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Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 2 months ago
Most pharmacies are having financial issues basically due to being stuck in the middle of the battle between insurers, drug manufacturers, and PBMs over reimbursement rates, and having the weakest negotiating position of all of the parties.

AI probably will save the pharmacies some money, but IMO this will probably cause reimbursement rates to decline further, leaving the pharmacies in the same position as before.

Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
I had a similar thought - it seems like most of the concerns could be addressed by adding better request tracing and improving the resiliency of the existing system. I wonder if this is just the result of an organizational tension where the load balancing team isn’t motivated to address this particular use case (which seems likely if the organization is large enough).
Comment · 10 months ago
AFAIK in the current setup, only the UI is Apple's; any time you message customer service or open a dispute, that is handled directly by Goldman employees, and decisions to raise/lower your credit limit are also made by Goldman. All of those parts will be handled by Chase now.
Comment · 1 year ago
AFAIK, "email HTML" isn't standardized either; most organizations that make nice-looking HTML emails have to do a ton of testing across different clients and come up with workarounds to make everything look consistent.
Comment · 1 year ago
My personal favorite UX-failure-of-the-moment in Teams: If I open the teams tab > Browse, it shows a big list of company-wide channels that I could join. There's a search box, but unlike any normal search box, it only does a prefix search, so if your channel is named "some test channel", and you search for "test", it doesn't find it! Several times I've given up at guessing the right channel name and had to ask coworkers to tell me the exact name in order to join.
Comment · 1 year ago
I used to have a problem very similar to this, where the "working hours" Teams showed on my profile were in the wrong time zone. It turned out the solution was to go deep into some submenu of the Microsoft account settings website (_not_ anywhere in the actual Teams app) and edit the account time zone preferences, so perhaps look into that and make sure those match the local settings in the Teams app.
Comment · 1 year ago
In the US, most rentals (except for very cheap ones) include a fridge/washer/dryer/dishwasher, but if you're buying the property, typically only the dishwasher is included unless you negotiate with the seller.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
> I am 100% sure you, as a manufacturer, could develop a very lightweight shim over a linux or BSD kernel that has significantly better performance than Android does

I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features. Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements, and most manufacturers aren’t exactly known for being able to produce high-quality software.

There have been a couple projects that have tried to make phones based on pure Linux (Librem, Pinephone). Their performance is limited a lot by not having good CPU options, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to achieve much performance improvement on the software side either.

Comment · 1 year ago
I think it may be linked to the Bing integration. If I ask about my location in a new conversation, I don't get back anything. But if I start with your example query, and then follow up with "is it available where I am?", I get

> To determine if Stripe Connect is available where you are, could you let me know your country? If you prefer, I can also look up Stripe's support availability based on the country linked to your query.

[me] yes, do that

> Yes, Stripe Connect is available in [my country], including [my city].

Comment · 1 year ago
I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining what kind of payment Google could make under this structure. Do you have something in mind?

I agree that if Google was paying a browser for something other than default search placement, that would likely fall outside the scope of the proposal. But historically, default placement = traffic, and is also the only leverage the browsers have - ie if Google wasn't the default, Google would only get users who explicitly selected it, and if Google knows all of their users are actively selecting them already, they have no reason to pay extra for that traffic.

API access seems like a good alternative way for Google to monetize, but it doesn't solve the problem of providing funding for browsers (except in your case, since you're combining a search engine and browser in one company). Or am I missing something?

Comment · 1 year ago
This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.

But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products

With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:

* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.

Comment · 1 year ago

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