I feel like that isn't even anything new, most businesses have worked like that for a long time. It's much more straightforward to be a supplier for a few big clients than to be a B2C. We just don't hear about them as often because of their nature.
It's never too late to improve your brain although there can be this false thinking that the brain needs "intellectual" hobbies to be healthy.
Yo give the most benefit, you should mix in hobbies like chess with things that stimulate your whole body and cause your brain to coordinate multiple systems at once. Something like dance is highly beneficial because you're not only listening to music, you're coordinating your movements, balance, emotions. If it's a social dance even better. You're coordinating your social skills as well.
I don't practice what I preach but I think social dance is the number one way to keep your brain healthy as well as your body if you're trying to be efficient.
I'm a firm believer that taking on something new every decade or so of life is an entirely good thing. I've watched so many people stop living in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. My heroes are people who keep doing what they love into their 80s and 90s, and keep finding new challenges along the way.
My understanding is that different types of exercises for your brain (chess, learning an instrument, etc) won't help prevent a decline, but that it might give you some tools to deal with it.
The CGI was preserved well enough for the fans who got access to some of it to re-render it in HD and upload to YouTube [0]. If WB cared even a little, fully CGI-rendered scenes could have been remastered relatively easily. The only scenes that are truly un-recoverable without redoing from scratch are those composited ones.
But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.
Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent.
The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway?
Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.
>Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway?
Because you literally connect to a git repo and your site is deployed, and scales with load. Compared to managing a VM, system and application packages, config, backups and then how do you scale that?
I have what is basically a demo running on Vercel free tier, there's no way I'm maintaining a VM for that lol.
If I had a serious site, same. If I had a team, then the equation would be different.
This is the Dropbox problem. People are willing to pay for convenience, and tech folks tend to underestimate how much convenience comes from seemingly simple solutions
it literally is though that's why i'm confused. you pay a flat monthly fee and get a box that runs linux. yes you might not be able to press one button and Effortlessly Deploy Your AI-Managed SaaS Infrastructure Product To Valued Customers Across The Metaverse or whatever vercel does but it only takes a couple hours to learn how to setup nginx node rsync and cloudflare (and even then i think there's some easier closer to one-click solutions)
also developing an app is something you need to be quite tech savvy to do anyway. genuinely are there really people who have the skill and patience to do that and then get stumped trying to deploy it? clearly there are since stuff like this is so popular I just don't really understand
I think the free/cheap tier is what gets people kind of hooked... it's really easy to setup something like Dokku self-hosted and run a few dozen apps on a decent rented server... Even then, there's something appealing about not having to even worry about it. Why bother setting up your own server(s) and databases when you can run in Cloudflare workers with CockroachLabs or Turso?
Even with my own server, I've explored the option(s) just to avoid potential pain down the road regarding excess load.
Russia switched 100% of its payments seamlessly, no reason for the EU not to do the same. Build up the network and tell banks to use that network even for transactions initiated with Visa/MC cards. At that point cards are still usable, but effectively a piece of identification plastic not directly controlled by Visa/MC anymore.
Italy has a similar size economy as Russia and they also have their own payment network. Technically there is nothing special. Countries have to come together and decide on a solution together.
On the other hand, if you step back a little bit, Russia is currently stuck in a Sovjet civil war, so I don’t think the Kremlin way is that great.
It is a good way if you want to protect yourself against pressure from the US. Sure, the Kremlin did it for reasons that don't exactly paint them in a good light, but this has nonetheless become a real risk for Europe as well.
Russia had roughly ten years to prepare. First talks about building national payment system started around 2010-2012. And it was meeting notable opposition: "why should we care? MC/Visa are good enough, why spend money on national infrastructure".
But yeah, it is amazing that in 2022 nobody here even noticed that MC/Visa left. Even MC/Visa cards haven't stopped working and are working to this day (banks made a rule that cards that expire after 2022 continue to work for several more years so that everybody has time to switch to MIR).
It's not seamless if it includes a war, global isolation, exodus of all business and disconnection of the banks. This means they were left with no alternative, in which case, sure, it's 'seamless' to use the only alternative method.
Europe will have a lot of friction with consumer habits and Visa will always be relevant for buying things from outside EU. These are all competing entities which hate anything that makes them seamlessly lose their business.
That's not how it worked, Russia prepared well in advance before the war (admittedly, after Crimea-related sanctions scared the hell out of them in 2014). When the 2022 sanctions dropped, transactions within Russian borders kept working seamlessly because the banks were already using the Mir network for those regardless of card types, i.e. you can still use your Russian-bank-issued Visa today for internal purchases. And I firmly believe that Europe needs the same kind of security for its digital payment systems, something akin to IBAN that solved this for EU-wide bank transfers (which is why I'm not sure if it's wise to use some random commercial product as a base).
Of course, right now nothing can dethrone Visa/MC for international payments, besides perhaps crypto in very limited and often shady scenarios. And Europe can't really do anything about that. But that's a different problem altogether (one that annoys me to no end as a frequent purchaser of digital products from Japan).
Nitpick: IBAN is a global identifier for a bank account. The transaction system where you enter an IBAN is called SEPA payment, or SEPA bank transfer, or something along those lines.
Just like I access hacker news by the Internet, not by IP address.
A lot of European online stores support asynchronous SEPA transfer. You complete your order, they issue a code and amount of money to send. You send the money with that reference code attached and they don't ship it until they get the money. It works for online order because you might be waiting a week anyway.
yes, but in many cases that is because this payment method predates "modern" online payment and they "just kept it around"
depending on what you buy "a lot" can be close to non or close to all
In the end it has major issues:
on the consumer side
- majorly reduced consumer protection compared to e.g. pay pal. If you wire transfer by yourself doing charge backs ~two weeks later after not getting the goods is hard, potentially non-viable (dep. on country etc.).
- you can typo address or reference number, leading to a lot of headaches (also recently they changed it so that the recipient "name" has to be correct, but many companies send you only IBAN,BIC,ref number and not the exact by letter company name under which the bank account operates...)
on the seller side (sometimes also affecting consumer)
- the order is in a "in-between" state until they receive the money, which can be days. During that time they can't rely on actually receiving the money but they also have to keep the good ready to sell. Especially in situations where you e.g. sell limited time/amount goods (e.g. resellers, collector goods etc.) this can be a pain. If you then add any form of expiration data (e.g. concert ticket) this can make the payment method a absolute no-go.
- your selling/order processing system needs access to your companies incoming transaction history, which preferably should be a separate account. This mean additional administrative overhead and failure conditions. Also many such systems are kinda build crappy in my experience.
while I have been using that in some situations it really isn't competitive as a modern online banking solutions
but what it also shows is that you can get really far with comparably "dump/naive" methods.
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Also for completion there is one additional SEPA method: That is you give the company the right to just take money from you bank account. You can split that into 2 versions: 1) permission for fixed amount reoccurring payments (e.g. donations,subscriptions) 2) arbitrary amounts at arbitrary times. The later requires a relatively high burden/overhead on the sellers side so you only see it with Amazone or Paypal
Standard legal protections still apply, one of you can sue the other for failing to fulfil the legally binding contract you made when you clicked checkout. Credit card payment can be fraudulent too, in all the same ways.
but also this means that major security features don't work anymore creating a higher risk for the bank
and Russia prepared for this for years after the sanctions related to the annexation of Crimea
and Russia kinda,nearly cut fully ties for the US
and it still hurt them quite a bit anyway
so such thing would be more like a last resort emergency solution then the "getting less dependent on while not cutting all ties" situations we currently have
IIRC, admins of a server can configure it to require different levels of authentication, from anonymous all the way to requiring a verified phone number (the latter of which I have so far refused to join).
This argument is often brought up against protesters, in Russian circles as well, but we need to remember that it's _the government_ that's jailing kids, not the protesters.
Kids, need to remember they're responsible for their choices. The people who manipulated and misdirected their energy to ends that would come with heavy consequences have lots of responsibility, too.
This was definitely a little frustrating. Matrix protocol does have stickers technically, I've been following that PR since its inception. But when I last used it in practice, admittedly a few years ago, the UX was lacking. Adding and posting stickers was _not_ straightforward, in fact adding new stickers was restricted somehow. Not sure how it works now, and maybe that's just inevitable with a decentralized protocol.
It’s not inevitable – the sticker packs (as currently implemented) live on your homeserver. So in a sense, it is decentralized already, and it’s only a matter of designing and building an interface to manage those packs (and hopefully making stickers link back to the packs, for better discoverability).
For now, you can override which server to use for the stickers. There’s an implementation that downloads Telegram sticker packs (but you have to specify which packs you want before deploying it).
Compared to Telegram, it feels like using a laggy MSN Messenger. The experience, both client and server-wise, just feels very unpolished. It's no single big thing, it's more like death by a thousand cuts.
I was bullish on Matrix because it's so extensible, but in the end I realized that only the default client experience matters as that's the one everyone will be using. And it just isn't there yet. In the end, all the group chats I was in migrated to Discord or Telegram, so I had no more reason to use it...
We explicitly built Element X to be competitive with Telegram's UX - I'm guessing that the feedback here is on the crusty old Element Classic app, which hasn't been touched for 3 years now, and definitely did feel like a laggy MSN by comparison.
Meanwhile Element X feels really really good - especially on iOS, but also Android has improved loads in the last few months (after tweaking the rustc ARM compilation flags properly, doh)
Thank you for your work. For my money there is literally nothing that free computing needs more right now than a consumer-ready open standard for encrypted IM. Matrix has been the obvious candidate for a decade. Let's get there.
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