You can either do it through the Stripe dashboard by creating a Payment Link with a "Customer chooses what to pay" type or through the API (see https://docs.stripe.com/payment-links/api).
This modal pops up when you enable Bouncer on iOS 18:
"The developer of 'Bouncer' will receive the text, attachments, and sender information in SMS and MMS messages from senders not in your Contacts. Messages may include personal or sensitive information like bank verification codes."
> For privacy reasons, the system handles all communication with your associated server; your Message Filter app extension can’t access the network directly.
Thanks for the documentation link, I was uneasy about using this type of extension.
They do, but it's important to realize here that there is, in fact, a small demographic who actually want to get that political spam. So messages like that are going to get through the automated spam filter.
I suppose they could bundle a more advanced rules-based system, but since there's an API for user apps to do it, why not leave the job up to them?
"Wow! 50M hours a day of time saved seems like a lot. How could they be evil if they're getting people to spend less time on FB?"
50M hours / 1.5B DAU is about .03 hours, or about <2 minutes per person. The average person spends 1h15m on FB, this is less than a 3% drop in overall time, but likely a larger proportion of that time is spent scrolling and seeing more ads than it is fixed on a single video.
That's total time spent on social media. According to the source, Facebook's usage is 38 minutes a day. I suppose this also counts people who don't use Facebook though.
This reminds me of the “free iTunes song” promotion Apple and Pepsi ran in ~2005. Some Pepsi bottles had codes under the bottle cap that could be redeemed for a free song; non-winning caps just said “Sorry Try Again”.
You still had to buy the soda to get the free song, but if you’re going to drink soda anyway, spending a minute or two picking a bottle with a free song gave you a nice little bonus.
I'm still waiting for a USB-C charger with more than two ports. Until then, I'm sticking with USB-A cables for everything except my MacBook Pro. For travel (where outlets are often at a premium), I use a four port USB-A charger on a nightstand to charge 2 iPhones and an Apple Watch (this one: https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Charger-Foldable-PowerPort-Sams...).
I have a mouth guard that keeps my mouth open and pulls my jaw forward (via rubber bands connecting the top and bottom pieces) that helps cut down on snoring. It works less well once the bands are stretched out a bit (you can swap them out though), but overall it's helped improve my and my girlfriend's sleep considerably.
I have one that was custom molded but it looks like you can get OTC mouth guards as well.
I've been doing Rails development for ~10 years and maybe it's just a sign that I'm getting older, but for me the biggest problem isn't Rails, it's Ruby.
In the past year or so I've done a lot of more modern JS development (with Babel and Flow) and toyed around with Elixir and ReasonML. Ruby hasn't seen much change in the past couple of years (granted it's much more mature than Elixir/Reason) and while it was a boon to developer productivity and happiness compared to the languages of the time, I think we've probably found a better balance in type systems these days than Ruby and the like did at the time.
Maybe it's just legacy codebases, but manually reasoning about types is huge time sink and are one of our leading causes of production errors. Explicit typing also informs better design (I've seen many a Ruby method have return type of `String | Array | nil`). Unit tests help, but why outsource that to tests and guard statements (where you have to check every type) when a computer can do that for you?
> I've been doing Rails development for ~10 years...
I'm a long time Rails dev as well. IMHO the main problem with the Ruby ecosystem is that the libraries haven't moved on into the current day and age. I find myself building more and more projects in something like Java or Python because those ecosystems have the firepower of the ML, AI, data processing libraries. And while I'd still say Rails is the best for building pure web and rest API stuff, Java and Python have gained a lot of ground and when all your real app power is in Python or Java a lot of times its not worth wrapping your core apps in another runtime just to provide a rest interface.
I hesitate to even say that I'm a Rails guy anymore because I've modified it for my own purposes so heavily that it's fundamentally a different thing[0] but I'm also a data scientist and when I need data science I just use python. It's so much easier to just have python / cython / numba and Rails share databases and just communicate through that when needed. For the stuff that can't communicate through the DB I can either fork off traffic to python in nginx or communicate through something that unix provides (pipes, ports, files, 0mq, whatever).
Ruby / Rails is so much more productive for me. No other language nails so many features as well as Ruby. Blocks are great, the meta-programming is natural and easy to debug, c-extensions are easy, and I generally like the balance it strikes with types. Couple quibbles here and there, to be sure, but usually the DB acts as my type enforcer and the high degree of test coverage covers the rest. Plus whenever I think something is risky I just throw in an explicit type coercion or exception, but it is rare.
I find people generally fall into one of three categories: Documentation enthusiasts, type enthusiasts, or test enthusiasts. Because I prefer human readable code I prefer meta-programming and because I prefer meta-programming I prefer tests over types or documentation. Though I don't pretend it's drawback-free, it is the environment that makes me happiest.
I think my next major thing will be to modify ruby itself because there are things that are missing that I feel could make it even better, but I'm trying to figure out if I can get away with just doing it in a really powerful gem.
[0] Designing for billions of writes per day, JSON API 1.1 + auto linking and pagination, dead simple defaults for controllers, lots of extra methods for better code legibility, etc. I've been thinking of extracting it all out into its own thing but I don't want to deal with the headaches of communicating breaking API changes.
Absolutely. Another 10yr Rails dev here. I believe that rails is untouchable as far is it comes to the ecosystem of gems and getting something quickly built and online, however I’m now moving all future apps to Django/ flask in python to take more advantage of the serverless ecosystem, and all of the data processing libraries out there. I’ll miss you Ruby
You may enjoy using Contracts and the Dry-rb suite. It makes ruby behave in a more functional way without sacrificing the extreme flexibility that is inherit in the language.
There was a good blog post about this from Thomas Reynolds the developer of Middleman a little while ago[0]
Nope, sorry but just nope. I use dry-validations and it’s fine for what it is, but unless this stuff is at the language level it’s just a hack and janky to use, which sacrifices one of ruby’s main attractions - language aesthetics.
I agree with parent, ruby is a pain to work in, especially if you’ve drunk the FP koolaid. I’m back doing rails again after a while doing react front end stuff and a bunch of own time elixir. Ruby needs to allow more functional programming imo.
Sure, it's definitely a hack on top of the language, but sometimes you don't have the option to rewrite and those tools can make your code more functional without having to switch stacks. It's not perfect, it's just a bit better than the alternative in many cases.
Careful, the dry-rb people are very sensitive. I posted a similar "nope" comment on r/Ruby a few years ago and now I have massively negative karma on that sub.
In my personal experience, Dry-rb is the "bargaining" stage of grief over the current state of Ruby and Rails. When you finally reach "acceptance," you move on to another stack entirely.
Exceptions are also problematic in Ruby. It quickly becomes impossible to look at any method and answer the question "what exceptions can this raise?"
Ruby has rich exception handling mechanisms, but everyone just uses "rescue" without any arguments (or worse, "rescue Exception") because of the elusiveness of the answers to that question.
Discipline can only get you so far. If you call a method coming from a third-party gem, you will still have no idea what exceptions could be raised by it no matter how well you've handled exceptions sourced from your own code.
It definitely is, but what happens when you'd like to use the other behavior? There's definitely certain occasions in which you want to use the not-best way to do thing. Leaving the choice to the programmer rather than removing the feature from the language is the way to go imo.
Yes, you can absolutely make Exceptions a first-class domain concept, I've been doing this in a worker instrumentation that I've been doing. I have a custom error class that inherits from StandardError, and the exception handling code handles these custom errors differently than other errors.
This way knowledge can be slowly wrapped around the failure modes as they get seen.
Performance in Ruby has improved. What people are using Ruby for seems to be constrained to "Rails" and Chef. At least going off the job ads in my area.
Meanwhile, Python, JS, Go, Java jobs run the gamut from webdev, ML, to game programming, and custom BI.
Not saying people aren't using Ruby out there, but 5-6 years ago it was all the rage. Couldn't turn around w/o bumping into a Ruby shop.
It seems to have settled into a Niche of "Rails devs" and Ruby fans using it.
There was a post about this a while ago but that's pretty US-centric.
In Japan there is a lot of attention on Embedded Ruby (hence the performance improvements). 99% of the professional Ruby work that I've done here in NY is not Rails. I've done everything from webdev (Jekyll, Sinatra), ETL work, to systems engineering all in Ruby. I've toyed around with Ruby & SDL but the performance at the time (4 years ago) was not good.
I've been doing Rails development since the day it was originally open sourced and while I agree about your sentiments about Ruby, I think Rails is also really starting to really show its age. It was a great leap forward at the time, but we've learned a lot of lessons in the meantime.
> When you are in a place where it's eat food that gives you no vitamins, no protein, no micronutrients, etcetera, or eat food that does not give you enough basic breakdown of glucose to get your body through another day, you do not have the luxury
But McDonalds and fast foods are much more expensive than healthy foods like rice, beans, rolled oats and potatoes, onions (all can be had for less than 1$ per pound). They should allow people to purchase those foods, and maybe even publish a guide on how to stretch each dollar farther.
as i said before, Beans especially are very well balanced, super high in fiber, protein and micronutrients.
I can't feed yourself on onions. And diet based on rice and potatos is not all that better for you. And you have to know hoe to prepare these so that they are remotely tasty.
I had my Venmo account temporarily terminated a few weeks ago. I didn't do anything other than be the recipient of a $139.99 payment from a stranger "for laundry". My account was unfrozen, but I think it was out of sheer luck more than anything. A less savvy person would have likely taken the notification at face value and left it at that.
I searched around for what to do in this situation and came across many reports of this type of scam, where an unknown sender "accidentally" sends payment, request a payment from me for the money back, and simultaneously cancels the transaction. I did nothing and hoped the issue would resolve itself.
Two days later, I get an email saying my Venmo account has been frozen "due to recent activity that appears to be a violation of our User Agreement." After reaching out to Venmo via chat, I had a similar interaction as the article. They told me my account was frozen, that my case was being handled by an Account Specialist, and that would be in touch via email.
The next day I got an email from the Account Specialist saying my actions and activity were in violation of the ToS and that my account was permanently deactivated.
I reached out to support again and played dumb, saying I received payment from a stranger but can't send the money back because my balance didn't go up. Support again said they couldn't do anything, that my account was frozen by an Account Specialist, and that they would be in touch via email.
The Account Specialist sent me an email saying the payment was refunded and that I should reach out to the sender directly, to which I responded that I didn't know who the sender was and I assumed the payments were made in error and asking them to confirm that I had to take no further action. They responded with a form email saying my account had been unfrozen. "However, please keep in mind that the state of your account can be revised if your transaction history raises flags on our system in the future."
A co-worker's PayPal was frozen because he sent me money for lunch. We went Little Havana[1], his note on the transaction was "Little havana". PayPal held the transaction and froze the account because he used the word "havana".
It's absurd that there isn't an option in Venmo to reject all transactions from people who aren't friends. If someone's Venmo profile is public I could send them money with the note "Drugs deal to fund terrorist activities." and there is nothing they could do to stop it. Might be a good way to mess with someone you don't like, especially if they carry a balance on Venmo.
That's why it is so infuriating when people respond to any criticism with "well just stop doing business with them!" That's fine until it isn't.
We have exactly one hospital in town. We have exactly one ambulance company in town. We have two medi-vac helicopter providers but you don't get to pick. We have one garbage company (Waste Management) that you're legally required to use in a residential property. One power/gas utility. One water utility.
All of those are private companies, but I have zero ability to switch. There's no competition. They're completely monopolistic either through regulation or naturally. If this is healthy capitalism I'd hate to see unhealthy.
Garbage pickup is particularly galling. It used to be public, government employees, with no profit motive. You had a complaint process. For ideological or "campaign contribution" reasons politicians gave it away to Waste Management, complaints are now handled by nobody, and fees climb year upon year.
> That's why it is so infuriating when people respond to any criticism with "well just stop doing business with them!"
God, I hate that phrase. There's a grain of truth to it, in certain contexts, but at this point its just an unthinking regurgitation used to protect the utterer from uncomfortable realities.
Would it be possible for someone else to start their own garbage company or hospital with minimum government interference? If not, then you are already seeing "unhealthy capitalism."
If the ToS requires you to waive your right to sue in exchange for binding arbitration, you can't even sue, you instead have to go to a private judge chosen by the party that wronged you.
I am curious to discover more about such scenarios. My understanding was that they generally use American Arbitrator's Association and do not have a say on what kind of arbitrator gets assigned to them.
This doesn't help when the entire arbitration system is biased towards corporations. They are the ones providing them with repeat business.
The proceedings are secret, the rules of arbitration are arbitrary and capricious, and you have no legal recourse if you run into bias, favoritism, conflict of interest, grotesque and willful misinterpretation of the law, or just plain old injustice.
If you actually want a low-cost, low-friction way to fairly resolve simple disputes, we already have such a system. It's called small claims court. Arbitration takes the scales of justice, and puts a pound of flesh on one side of the scale.
There's still a conflict of interest there - arbitration will only continue to be used if it provides a more favourable outcome than going to the courts.
> If the government fucks up, I have an easy way of appealing, everything is clearly defined.
So very optimistic. My wife is a foreigner, so she must deal with visas and visa extensions and paperwork and still being brought by immigration officials into tiny rooms and grilled about her paperwork despite everything being correct whenever she comes back from abroad. Our children are citizens of one or possibly two different countries, depending on whose government you ask. I could give plenty more examples but don't want to give up too much personal info. "Clearly defined?" What a laugh.
Does Venmo have many international users in practice? Venmo's terms of service require that you be a US resident physically in the US in order to use it, so I'm not sure how things would go if someone from or in another country were to try a lawsuit or arbitration relating to Venmo.
But I agree with your broader point, both in general and about Venmo and PayPal. They are shady enough companies that I don't have a Venmo account, leave my PayPal account dormant with no bank accounts linked, and opted out of arbitration when PayPal added that.
And this is why it’s so scary that our societies are moving towards using such private companies for basically core infrastructure of society.
One might turn this on its head, and suspect that this loss of agency might be the entire point of society changing in this way. TPTB have heard quite enough from the little people, thank you very much.
