krotton

I remember trying "call <my wife's name as in my contacts>" a few years ago and Google Assistant cheerfully responding with "calling <first Google search hit with the same name>, doctor". I couldn't believe it, but back then, instead of searching my contact list, it searched the web and called the first phone number it found. A few years later (but still pre-Gemini), I tried again and it worked as expected. Now, some time ago, post-Gemini, it refused to make a call. This is basically the first most obvious kind of voice command that comes to mind when wondering what you can do with the assistant on your phone and it's still (again?) not working after years of voice assistant development. Astonishing.

My current company uses Slack as the main messaging app, while still using Teams as part of the Microsoft package, for its integrations with Outlook and conference hardware and software. And this is a recurring pattern I've seen in other places. Teams is nowhere close to being a usable alternative to Slack.

Well, you're dangerously wrong in simply assuming it's not smallpox, having zero evidence for your thesis.

There's no Trump and dem opposition in the rest of the world, yet lockdowns have still been applied. US internal politics really is not the only reason why things happen.

It does. If the employees of the company have a coherent stance on something, that's exactly what the company's stance is.

How could you ever trust an employer who cuts salaries, but awards themselves a bonus?

I think the problem is more complex here, as these are usually not in-house marketing people who have willingly chosen to market cigarettes, but rather people working for external marketing agencies for whom promoting Philip Morris' products is just one of many projects imposed on them. They haven't really chosen to market tobacco, but would probably have a hard time objecting to this one particular project, if they otherwise like the job.

We do teach kids not to talk to strangers in the street and consider it quite important, I think. What's so much different about teaching them how not to get robbed on-line? It's not about being a good consumer, but about minding your own feet.

Well, the cow is a tad worse off than before...

> abstraction isn't something telling you how you should act, but instead something telling you how you should react?

A little bit OT: I don't think acting and reacting are separate things in the real world. We're always only reacting.

PayPal (linked to my credit card as well) is #2 for me. Most of the time I use instant transfer services (there are quite a lot of them in Poland, integrated with most banks in the region). My favourite one is Blik (founded mainly by the biggest Polish bank PKO BP, but also supported by most of the others): you start a session, generate a one-time 6-digit code in your bank's mobile application, enter that on the payment site, confirm transfer information on your phone and it's done. I also use it to withdraw cash from ATMs and on some occasions have used it to help my friends pay in emergency situations (they've just called me, I've given them a code, they've entered that, I've confirmed et voila).

> Also, credit cards are already very convenient and near universally accepted. It's hard to compete with that.

Oh, come on. Maybe it's a US thing, but credit card is the last but one (just before a manual transfer) payment method I use (in Europe, Poland most of the time). It requires providing full credentials to every merchant you transact with on-line. It requires taking out your wallet and typing all this data in. Or taking out your wallet and taking photos of both sides in some modern apps, then checking for correctness. I actually use PayPal as my card payment gate to minimize the number of parties that see my complete set of payment authorization data. Credit cards are moderately convenient when used off-line and completely unadapted to being used on-line.

I had exactly one issue with a macOS upgrade - when they introduced APFS. The upgrade process has failed in the middle with an FS-related error, but AFAIR it resolved itself after rebooting and retrying. For comparison, Windows 10 and various popular Linux distributions have caused me a lot more after-update trouble: input devices ceasing to work, graphics drivers breaking and falling back to the built-in generic ones (with a 800x600 resolution, on Windows), graphics drivers breaking and not falling back to anything, but just causing X to fail to start (on Linux). Once (a few years back, I admit) upgrading Debian testing brought in a new version of the kernel that turned out to have some ACPI-related bug on my machine and consistently freeze about 30 - 60 seconds after booting. This all is of course just personal experience, but I think I'm not the only person with similar ones.