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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Apple doesn’t process the transaction, a different payment processor does, Apple just provides the API for developers from said payment processors to implement in their app.

    The current closest thing for tap to pay for consumer to consumer payments is NameDrop then using Apple Pay Cash through iMessage however this is a less seamless method and is only available in the US. I can however see Apple expanding the tap to airdrop features to Apple Pay Cash in the future, perhaps with iOS 18.



  • Technically most of the weather data is derived(within the United States) from the National Weather Service, all of this data is a matter of public domain under federal law(so it’s being subsidized by taxpayers). What companies like the weather channel or accuweather can do is increase the accuracy by adding more stations and providing more compute power to run more powerful simulations(something the NWS can’t do because of budgetary constraints) or what an app like Carrot can do is allow you to add your own weather station and interpret the data to give predictions.


  • It’s simple, during the pandemic they couldn’t have workers come in but they couldn’t have just no work force so they pushed for work from home and made it seem like a big positive to keep money flowing into their pockets. Now that they can have people come into the office they need to justify their leases and justify their middle management oversight so they need people coming back to the offices. It’s not about whats convent or comfortable for the workers, it’s what can make them the most money and justify expenses as to not spook investors. If the company could cancel even half of their leases they would and have most everyone work from home and maybe even cut back on middle management. However they got 20-30 year leases to save money(in month to month payments) and it’d be really expensive to exit the deal sooooo justifying the lease is more important.



  • Additionally if no one is buying products from heavy polluters then it doesn’t make sense to burn the fuels. It either requires people to take action and change their buying habits or for governments to tax carbon to both make the environmentally friendly options economically viable to most people and to get companies to reduce emissions so they can stay competitive.

    Air travel is more difficult to get environmentally friendly at this time due to the limited options as electric consumer planes are still in the testing and development stage and would struggle with international flights however train travel in Europe can be a solid option over plane travel but from a US perspective air travel is still generally the best way to go as trains are just not the best in the US and a car trip will take longer then both planes and trains and emit more fossil fuels per trip per person.



  • So I’ve had YouTube premium for years now, going all the way back to when it was still called YouTube red so I’ve been on the legacy $10/month plan and because I got to keep my old pricing it’s stopped me from canceling at any point when I was rebudgeting and it even stopped me from getting the cheaper $8/month student plan as I didn’t want to lose my legacy pricing once I was done with college but considering they’re hitting all subscribers and not just new subscribers I’m going to jump to that student plan to pay less each month instead.

    It just doesn’t quite make sense why they’re increasing prices besides greed(or they know they can with the roll out of ad blocker blockers). If it was still during the YouTube red era they could have at least used the argument that they were re-investing in originals but they stopped creating YouTube originals. The only real new thing to YouTube premium since the rebrand from YouTube red is PIP and you can join the beta program.




  • Threads automatically adds all your instagram follows so for creators they don’t have to try and rebuild their audience on a new platform where as for users they don’t have to find all their friends/family/and creators on a new platform, its just there. There is also the ease of signup, if you have an instagram account you just log in, if you don’t it’s really simple. For Mastodon there’s different servers to pick and then you have to find your favorite creators again and it’s another login to remember.

    TLDR people are lazy so go with the option that is easiest for them


  • They likely coded it all in quickly in a messy fashion that they didn’t think about ways to disable any of the tracking in the EU and that’s why is not available there at launch. While Meta has plenty of software engineers to get jobs like this done the speed they supposedly went to get it done(Being start in January launch in July) likely means things got rushed as it supposedly wasn’t planned to launch till later this year but with twitter imploding Meta wants to get as much of the existing marketshare moved over quickly with instagram being the perfect way to make moving seem easy.


  • It’s likely also due to the populations living in southern states, another big part of the population in southern states are those who had jobs in the mining industries or people retiring, the biggest things the republicans are pushing are bringing back mining and making sure that people get to keep their money(such as lower taxes) where as democrats are pushing for a cleaner environment(so miners blame them for losing their jobs), and major infrastructure plans that could take a while to pan out(so people retired see that and don’t want higher taxes as they already got their grain and don’t want to pass it on).

    This is an over generalization and there is other major factors but these two groups are significant sections that the republicans are appealing to where as democrats aren’t such. Democrats might be able to get big wins if they could campaign on programs to help mine works get new jobs and revitalize the economies in mine towns and maybe some more programs for people that have retired so they feel they are getting more then what they’re putting in.



  • Serialization is only on certain parts so things such as housings or charging ports still have good value and serialization is on a specific chip so while those parts do sell for less, a skilled repair technician could move the chip over assuming the whole part isn’t fried and it’s just damaged. There is less value in locked phones but there is still material value and they often steal the phone then get the phone number for the device and try to trick the user into removing the device or phishing their Apple ID as find my doesn’t require two factor to remove, only the password.



  • Ok so basic question you should be able to answer then how do you stop a foreign government from spying on other countries citizens? WhatsApp is not just a western world app. For example it’s used in Russia and the US and the UK so if Putin went to Meta and said “I want everything you have on Ex prime minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson and you can’t tell them” what reason would meta have to deny his request if the precedent by the UK is that this data needs to have a back door and if you say then the user should be notified then anyone under investigation is just not going to say anything incriminating and if it includes old messages then you risk the political espionage if anything is shared under the assumption everything is end to end encrypted. What about trade secrets, a corrupt government official could get a companies trade secrets for a business friend from anywhere in the world.

    There is a great video by Tom Scott that talks about this exact situation when the UK tried to break encryption 5 years ago but that failed because it wasn’t feasible from a security standpoint. There is also a great episode from Last Week Tonight talking about encryption and government attempts to get around it. We’ve seen from things like the Pegasus malware that repressive governments will use this little break in encryption to jail protestors and journalists and spy on their political rivals, having an official way will just make it easier.



  • It’s generally a question about what’s best for the user, your general user would likely be more mad losing all their messages because they forgot their password then they are calmed by the fact that no one else can read the data. Same for photos and files, however for sensitive categories such as health and passwords they are always end to end encrypted as it’s determined it’s worse for anyone else to get that data then it is for the user to lose it.

    For anyone that truly cares to have complete encryption there is advanced data protection but for the general users the defaults are a good balance between security and ease of use.


  • If a user wants more protections there is “Advanced Data Protection” which fully encrypts all iCloud data however Apple knows you might lose your password or something so they require a recovery method before turning it on and make sure you know Apple won’t be able to help you if you lose your password and recovery method.

    Also for certain sensitive data such as health data or passwords full end to end encryption is enabled even in standard mode as it’s determined it’s worse for someone else to get access to that data then it is for you to lose it where as generally losing your photos are worse then someone else getting access to them.