> I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
Yeah - I watch most of my YouTubes on the Apple TV and the ads are a pestilence. Sometimes it'll be 50s pre-roll[1] with multiple 30-50s breaks for a 10m videos.
Luckily there exist[0] many fine technologies that let you view them without ads via something like Infuse with a DLNA server if you're that way inclined.
[0] Currently. YT-DLP is fighting the good fight but I don't know how much longer they'll be able to keep in front. But then I'll just stop watching YouTube, really, because it's a horror show without adblock/circumventions.
[1] The video doesn't appear in your history until the pre-roll has finished which means if you can't be arsed sitting through a 50s pre-roll just that second and - at least on the Apple TV - you've not clicked on the video from your homepage / subscriptions, good luck trying to find it again unless you remember the name + channel etc. (which it also won't properly show you until after the pre-roll!)[2]
Riksbanken have been pushing for cash payments too. Personally I think its too little too late. The culture in Sweden has already changed to purely digital
Sweden has also done multiple pilots of a digital currency pressed by the state. This might be an interesting alternative to not give up control of our currency and privacy to banks and cc companies. Also supposed to work offline. https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/rapporter/e-krona...
That used to be semi-common for smaller transactions in Sweden but was made illegal. Not sure why, probably to fight tax avoidance.
At this point the cost of handling cash is way higher than handling cards and as no one in Sweden ever uses cash its no longer relevant at all anyway. Now many (maybe even most?) dont accept cash to avoid the cost of handling cash instead.
There are numerous things still missing in terms of async support. Most notably for me is DB transaction support which leads to most non-safe endpoints running on the shared sync_to_async thread and me having to separate my code into one async function calling another sync function wrapped in sync_to_async.
In fact if you look at the source there is a lot of async methods in the framework itself which just straight up calls sync_to_async e.g. caching. This doesn't matter as much as hopefully it will get added proper async eventually. But I think believing your requests wont block just because you're using async is a bit naive at this point in Django and the async implementation has been going for years.
Not to mention that the majority of third party libraries lack support for async so you'll probably have to write your own wrappers for e.g. middleware.
> But I think believing your requests wont block just because you're using async is a bit naive at this point in Django
TBH personally I have yet to work on any professional async Python project (Django based or not) which did not have event loop pauses due to accidental blocking IO or CPU exhaustion.
I take your point fully though that a lot of Django's "async" methods are really using a thread pool. (True for much closed source async code as well!)
I think one reason for the eReader market not being big is that they're so good and sustainable. I bought my Sony PRS-T2 in 2012 and am still using it to this day. It has battery life for weeks, storage space for 100+ books and works just as well as when I bought it. It's really hard for me to motivate buying a new one when the only interesting "new" tech is backlight and I guess it's the same for most eReader owners.
The ~90e I paid for it back in 2012 was for sure good value!
I had the same issue with my Kobo, which I've had for about 8 years. I was looking at the replacements, but they're quite a lot of money for...what? Slightly faster page turns? A screen that might look a little bit better?
I added this to personal instructions to make it less annoying:
• No compliments, flattery, or emotional rapport.
• Focus on clear reasoning and evidence.
• Be critical of users assumptions when needed.
• Ask follow-up questions only when essential for accuracy.
However, I'm kinda concerned with crippling it by adding custom prompts. It's kinda hard to know how to use AI efficiently. But the glazing and random follow-up questions feel more like a result of some A/B testing UX-research rather than improving the results of the model.
I often ask copilot about phrases I hear that I don't know or understand, like "what is a key party" - where I just want it to define it, and it will output three paragraphs that end with some suggestion that I am interested in it.
It is something that local models I have tried do not do, unless you are being conversational with it. I imagine openai gets a bit more pennies if they add the open ended questions to the end of every reply, and that's why it's done. I get annoyed if people patronize me, so too I get annoyed at a computer.
Apples only delivery choice in Sweden is UPS which is notorious for messing up deliveries here. I ordered a MacBook and the delivery is supposed to be hand over with signature required. The UPS guy left it outside my apartment door in the stairwell in the morning. I was lucky it was still there when I got home from work. Apparently I signed that delivery (the UPS guy probably signed it himself...)
Delivery drivers in the UK regularly do this. They get to 11am, realise they won’t meet the delivery slots for the afternoon deliveries, so bulk mark everything as delivered and sign themselves, then take their time and deliver after the slot later that day.
This is illegal. Signatures are legally protected in the UK (and elsewhere I’m sure) and forging a signature is a crime. I got like 3 Hello Fresh deliveries in a row when I complained of their repeated forgeries before I cancelled.
They generally just scribble the name. Generally when I speak to support representatives and say that I got a delivery confirmation with a signature on it pretending to be mine they get extremely apologetic.
I don't know if it needs to state the name next to it, that's a good question, and may also depend on jurisdiction, but I would suggest that if a delivery signature was just writing a name then it wouldn't carry the necessary weight for proving receipt.
The nice thing about drivers providing proof of your package being delivered somewhere that is not your home, is that you have proof that your package was not delivered to your home.
Them not taking the photo taking seriously works in your favour.
And UPS is probalby to blame for that. AFAIK most delivery companies nowadays work their shifts with delivery quotas. I.e. the courier needs to deliver everything on the truck (which is typically more than you could deliver in a time-based shift) before calling it a day.
Essentially, courier companies have found out that rather than scaling their workforce to the deliveries workload, it is more profitable to squeeze out a fixed number of employees to save wages, and occasionally apologize for the mixups caused by this situation.
> which is typically more than you could deliver in a time-based shift
I think this compounds the issue: if people are committing fraud/lying (taking a picture of a random house as proof of 'sorry you were not in' or forging signatures themselves) because their slots are too full to deliver all packages they're supposed to then whomever is working in logistics won't see it. They will think all packages were at least attempted within that slot and as such not too onerous.
I believe the results of this policy should have a measurable effect on the number of complaints/customer support cases and they are definitely taking notice of that.
But it's not that anyone will take action. This is exactly the expected outcome: Pay less for courier wages in USA/Europe, and keep the much cheaper (and probably outsourced) customer support hotline busy.
On the contrary, it would be more likely to take action if the complaints are not high enough. This means that they could squeeze the schedule of their couriers a bit more.
I recently got my entire shipping costs refunded because I paid for next day delivery and the driver said they "missed me" and the proof was a photograph of a different address. I was surprised it was that easy to get the money back from the seller. I was incensed as I had spent the entire day waiting.
I paid for next day before a long holiday weekend and got my (time sensitive) item five days later. I was unable to get a refund. Maybe I should have called again to speak to a different rep. This was UPS.
Wonder if they are fooling themselves in the end though. It might look good on the KPI, but if it's based on fake data, the leaders are navigating blind.
They always require signature, and disallow “pre-signature.” I get a $30 cable; signature required. I get a $50 iPhone case; signature required. I get a $120 peripheral; signature required.
They left the $2,600 computer sitting on the doorstep (no signature required). Luckily, my daughter was paying attention, and immediately grabbed it, but we have had a problem, hereabouts, with highly aggressive porch pirates, that will actually go right into the house, to grab new deliveries.
I'm sure similar stories can be told for any country, but I've got to say that when I lived in Germany, I never had any trouble with deliveries. Maybe I just got lucky.
I did feel bad though for the people doing the deliveries, independent of what company they worked for. You can tell it's an awful job and they're working their butts off, sometimes delivering a package way after hours, like say after 9pm or so. I'm afraid it's like that pretty much in any country, though.
I think it’s highly dependent on both what kind of place you live and who the delivery driver is. At my place, I live in the Hinterhaus (which, annoyingly is where my buzzer is) up several flights of stairs with no elevator. Additionally, until recently the delivery driver for my street seemed to have some kind of agreement with someone about 10 houses away on the ground floor that would accept all the parcels for the entire street. They even had the gall to ask for donations for their “service” (all of the parcels I picked up from them reeked of smoke).
At my partner’s place, the delivery people are excellent, and we never miss a parcel. She has an elevator, in a different part of town, and there’s no Hinterhof. It’s very hit or miss.
Same in South Africa. Delivery services (like Courier Guy, Fedex, DHL, Fastway, RAM) are very good. They are fast, phone you if nobody opens up, and I have had zero issues in over a decade.
The country went a bit delivery crazy after COVID, so the competition is healthy.
Might it also be that deliverers in SA expect it to get nicked if they just leave it at someone's front door? As compared to the deliverer in Sweden mentioned above
Also it's so complicated to have UPS leave your parcel at a place of your choice (carport, deck, porch, etc.) in case you aren't home.
They have their MyChoice service which you have to sign up for and wait for a confirmation that is sent to you by mail which might take several days. However even if you take these steps it turns out that they will only match your parcels if the sender uses exactly the same address as the one you provided them. One character off and you lose any ability to set how your parcel should be delivered.
Any other delivery service does that easily, without postal confirmation for a specific parcel or any upcoming shipments.
Since I'm at the office during the day I had situations were I simply couldn't receive a UPS parcel for several days because their MyChoice service is useless once the address matching fails.
Interesting, my user experience with them is top notch (Prague). MacBooks, iPads, musical instruments, mountain bikes, really expensive stuff generally. The delivery slot is kinda long ("in the afternoon"), but the tracking info is spot on, they always call and so far I have never lost anything with them.
> The delivery slot is kinda long ("in the afternoon")
At least they tell you the day, not like in Germany. Gets put on the post today, then usually it either gets sorted overnight and delivered the next day, or there's another working day in between. The tracker used to say which it's gonna be after that overnight sorting (so if you check at 2am), but in the last year or so they've switched to telling you it's e.g. after the weekend some day and then surprise show up on Friday for example when you hadn't planned for anyone to be home, wasting the deliverer's time if you didn't decide to work from home that day spontaneously
Nice one! Had this problem last time we ran a tournament.
I also did some constraint programming to solve my poker problems. We play mostly cash games so I did a MiniZinc model for computing the least amount of transactions after the game: https://github.com/SRautila/poker-home-game-calculator
It is very much maintained and got it's 1.0 release not long ago. Sadly there is a single guy doing all the work for Ninja so the tempo of releases varies. I also think there is quite a way to the stability of DRF and DRF's ecosystem. If you want permissions and throttling for example you'll have to use django-ninja-extra which is pretty much "DRF but its Ninja".
For me personally I think the micro approach of Ninja / FastAPI is at odds with what I want out of DRF. I just want to make my crud stuff and not worry about implementing e.g. throttling, etc, on my own.
But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.