rexf (u/rexf) - Readit News

rexf commented on Doctors Warn Accountants of Private-Equity Drain on Quality: You Could Be Next wsj.com/articles/doctors-... · Posted by u/impish9208

gist · 8 months ago

> If people knew which business were PE owned they would avoid them.

What? You think the average customer knows or cares about that?

rexf · 8 months ago

yes

tons of businesses currently advertise their "family owned & operated" status in America. so in the future, seeing marketing around "not owned by PE" wouldn't be a surprise

rexf commented on Google and Meta struck secret ads deal to target teenagers ft.com/content/b3bb80f4-4... · Posted by u/ViktorRay

nonrandomstring · a year ago

> but to enjoy the validation

Absolutely. It makes me think about the things in life that don't need "validation".

Maybe it's a cliche but my dad would say about Korea and other wars "no pics, no words, you had to be there". So that was a teenage trope in the 80s and 90s too for my generation, if you were trying to be cool just say "you had to be there". It draws a circle around a personal or group experience that explicitly does not or cannot be shared. I think maybe it somehow earns more respect and interest than a photo, and I think with ubiquitous AI image manipulation the currency of "pics or it didn't happen" and "for the Gram" is going to vanish in a puff of incredulity. Now you can just text-prompt for a picture of you and some celebrity you "randomly met" in front of Buckingham Palace or the Taj Mahal! You can probably rent some bots to "auto-like" you on social media, right? So who is fooling who now?

rexf · a year ago

> Maybe it's a cliche but my dad would say about Korea and other wars "no pics, no words, you had to be there". So that was a teenage trope in the 80s and 90s too for my generation, if you were trying to be cool just say "you had to be there".

sounds like a partial retroactive justification to me. sure, you wouldn't get the full experience via a photo or verbal anecdote, but it's not like camera smartphones were ubiquitous in the 80s either.

rexf commented on Second factor SMS: Worse than its reputation ccc.de/en/updates/2024/2f... · Posted by u/F30

dools · a year ago

A family friend of ours recently fell victim to a phishing attack perpetrated by an attacker who paid for Google Ads for a search term like "BANKNAME login". The site was an immaculate knock off, with a replay attack in the background. She entered her 2fa code from the app on her phone but the interface rejected the code and asked her for another one. In the background, this 2nd code was actually to authorise the addition of a new "pay anyone" payee, and with that her money was gone[0].

I have accounts with 2 banks, one uses SMS 2fa and the other uses an app which generates a token. I had thought that the app was by default a better choice because of the inherent lack of security in SMS as a protcol BUT in the above attack the bank that sends the SMS would have been better because they send a different message when you're doing a transfer to a new payee than when you're logging in.

So really the ideal is not just having an app that generates a token but one that generates a specific type of token depending on what type of transaction you're performing and won't accept, for example, a login token when adding a new payee. I haven't seen any bank with that level of 2fa yet, has anyone else?

I guess perhaps passkeys make this obsolete anyway since it establishes a local physical connection to a piece of hardware.

[0] Ron Howard voice: "she eventually got it back"

rexf · a year ago

just this week, I clicked on the 1st search result ad for "amazon" in google search. It led me to a windows-themed "Virus detected" amazon clone. I'm not using Windows. I was able to close the tab, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for google search results.

(I know I could have just typed "amazon.com" and gone directly. But browser autocomplete makes it a tiny bit easier to use the omni-url bar and just type "amazon" than "amazon.com")

rexf commented on Kino: Pro Video Camera lux.camera/introducing-ki... · Posted by u/louis-paul

FireBeyond · 2 years ago

> A lifetime fee of $1, sold to a huge audience of 100k paid users, will pay for ~1 year of a single dev in the US, perhaps 2-3 years of a developer in a low-cost country. And then where does the money come from for updates in year 4 and beyond?

I challenge you to demonstrate the Pomodoro app that has a full time dev effort for a year, and then requires anything more than piecemeal bug fixes or maybe a recompile in that four years of support...

rexf · 2 years ago

Apple Watch app, widgets, Live Activities, new phone sizes... there are always things Apple wants you to add over time. Do you want meaningful updates or abandoned software? It doesn't take a full time job, but it's significantly more than $1 per install

rexf commented on I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened twitter.com/paulg/status/... · Posted by u/hakanderyal

parenthesis · 2 years ago

Can someone quote the whole thing here? Not everyone has a twitter / X account.

rexf · 2 years ago

Paul Graham (@paulg):

I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened:

> People have been claiming YC fired Sam Altman.

> That's not true. Here's what actually happened.

> For several years he was running both YC and OpenAI,

> but when OpenAI announced that it was going to

> have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going

> to be the CEO, we (specifically Jessica) told him

> that if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI,

> we should find someone else to run YC, and he

> agreed. If he'd said that he was going to find

> someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so that he could

> focus 100% on YC, we'd have been fine with that

> too. We didn't want him to leave, just to choose

> one or the other.

https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940

rexf commented on Bollards: Why and What josh.works/bollards... · Posted by u/mooreds

Aeolun · 2 years ago

Right in the middle of a cycle path is extremely obvious though. You basically have to not be paying attention for an extended period of time if you want to run into them.

rexf · 2 years ago

It's entirely possible someone is cycling and has reduced vision (sunset, evening time, sun in your eyes, etc.) or isn't 100% focused for a few seconds (while thinking about something else). Putting any physical obstacle in the middle of a path is a very odd and dangerous choice.

rexf commented on McDonald's and other big brands warn that low-income consumers starting to crack cnbc.com/2024/04/30/compa... · Posted by u/paulpauper

elric · 2 years ago

McDonald's used to be fast & cheap. But it's become slow and expensive. My local McD has switched to ordering kiosks with shitty touch screens, which are hell of a lot slower than in person ordering used to be. The UX is awful. Each item you add requires multiple taps, often a good 50cm away from the previous tap, and they try to trick you into adding shit you don't need at every possible opportunity. Then there's a 50% chance that the payment terminal won't work.

Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that the BigMac has gotten smaller of late. But maybe I've just gotten fatter.

rexf · 2 years ago

> Then there's a 50% chance that the payment terminal won't work.

where is this? In CA, almost all payment terminals seem to work in retail for me. Businesses would not stay in business easily if their payment accepting device was broken.

(And for McD's, it's not too difficult IMO to select & checkout via their native iOS app.)

rexf commented on Anatomy of a credit card rewards program bitsaboutmoney.com/archiv... · Posted by u/disgruntledphd2

soared · 2 years ago

How?

rexf · 2 years ago

It's not trivial to do. You have to save rewards points, learn transfer partners (and their booking sites), and be willing to book ~330 days in advance for certain flights.

rexf commented on Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right hugo.blog/2024/03/11/visi... · Posted by u/wolverine876

axus · 2 years ago

"Apple intentionally calibrated the Vision Pro display slightly out of focus to make pixels a bit blurry and hide the screen door effect “in plain sight”

Makes me think of the blurring effect of phosphors on a CRT.

rexf · 2 years ago

This is shocking to read. I tried the in store demo and my main take away was that the display wasn’t as crisp or sharp as I expected for a $4k device.

rexf commented on Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's traderjoesprices.com... · Posted by u/cmoog

ChuckMcM · 2 years ago

Given that these prices are going into a database, I was hoping that you could click on an item and get its pricing over time (not a referral link to the Trade Joes web site).

rexf · 2 years ago

TIL Trader Joe's has a website with prices.

(I shop their stores, but I don't use their website at all.)