Isn't the issue that some people work around MOT decibel limits? After all they only need to pass the decibel limit on the MOT test, and not on the road in regular use.
The engineering solution approach doesn't seem to be fundamentally different to speed cameras.
Motorcycle exhausts are easy to swap out so people could easily take the MOT with the stock exhaust then swap the loud exhaust into place when they get home.
I used to live in downtown Chicago, where the worst violators where high end sports cars, though we did get the occasional quartet of motorcycles ripping down the roat at 3am.
Illinois doesn't require vehicle inspections, so there's no opportunity for exhaust modifications to be discovered.
That will be just great when Apple finds a creator doing that during App Review and bans Patreon over it. Patreon is going to be forced into the position of policing it for Apple, I'd guess.
> However, the rulings established that Apple's so-called "anti-steering" rules—language prohibiting developers from mentioning cheaper or alternative purchasing options that might be available outside of an app—were anticompetitive.
> Apple has updated its App Store rules to allow developers to provide external links to other payment options, technically circumventing its normal fee structure.
Why does Patreon need an app? Have users go through the website. Send them updates when people post new content.
I've never used the Patreon app on either Android or iOS. I support a number of creators and I have no idea why I'd want an app. Money is taken from my account. Receipts are sent to my email. Articles from creators are sent to my email, and if they're long enough I click a link and read the full article (or view the pictures) on the website.
The app's useful for audio posts. But mostly it's just an extra chance for them to make money. Push notifications, the home screen icon, etc. Most people I know, their inbox is barely functional due to the marketing emails, and they're reliant on features like Gmail's "Important" which only highlights real people, not Patreon content.
You're not the average user, and if the average user gets a billing email and hasn't bothered to read their content email, visit the site or open the app, they are more likely to end their subscription.
There's another erm... "creator oriented" Patreon-like service that works entirely through the web. Specifically to avoid Apple and Google's cut. And they seem wildly successful, although perhaps the type of content may influence user's decisions.
I made a very simple PWA and every time after reboot I have to re-log in. Of course, the browser will auto-fill my password but same page as a PWA it won't.
I also did some testing with macroquad [1] and I was finding that occasionally as a PWA the GL stuff just didn't work. I suspect Apple was disabling the GL stuff in the PWA as an anti-fingerprinting technique; there's no way they do anti-fingerprinting for an app.
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PWAs just can't do the same things that native apps can. This is probably intentional otherwise who would give not only 30% of their revenue but allow them to be a middle man between them and their customers?
PWAs are only able to be limited by technical measures, not business measures. For instance, anti-fingerprinting logic wouldn’t be needed in an App Store. There, Apple can say if they find out you are fingerprinting users without going through Apple’s specific ATT user consent process, you are in violation of our developer agreement and may be permanently banned from the store.
Each update of an app is reviewed, while a website can change completely at any moment (or have different versions served for different people). This is why for instance web extensions are heavily reviewed and audited.
This means they are pretty fundamentally different models.
The prompt for location is different for example because Apple enforces you are using the location information you gather for a specified reason, and has the aforementioned business penalties for misuse, and has tied all that to a real world identity. The browser can’t know if the page asking for location data is for mapping, for marketing tracking, or so that someone can drive to your home. The two features are going to look and behave distinctly.
I know PWAs can't do many things that apps in general can. But people were suggesting that Patreon should just be a website and not an app. And that's why I said PWA. If you can be just a website, you can be a PWA and be a bit better than just a website.
Given Apple's back and forth history allowing or not allowing and limiting or not limiting PWAs, I'd be hesitant to risk my business model on them. Which is exactly what Apple wanted I guess
Aside from many users not being familiar with PWAs and not wanting to install them, I believe they’d also have to drop support for older iOS versions, as for example PWA push notifications were only added in iOS 16.4.
I’ve been trying to figure this out. Just guessing since I have limited Patreon usage.
They don’t want to just be a payment middleman for creators, they want to be “sticky” like Facebook.
So they might add things like chat, media playback (with DRM), creators being able to post with notifications. Maybe you can sign up for additional private streams or even 1-on-1 sessions (like a gamer offering tutorials).
But by having an app to consume digital services, Apple says you have to provide a way to pay for services in the app (because that’s apple’s revenue model, a portion of software sales and resulting digital goods and services off of the App Store)
It's probably a generational divide now. For many middle/younger gen z and the upcoming Gen alpha, apps "are" the web. Not having an app to look at may as well not exist. Especially true of IOS users.
Sure Apple allows it. However it is much easier to have a good UI experience with a custom app than a web app. Some people also think they must have an app for everything and so even if there is a good web experience they will demand the app anyway.
I went on holiday for 2 weeks. Came back to find the team had spent a week on a 5 minute task that had been clearly documented. Nothing had moved forward. Spoke to my manager that day and from that day forward it was clear what my value was. Eventually lead the team and helped the team develop processes and initiative so they could be productive in my absence.
Up until that point I knew my value but I don’t think anyone else quite got it.
I like the article and I have been promoting a blameless culture for most of my career. To respond rapidly to failings, we need transparency about what has happened. The same is required to ensure it doesn't happen again.
I have seen a lot of incidents and I cannot think of one where a single person was to blame. Sure, one person ran a command or made a bad commit. However, someone else granted them access, someone trained them. A manager either reviewed the process performed or never considered a process was required. A lot of company cultures do not promote proper risk management in technical processes.
I get a lot of satisfaction from technical post-mortems. There is always something that could have been done, a process that could have been in place or a software/infrastructure change to mitigate the problem.
A couple of companies have worked for have had individuals that did not subscribe to this culture. They would want a name. I never knew why exactly. Maybe it was to block a pay bump or defer a promotion. As the tech lead or dev manager any team failings are my responsibility and in companies where bullets are fired I take them. I find this protects the team and helps a blameless culture thrive amongst engineers.
Generally, I find this culture leads to fewer incidents and problems as the openness when things are going wrong allows for faster response times and software/process changes in review.
I have worked years in a culture that attributes all mistakes to defects in the process. And the only possible individual mistake is not to follow the process. Process culture is just as bad as blame culture in some ways. It leads to ever more complex processes. The teams I've seen do best, the manager of the project will allow process to be informal and treated as best practices only. Then people are held accountable for bad results by putting them on tasks that can cause less damage. Good results mean more critical tasks. No single mistake kills a performance review or promotion, or makes one. We all make mistakes and get lucky. But over time reapeated mistakes or successes do have an impact.
Process culture can be nice in the ideal scenario where the processes can have huge parts automated or programmatically guard railed. However, when that isn’t the case, I agree the paperwork barriers can get dreadfully tedious and introduce their own opportunities for mistakes
I've not heard of the idea of blameless culture, so I enjoyed reading this from that angle.
One of my worst and most consequential work experiences was with the opposite type of culture.
There's lots to be said about it, but in reflecting on things I've often felt like one of the worst parts of that type of culture (
"blameful"?) was a profound lack of trust, a feeling that the blame belied some lack of real interest in improving the situation, as opposed to being punitive against certain individuals for unrelated reasons. That is, the individuals who were targets of the most blame as far as I could tell were generally being targeted for cliquey reasons that had nothing to do with performance or anything of that sort. Conversely, people in the "in group" were given a free pass for all sorts of serious problems. Getting a free pass wasn't really the problem, it was a sense that blame wasn't really about the ostensible blameworthy act, it was that it was being meted out as a kind of superficial leverage for some other thing.
Also, because of these types of issues, serious, legitimate administrative, communication, and other systemic problems never got addressed, because the blame was being used as a kind of social ostracizing mechanism, and the actual underlying problems weren't fixed in their entirety. So in many ways a lot of the problems got worse, not better.
In contrasts, in other environments (even the same place at a different point in time) where there's an emphasis on problem solving and figuring out what could be done differently by everyone, and assuming the best intentions and basic competence, trust underlies everything. You're motivated more because you believe that actions have fair consequences, and that everyone has each other's best interests in mind.
How does reliability work? How do I know that what I store today will still be there tomorrow? What guarantees do I have that a machine executing a task will exist until completion of that task?
How are you handing security? What controls are in place to make sure hardware owners can’t access data being hosted or processed?
The reliability varies, given that not all hosts are the same, but we provide statistics on the nodes and depend on the workload you should use the provider with the best SLA conditions for you
On these smart fridges, I struggle to see how these are anything but gimmicks undermining the device's lifespan. Most cooking requires items from many sources. You can check your milk but what about the flour in the cupboard? AI reminders. Is that a subscription service or are advertisers being given your data?
How long are these manufacturers promising to support the hardware? If the fridge is internet-connected and support ends, at what point is that a security risk? This generally applies to most purchases these days...
I was looking in my garage and I found a cassette player my grandad gave me that still works. When I look around shops and at many things I own I see planned obsolescence everywhere. Personally, I find it really demoralizing.
I am sure there are numerous services costing $5-10/mo that would cover this and I would certainly consider that to eliminate the hosting and maintenance cost.
If I had to build it, I would expect using Lambda, DynamoDb and S3 would likely bring the hosting cost to down to a couple of a dollars a month max.
Has the author really learned that Gmail is a better fit than Outlook? Who is paying for this product? There is a fair chance that Outlook would open up more sales opportunities to businesses, that appears to be the most obvious way to generate some income.
Secondary, a lot of clicks came from India, Kazakhstan, Costa Rica and Argentina… is this the target market? Probably not.
It is an interesting experience for the author but it is unclear if they really learned anything. It looks to me like they have been potentially misguided by poor market research gathered by a bad ad campaign.
Twitter killed a lot of third party apps and it just grew and grew. I suspect there is a vocal minority complaining about these changes. Most sub’s are going dark for 2 days. Time will pass and Reddit will continue to have a highly active user base.
Reddit is relying heavily on the voluntary work of moderators. Without them and power users that indirectly curate the content of subreddits, the site is toast. Reddit is not dying by alienating its user base; it might be if they are alienating their power users.
Techy/young people think that they are the intended audience of Reddit.
You're not anymore. The intended audience is _bigger_. It's like how Facebook shifted from young college folks to kids, moms, grandpas, and mainly companies.
The original users of Facebook left, but Facebook still grew.
Now it's Reddit's turn to swap its original user base with a bigger target audience.
Even better, if they could leverage LLMs, they could maybe automate a large part of the initial moderation. They have already acknowledged that these models were likely trained on their data. Why not feed new posts back into it and determine about relevance (on vs off topic), attitude (compassion vs hate) or quality (written by a bot)?
reddit is an order or magnitude smaller so in actually surprised the group numbers are so close which only proves the communities is a core feature of reddit
Twitter's official app and interfaces were never as user-hostile and borderline unusable as Reddit's app and redesigned web interface.
And twitter never tried to pivot its core product and kick out most of its users to chase last year's hype and be more attractive to markets that are already happy with other apps.
The problem is a lack of alternatives. At least with Twitter there was mastodon, but that was always going to fail outside of techie circles. What is the alternative to Reddit? Years ago the idea of starting a successful social network was a venture capitalist’s dream, but I wonder if they’ve woken up to the challenges of actually managing one.
The sample size of thirty people is going to be too small and the two year duration is too short.
I expect that participants will be happier than average and feel more secure. On the flip side they will continue working and their lives will not change much because they can see the payments will be terminated reasonably soon.
Even with the small sample size they are splitting the trial between two locations and trying to make it representative (whatever that means). This seems to raise the risk of a lot of anomalies.
I struggle to see how any meaningful conclusions would come out of this.
This technology feels like an engineers solution to a trivial legal issue.