Rjevski

I don’t like AMP, but I am so happy to see when websites complain that “leads dropped by 59%” because of it.

For “leads” to drop that much it must mean they weren’t legitimate, happy leads in the first place. I bet those “leads” came from a shit letter popup or other similar dark pattern, in which case AMP works as designed and benefits the user by shielding them from such garbage.

AMP is bad for the web in the long term. But it is a decent stop-gap solution given that nobody is willing to make their websites bearable without Google’s pressure.

EDIT: I just tried their website again without an ad blocker and sure enough, I was asked to subscribe to their shitletter.

Are we sure it was buried intentionally, and not moved from its original place and eventually thrown away (presumably because the concealment worked as intended and it looked like a junk old battery) to where it ended up now?

The problem here is that there’s a limited pool of consumers (and thus money) for this content.

It used to be that the aforementioned magazines were sufficient to fill that gap of the market; as a result they were making decent money, could put out decent content that people were happy with and didn’t have to resort to scammy behaviour to make profit.

Nowadays the floodgates are open and everyone is a wannabe “influencer” except the pool of consumers & money remained the same, so they now have to resort to less than acceptable techniques to try and make money, and this article is one of the possible outcomes.

Text on the internet has the same problem by the way - there’s now a shit ton of garbage content written only to gain clicks and attention without actually delivering any value to the reader.

Why can’t you chargeback with a debit card? I’ve done it multiple times successfully.

You’re grossly over-estimating the average intelligence (and willingness to actually stop and think for a minute) of those accounts’ target markets.

I have friends who spend pretty much their entire lives on FB and Insta and they would swallow anything from there... last time one was surprised when I told her a watch she saw advertised on FB with a huge discount (300£ to like around 39£) was never at 300£ in the first place.

To be fair, the main lesson here is that you shouldn’t be paying 500$ to an illusionist.

That “Angie” whoever she is, is just a fraud. She’s not actually delivering any value. Whatever she’s pretending to earn could be all fake (it’s honestly not that difficult to fake these “perfect” photos and definitely doesn’t require to be a millionaire), and even if it’s real now, she’s gonna be the first one to get the door the second this social media/bullshit media bubble pops and brands realise it’s not worth it.

You want to make money? There are plenty of career paths that will make you good money by delivering actual value to your customers. Bragging on Instagram and getting virtual internet points isn’t one of them.

As usual, I'd like to point out how scummy this site really is.

The paywall advertises a "Premium EU Ad-Free Subscription" which is more expensive than the standard subscription and explicitly states "No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking" as one of the perks.

Trying to buy it has the following:

> By subscribing, you agree to the above terms, the Terms of Service, Digital Products Terms of Sale & Privacy Policy.

On the privacy policy, we have this:

> hen you use our Services, third parties may collect or receive certain information about you and/or your use of the Services (e.g., hashed data, click stream information, browser type, time and date, information about your interactions with advertisements and other content), including through the use of cookies, beacons, mobile ad identifiers, and similar technologies, in order to provide content, advertising, or functionality or to measure and analyze ad performance, on our Services or other websites or platforms. This information may be combined with information collected across different websites, online services, and other linked or associated devices. These third parties may use your information to improve their own services and consistent with their own privacy policies.

There is absolutely no mention of the "Premium" ad-free subscription in the privacy policy at all, so they are still granting themselves the right to stalk you all over the place even with the premium, more expensive subscription.

Not to mention, the privacy policy page itself loads a handful of different trackers before any kind of consent was even granted. I can see Google Analytics, something from "c.go-mpulse.net", something else from "bam.nr-data.net" explicitly sending my user-agent in the URL (why? They'd get it in the headers anyway), Google News JS, Google Pay and the New Relic JS agent.

My only response to this is a big "fuck you" and this link: https://outline.com/zd5du7 so you can read the content without any of that garbage and without paying them since they don't even deserve a single penny.

Isn't there a consistent history of shady practices from such companies, like purposely ambiguous language in the Android location activity preferences, or similar stuff from Facebook when they try to make you share more data with them like contacts?

Would anyone trust them to not silently still collect personal data?

For example, even if they don't need the data now because you're paying not to see ads, they might still collect it so that they can show you "better" ads if/when you stop paying.

Why would "being busy" be the symptom and not the cause?

I used similar platforms in the past. When I have time I'd spend a lot of it on there, and when I didn't have time anymore (new job, etc) I didn't use the platform much. This is perfectly normal and no amount of "retentions" or "re-engagement" bullshit will make me spend more time on there unless they pay me enough where spending time on the platform becomes more lucrative than my day job.

Just wondering which provider did you choose to go with instead of AWS?

As far as I know GTP is only used for data sessions (PDP) contexts. It should not affect handset registration and circuit-switched voice.

Electron for a system tray icon and a single page of UI...

It used to be that multiple video games and applications would fit in less than what this app consumes in terms of RAM.

It’s quite ironic that this is posted on a shitty website with a non-GDPR-compliant stalking “consent” prompt.

How about you do your own part before talking to others about “saving the web”?

Bitcoin is not better than MasterCard/Visa for the majority of day to day transactions.

I see this a lot with Linux and non-stock-Android users.

A dongle is ~10$ and you can pick one up anywhere. This horrible contraption he had to build just to enjoy music costs way more in time & money.

Kids or not, I would recommend starting with a problem to solve.

Programming by itself can be boring and is definitely not as rewarding as other stuff (games, etc) especially if you’re just a beginner so learning it “just because” is going to be a hard sell.

Find a task or a problem she’s having that she’s currently doing manually and help her automate it.

Repost of my comment above:

"Squiggly letters" captchas are still fine. There's a lot of FUD around AI & ML breaking them but I have yet to find an off-the-shelf tool that can break them; and so do the spammers. Sure, you might break them if you pay a team of computer vision scientists for a few months but that isn't profitable for spammers, so even though they are technically breakable, in practice they're still good enough to thwart spam & bruteforce.

"Squiggly letters" are still fine. There's a lot of FUD around AI & ML breaking them but I have yet to find an off-the-shelf tool that can break them; and so do the spammers.

Sure, you might break them if you pay a team of computer vision scientists for a few months but that isn't profitable for spammers, so even though they are technically breakable, in practice they're still good enough to thwart spam & bruteforce.

Everything is already lost if your email is compromised as they can just use the "forgotten password" functionality and reset it thanks to their access to your email.

What's your point? One thing is a list of wrongful convictions - failures of the justice system - but what happened here isn't a failure, it's the system working as designed.

What a fucked up country.

It doesn't take that much more. Office 365's base plan is something like 35£/year, plus around 10£/year for a domain. They offer IMAP import so migrating from Gmail is seamless.

You should explain to him that whatever you publish on the Internet is forever and whether he'd like someone in his adult life to be able to find that content.

Yep that is for a mid-level engineer. Seniors can get up to around 800/day.

Not saying I agree with them (honestly Quora should die and burn in hell), but if you really need the service can't you just give them a middle finger in the form of a fake ID? Best case scenario it works, worst case scenario they still don't reopen your account. Either way you don't lose anything.

Is 250k a big deal in the US, and how does it compare to how much a contractor makes? For reference, in the UK it's common for mid-level Python developers to make around 600£/day which is way above any full-time senior position, so if money was an issue couldn't you just become a contractor instead?

> You can also work on instagram, oculous

Instagram is no better. In fact they're working hard to turn Insta into yet another Facebook.

Oculus will also be just another channel for them to deliver cancer aka ads (look at what's happening with Insta and WhatsApp), so I don't see much point in working on it.

> just take the time to become a better engineer

Maybe, but I'm sure there are other companies that deliver actual value that people want where you can also become a better engineer.

Sorry, I don't agree with making the world worse just for the sake of money.

Why can’t you use your skills for something that actually makes the world a better place and delivers real value?

So adult content is apparently immoral, but stalking their visitors by leaking their data to over 100 “partners” (according to their non compliant GDPR forced “consent” screen) is okay? Lol.