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Cake day: November 13th, 2023

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  • I’ll preface this by saying this shady shit gets all my hate.

    It’s tempting to opt for telematics/black box insurance because of the initial cheaper prices but the privacy violations and potential downsides make it not worth it.

    The overall problem here is that human psychology tends to frame this difference as a loss not a gain. Given the choice, people will see the cheaper option as the baseline, and then ask “can I afford to pay more for privacy?” instead of affirming “my privacy is not worth this discount.”

    Also, those of us that have paid for insurance without such a “discount”, are likely keenly aware of the difference. For new drivers, from now to here on out, the lack of past experience presents a new baseline where this awfulness is normalized. Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since the “privacy free” option is still profitable and is enticing for new customers (read: younger, poorer). So it’ll take some kind of law, collective action, or government intervention to make this go away.

    Have fun fighting with your insurance to get them to remove anything from your record. […] If I had spyware insurance they would’ve dinged me for it.

    I think this is the bigger problem. If someone has the data an insurance company wants, you probably agreed to an EULA or signed something that makes their ownership, and its sale, legal. With the “yeah go ahead and use my data” option on the table, the machinery to do this without your knowledge is already in place. All the insurance provider has to do is buy the data from someone else. When the price is right, 1st party spyware isn’t required at all.



  • They could save so much money by not mailing every day and hiring people to hunt me

    At the scale these mailings are conducted, it all averages out into a net win for Spectrum. It suggests that enough people really do suck it up with the rate hike for some reason or another. Otherwise, they wouldn’t do it. Also, from their perspective, the wasted time, energy, and paper is all someone else’s problem.



  • I’m starting to wonder if all that are symptoms of a company using information technology to it’s most powerful extent.

    Services like Door Dash couldn’t exist at the current scale, speed, and service without the internet and highly capable phones/laptops/whatever in everyone’s home. It enabled this kind of gig economy service to come out of nowhere, build very rapidly, and disrupt the market before the law or even social norms could ever hope to step in. But as a consequence of all that, the owners cannot help themselves, and continue with their “Greed% speed run” of running a company straight to its conclusion. Every mistake, every error, every bad take, it’s all accelerated right alongside the good stuff. It’s like enshittification on amphetamines.


  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlThoughts on this?
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    10 months ago

    TL;DR: the author needs to do a better job of citing sources and building an argument.

    The author’s argument from self-appointed authority tone aside, I dug into the only two verifiable pieces of evidence cited. These are almost impenetrable to the outsider, and even with plenty of coding experience behind me, I’m having to go deep to make sense of any of it. After all, sometimes, bugs and design decisions are the result of a best effort in the situation at hand and not necessarily evidence of negligence, incompetence, or bad architecture. There’s also something to be said for organizing labor, focusing effort on what matters, and triaging the backlog.

    The original author really needs to pony up a deeper digest of the project, with many more verifiable links to back up the various quality claims. If anyone is going to take this seriously, a proper postmortem is a better way to go. Cite the version reviewed, link to every flaw you can find, suggest ways to improve things, and keep it blameless. Instead, this reads like cherry picking two whole things on the public bug tracker and then making unsubstantiated claims that’s a part of a bigger pattern.

    My personal take on what was cited:

    1. I’m grossly unqualified to assess this codebase as a Wayland or GUI programmer, but work plenty in the Linux space as a cloud practitioner and shell coder.
    2. The first article smells like inadequate QA for cases like placing Wayland programs in the background, which is not typically done for GUI apps under normal usage (IMO).
    3. The second article is a two-line change that I suppose highlights how ill-suited C is for this kind of software. Developer chatter on the MR suggests that the internal API could use some safeguards and sanity checks.
    4. 162 open issues, 259 closed, oldest still open is five years old. Not great, but not terrible.
    5. None of this is particularly egregious, considering the age of the project and the use it enjoys today.

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