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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • I think the old plastic rings have been banned in some states. For cans I’ve mostly seen beer cans now coming in a thicker but more widely recyclable ring. Sometimes they come in paperboard boxes like the larger packs do and suspect that’s where the industry is moving. I’ve still seen something like the old rings come with soda in plastic bottles. Really not sure why they haven’t changed.




  • People used to post Piped/Invidious links all the time, but that eventually became a problem because it meant the link often went to a different proxy than the one that might be a user’s preferred server, and it made it harder to copy the link for use with a preferred server. After some discussion, the consensus became that people should just post the YouTube URL as the main link so users could utilize the preferred proxy they likely already have configured, and then (optionally) include a Piped/Invidious link in the body text for those who don’t currently use a proxy but would like to try it.


  • I haven’t paid much attention, but I had some myCharge units I bought at Costco last year get recalled. I suspect a lot of these have cheap batteries from suppliers that don’t put much effort into consistent quality. That’s “okay” with alkaline batteries where the worst that happens is they leak and maybe ruin the device they were in. Have poor quality with a lithium battery and you get a fire or even explosion. I suspect with Anker or some of the other brand names at least you’ll actually get a recall if there’s a problem. A lot of the other no-name, fly-by-night brands on Amazon or elsewhere probably don’t even give you that.





  • All the abovementioned practices were facilitated by Delivery Hero’s minority shareholding in Glovo. Owning a stake in a competitor is not in itself illegal, but in this specific case it enabled anti-competitive contacts between the two rival companies at several levels. It also allowed Delivery Hero to obtain access to commercially sensitive information and to influence decision-making processes in Glovo, and ultimately to align the two companies’ respective business strategies. This shows that horizontal cross-ownership between competitors may raise antitrust risks and should be handled carefully.

    I suppose it can work if they still face robust external competition, like how Hyundai and Kia own stakes in each other and use their combined efforts to compete on the global market, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if even that has anticompetitive implications in their home market of South Korea, both for consumers and workers.


  • I read an article a while back highlighting how many “tech bro” products seem to be about eliminating human interaction, like grocery or meal deliveries, or self-checkout in stores. There is a convenience factor for these things at times, of course, but with the way many of these executives seem to be pushing exclusively using their services and having zero direct interactions with other humans it starts to raise questions about perhaps their own interpersonal skills and why they want to eliminate the human interaction. This feels like more of the same.



  • That’s fair, and I think a lot of the problems with that software was the internal developer/administrator for the software (I think it marketed itself as Open Source but was probably more accurately Source Available to customers) had taken it hostage with no one else allowed to touch it. I think it had become the proverbial million lines of undocumented spaghetti code that had guaranteed a permanent job for this guy because if he left the entire business would fall apart, including an inability to bring in revenue. Everyone knew he was a problem, except perhaps his boss, the CFO. When our companies merged they were originally supposed to join us on NetSuite (not without its problems of course but definitely better than the other software) but the hostage taker supposedly convinced the CFO that NetSuite wouldn’t be able to produce a report the CFO liked and we wound up moving to theirs instead. It was also supposed to save money by having lower user licensing costs. They brought in an outside consultant for our transition because the internal guy was too busy but then it turned out the internal guy was doing a bunch of non-standard stuff that didn’t work with the consultant’s design and the internal guy had to redo it anyways. When I left two and a half years later the company had spent millions on the transition and two different additional major pieces of software (the second replacing the first) trying to replicate what we’d had in NetSuite but was still lacking much of that functionality.


  • The advantage browser-based ones have is it’s generally easy to copy/paste any text you need. I used one that ran as its own desktop software and made many of the key text fields uneditable, instead of letting you copy text from them but refusing to save any changes to those fields that must not change. Want to grab the order number for this customer? Too bad! Type it yourself or export it to PDF and copy it from there! I was so happy when I discovered a little program that lets you copy any text on the screen by effectively taking a screenshot, running OCR on the screenshot, and putting the output onto your clipboard. Still took more effort than simply right-clicking the text and hitting copy, though, or double-clicking and hitting Ctrl-C.