bgarbiak (u/bgarbiak)

bgarbiak commented on That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/dustincoates

bgarbiak · 2 months ago

I once shouted into the phone while on a call with a helpline person. They screwed me over with an invoice that looked like a contract extension (domain, hosting), but turned out was an invoice for a separate, second contract for services I don’t need, nor I didn’t order (antivirus for an e-mail, a paid SSL certificate). A pretty blatant phishing-alike fraud. Later I found it’s their MO.

When the person told me that he understands my disappointment but he can’t do anything, and I need to call another number within the company and, ideally, send them a letter via snail mail - I snapped. I shouted that I’m not calling anyone else and it that is their job to fix it, not mine, and I don’t care which department does what in their company, it’s the helpline person to know this and do all the steps necessary to help me get the money back. The guy asked me to calm down and I hung up.

Not my proudest moment, but you know what? The same day I got mail from them with apologies. They nullified the new contract and moved the money to the correct account.

Shame that the corporate greed degrades people to these levels of pity, and it’s not a lesson I’d like to teach my kids, but sadly: in many cases being the nice guy gets you nowhere.

bgarbiak commented on Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode wired.com/story/airbnb-is... · Posted by u/thomasjudge

freddie_mercury · 3 months ago

I think the people who say hotels are better than AirBnb aren't traveling with kids.

Having an actual kitchen when you travel with kids is great. Having actual separate bedrooms so we don't have to go to sleep at 8pm when the kids go to sleep is great. Being able to do laundry without tracking down a laundromat or pay exorbitant hotel prices is great. Having a living room or similar area with at least a few square metres of floor space where kids can sprawl is great.

bgarbiak · 3 months ago

Strange. As a father of two I prefer hotels over AirBnB. Laundry could be an issue, yes, but not having a kitchen is actually a feature for me. Someone else taking care of feeding the little ones is exactly what hotels are for

bgarbiak commented on Legendary Bose Magic Carpet Suspension Is Finally Going Global thedrive.com/news/legenda... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

Animats · 4 months ago

BYD has had active suspension in their Yangwang U9 supercar for two years now. It's over the top.[1] It can sense and jump potholes. Drive with one wheel missing. Dance to music. Do tank turns. There's even a LIDAR watching the road surface for bumps.

That's not just adjustable damping; that's a fully powered suspension.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIKAn8yDkpA

bgarbiak · 4 months ago

And Porsche has its Active Ride[1] tech, already implemented in Panamera and Taycan.

Yet, for some reason they, supposedly, want to use the so-called Bose tech too.

[1] https://youtu.be/BohF6I3_QZ4

bgarbiak commented on SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces serenityos.org/... · Posted by u/doener

GuB-42 · 4 months ago

> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.

Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster. For me, it is an impressive technical feat and it took years for Android to catch up (see: "project butter"), and in the end, it was mostly by brute force, i.e. putting ridiculously overpowered hardware in smartphones.

Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent.

Why you have latency to hide in the first place is another problem. There may also be some clueless designers who put slow animations for no good reason, maybe because they are just copying Apple, not understanding why Apple did it in the first place.

bgarbiak · 4 months ago

Well, the iPhones were in fact faster. Faster at playing the animations, at least.

I worked on an app in the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S II era and we wanted to use the same trick on both: smoothly animate the view switch between user interaction event and the API response. It worked super smooth on iPhone, and it was jittery as hell on Android. In the end we left the animation on the former, and move the users straight into the loading screen on the latter.

bgarbiak commented on TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale afterbabel.com/p/industri... · Posted by u/cwwc

bgarbiak · 4 months ago

Certainly not only TikTok, but - IMHO - the most damaging part of every other social media _is_ the one based on it: Reels, Shorts, etc. The endless swiping for the next dose of dopamine.

The YouTube's one (Shorts) is especially irritating, as you can't really ban children from using YT - there's stuff there they need to watch for classes and so on. I guess the only chance this will stop is a government regulation of some sorts.

bgarbiak commented on Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes harvard.edu/president/new... · Posted by u/impish9208

JumpCrisscross · 4 months ago

> he could potentially pull a completely illegal fast one and freeze their accounts

Harvard (and most institutions and powerful individuals) would be smart to maintain liquid assets and a bank account outside America’s control.

bgarbiak · 4 months ago

Trump can make that illegal in no time. „No foreign funds” is a well known method of fighting opposition, tried and tested in many soft regimes (looking for a recent example, Hungary comes to mind).

bgarbiak commented on E.U. Prepares Major Penalties Against X nytimes.com/2025/04/03/te... · Posted by u/dotcoma

FirmwareBurner · 5 months ago

>I'd love to hear your better idea to deal with disinformation.

There is no silver bullet solution since we're not in an utopia. On the one hand all private media is controlled by biased oligarchs each with their own interests. On the other hand, governments in power want to control the narrative towards their own interests hence why in many EU countries we have state media. This is how it's always been and how it's always gonna be, a constant tug of war between interest groups, but I don't want any one side to have complete control of the media as that would be even worse.

>The free marketplace of ideas has obviously not worked.

Why do you think it hasn't worked? To me it seems like it's working, that's why those in power fear it and want to control it all for themselves.

My parents lived under communism. The speech control the EU is pushing resembles very well what communism had but with a better PR spin on it. Communism got defeated in part by total freedom of speech winning in the free market place of ideas versus government controlled speech. The Arab Spring revolutions could not have happened without the free media circulating on the internet. So to see the EU trying to lock down on free speech the same way totalitarian regime did, is incredibly suspicious to me like their afraid of their own people revolting against them.

I don't want unelected elites in Brussels deciding for me what content and opinions I should be allowed to view. If you want to win in the free marketplace of ideas, then come up with arguments for the people on why you consider each piece of information to be misinformation and debate it in public, not just ban it outright.

bgarbiak · 5 months ago

I remember the communism. Boy, you have no idea. And, frankly, your comparisons between EU clampdown on disinformation and hate speech (however effective or justified it is) to communism propaganda and to persecutions against its opponents - it is pretty offensive.

bgarbiak commented on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting bbc.com/news/live/c625ex2... · Posted by u/yakkomajuri

alephnerd · 6 months ago

Yep. The warnings have existed for a long time, but most European states have continued to ignore the hallmarks.

Even Poland only started rearming after Kazynski's plane was shot down in Smolensk in 2010 (edit; not shot down), Romania only (started after Crimea and it's implications of a similar incident in neighboring Moldova in 2014, Turkiye began due interventions in Syria and Libya that lead to Turkish and Russian soldiers fighting against each other in 2012-15, and Netherlands after over a hundred of their citizens were shot down in an Air Malaysia Flight in 2015-16 (forgetting the exact date)

Trump is absolutely wrong in publicly abandoning our European allies, but this is something every administration since 2008 has been saying would eventually happen.

The failed UK-France intervention in Libya should have been the warning call (France and UK's air forces couldn't disable Libya's A2AD and ran out of precision muntions, forcing the Obama admin to intervene and spark the Benghazi crisis which helped bring Trump into the Oval Office in 2016). In fact, that incident probably further emboldened Russia as Libya's military apparatus was heavily Russian/Soviet in armament and strategy.

bgarbiak · 6 months ago

Uhm, that Polish plane wasn’t shot down. Don’t spread silly conspiracy theories. Polish military spendings were rising steadily since long before the accident, but a significant increase happened after Russian full scale invasion on Ukraine.

bgarbiak commented on Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke bsky.app/profile/auonsson... · Posted by u/perihelions

elif · 9 months ago

Not true. China has taken down 2 US satellites in the last few years.

bgarbiak · 9 months ago

They shoot down their own redundant satellites, and it was in 2007 in 2010.