nearby towns. Bike paths and affordable electric bikes/scooters to make living not in the centre and still enjoying the amenities possible.
- Investment in/encouraging private sector investment in smaller towns and cities, so the spread of demand for housing due to work is more spread across the country.
- Encouraging working remote or hybrid schedules, so employees feel they can live further out.
As always, there is a compromise to be found, and so we have planning systems.
Companies and services that come out of this regulation may end up competing in the US anyway and creating a more competitive landscape there anyway, even if there is no DMA-style legislation passed there.
We will see!
> Examples of the “do’s”: gatekeepers will for example have to:
> - allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations;
> - allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform;
> - provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper;
> - allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform.
>
> Example of the “don'ts”: gatekeepers will for example no longer:
>
> - treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform;
> - prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms;
> - prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so;
> - track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
---
> As an aside, it strikes me as vaguely protectionist to see that it’s only 6 companies and none of them are European… (maybe that’s a hot take?)
Simply put, there are no European companies on this level. If you want a phone, you are going to have to choose Android or iOS. To chat with people on your new phone, you will use what your friends & family are on - most often WhatsApp. When you want to search something on the internet, for most people it's going to be the default search engine, so Google Search. And when you want to go on a Social Network, it's going to be... etc, etc. The EU is of course part of the western world and so has not had the same requirements to develop their own companies, or lock American companies out, like China/Russia.
Perhaps the closest that could come to mind could be some messaging apps, e.g. Threema, or perhaps Mastodon as a social network (sure, it's federated, but anyway...). But these don't qualify as they are nowhere near big enough.
Finally, I'm quite optimistic about the DMA; not just for consumers in the EU but also in the US and worldwide. I feel there has been significant consolidation of market power and stagnation/coming stagnation, and competition is often considered the way to break out of this. Perhaps we will see a new generation of companies and ideas and more options for both consumers and small/medium businesses in the future.
Some useful info about who the gatekeepers are/which parts of their platforms have been designated at gatekeeping: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en . Includes a nice diagram!
Just curious, what is it that people don't like about Android?
If the burglar only takes a 30 second look before breaking in, residents could be home but away from a window, with this the burglar can more confidently know when is a good time to break in, without exposing themselves to the same risk that looking around the house brings.
- Too much red tape/risk assessments/effort/time required to set up a credential store
- Devs working there may not know/understand the importance of it, and may not be up-to-date with modern software development practices.
- Assumption that Github repo will always be private, correctly configured, never leaked.
- Assumption that employee computers with code checked out will always be full disk encrypted and source code never read by a malicious program/transmitted somewhere else.
If you work in a company that makes software for a living, it's worth bearing in mind you are probably nearer the forefront of modern best practices and there are many companies in other industries that do some software as part of, but not the main part of the product, and these do not necessarily focus on software development and therefore may be "as hot" with best practices, to put it mildly.
Car workshops would modify and compile their own distribution of the car source code? I can't say I have ever been to a workshop where I would imagine anything like that.
Open source here would clearly be a big win for security and bug identifications in cars. Better quality laws to go along with it to protect researchers would naturally be a big positive as well.
For a comparison look to Android. AOSP is open source, and whilst alternative, non-OEM, flavours of Android do exist (GrapheneOS, LineageOS, etc). But you don't see shops that fix or sell phones putting any of these on the phone. And if you did, would it be a security downgrade? I don't think so!
> Would you fly on aircraft knowing mechanic servicing it last night could have added something funny to the plane you are taking?
But... they could have done. Maybe not the software, but mechanically, of course it's possible. Why doesn't it happen though? I guess the same reasons why in general people act responsibly in society.
- slow = notification with "slow photo write to SD card, use a better SD card for better performance"
- failure = they could offer a built-in app with reliability stats for the SD card currently inserted
At Samsung's size and amount of money to solve these problems, the skeptic in me feels like (3) is a convenient excuse for (1), or to excuse just copying what Apple does.
I just assumed that Netflix had different video formats on its' servers, ready to go, and when the app requested the video it also sent the screen size/resolution to get the smallest file size, that would also look good on my phone. If that was 480p then all well and good, it was fine to watch.
It was a while ago now, but IIRC the amount HBO used was pretty horrendous, like a GB for 30 mins or so of video, so I guess they just downloaded a big file and let the player on the phone handle that.
Like a say, a few years ago now so the situation may well be better with HBO now.
IMO, more likely to affect startup company success in becoming big:
- One common language, one culture, one currency across the US (sure, differences between states in culture but not as diverse as in Europe). This is gradually converging via the EU, but the US has a couple of centuries headstart...
- VC funding concentration in California (think about how many of those "US" companies are from California); VC investors in US are global names if you work in the industry, in EU they are regional names.
- Generalising a bit here, but from my experience, I find work/life balance generally considered more important in EU compared to US. In the US, work is given a higher priority and if your boss asks you to stay late/work on a weekend, many colleagues in the US would do it, European colleagues would put e.g. family first instead.
- Side note; work/life balance point can be reflected in terms of national culture, e.g. "The American Dream"
By comparison, several years ago, I was regularly streaming Netflix content without any trouble. One day I streamed a show on the HBO app on mobile data and it ate up almost all of my month's data usage. I guess it's behind the scenes work, and not so exciting, to e.g. stream a smaller resolution for a mobile phone, but in moments like that you realise there are a substantial amount of things to think about when making such an app.