snottynose

One of the best and most elegant UX designs of all time. I can't think of anything that has beaten it since.

This is an incredibly bad metaphor. Nobody, no sane person at least, is claiming that they invented the alphabet and are therefore responsible for everything downstream of that.

The point about cheating on tests is that an exam is supposed to prove that you have internalized knowledge and are able to reason about it adequately. Cheating means that you reproduce the output of that understanding, without actually having done the work of understanding. Chinese Room.

This is largely true, but it is still sad, because interacting with a chatbot is not interacting with a community. At least you could assume that the gatekeeping assholes had a human judgment. I've never understood why so many questions on Exhange need to be closed for minor deviations of moderator norms, on a website meant for... asking questions.

The old ticket stamp machine still stood in the bus but it was taped over. The driver did seem to accept cash from some people and it seemed like random amounts (pay whatever you have?), and he did not give out tickets, hence my remark about bribing.

The app is called DB NRWay and has 1.6* on Google Play, so... See for yourself. I was surprised as well. Like I said: it was a surreal experience.

And yes: all bundesländer are _so_ different! NRW has another spiffy (creepy) app that uses geolocation from your phone to determine the amount of kilometers you have ridden on the bus, but it specifically only works within the bound of NRW.

Nice to see someone equally dispassionate about Github. It's a place to `git push` to and that hasn't changed in ages!

This has always puzzled me about the millennial generation. On the one hand, let people enjoy things, and who am I to judge what people like to do? On the other hand, it really strikes me as a form of arrested development and adults playing with LEGO really gives me the ick. That might be projecting my own fear of being Peter Pan, unable to grow up...

It is possible in Europe with credit cards and with SEPA Direct Debit (commonly used for recurring debits such as subscriptions), but indeed regular bank transactions are difficult to reverse. To me this is the big benefit of credit cards and Paypal: it gives the consumer real leverage when disputing a transaction, and it shifts some of the burden to resolve the issue to the vendor.

I wonder how the costs of "working at taking your fare" measure up to just eliminate that work, and accept that people ride public transport for free and is paid from public funds, as they have decided in Luxembourg (where there is ample tax revenue) and Belgrade (where people have historically refused to pay, then the city made it official policy).

Do not discount the many benefits, which might be difficult to quantify!

Recently took a bus from an airport in Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Had to install an app, create an account with the bus agency, give way too many of my personal details including address and phone number. Needed a smartphone, internet connection, German-compatible digital payment method (2 out 3 payment methods did not work).

This was a surreal experience. It literally took me about half an hour of struggling my way through a half-baked Germlish app to buy a single ticket, for a trip that I will probably make only once in my life. When the bus came, a very long line formed because, of course, most people assume you could just buy a ticket with the driver. I felt quite bad for this driver who probably had to deal with this every day. This particular bus only went once every two hours. It made me wonder whether any tourists had arrived there, waited 1½ hours for the bus, only to be rejected because they did not have a ticket and could not bribe the driver with physical euros. The airport apparently had no exchange offices.

Compare: when I took the bus in Montenegro, I gave the bus driver a 2 euro coin and stepped inside the bus and it went.

In most countries we had functional paper ticketing systems which were cheap, easy to understand and provided privacy. But they had to be replaced because . . . apps are cool???

Agreed, and I would like to see practices such as these challenged in court. On grounds of consumer law: unreasonably burdensome terms are not allowed, on grounds of not discriminating against people who do not wish to use a smartphone. If the judiciary does not see any law applicable; representatives should enact it. We must not be penalized for wanting Big Tech OS out of our personal transactions using .... legal tender!!! Disgraceful state of affairs.

I'm surprised people get worked up about this. I've felt like folks have learned to tolerate much worse and manipulative behavior from companies in the last two decades of personal computing... Not that I like it. I believed that society kind of accepted dystopia. Is it just that people are more sensitive because this happened in a corporate setting?

Sometimes you really hit a dead end. Some orgs just don't respond, or say they don't have the resources to process your complaint, or lie. The codified consumer protection laws are nice, in principle. Multinationals know they can get away with pretty much anything.

Hear, hear.