I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • They’re not missing funds though, it’s not a discrepancy in accounting. They overpaid , they know where the money is, and it’s simply a business decision whether to recover it or not.

    They could have simply filtered on overpayment above some arbitrary value based around recovery vs goodwill.

    Or they could have let it slide, but still notify people so that they wouldn’t be wondering if it was an accounting error.

    But no, they want to recover 23 cents which is well below the cost of everyone’s time and effort to deal with, on both sides of the transaction.




  • And holy shit does their algorithm latch onto any minor interest in their content.

    Accidentally tapped on a floor tiling video the other day, three days of tiling and handyman videos jammed into my feed and me pressing the “not interested” button on every single one.

    Facebook, I am there for the rare post from my 150 or so friends and family. That’s it. Nothing else.

    The reason we don’t use it anymore is because actual posts from real humans we know are buried under a torrent of shit. Sometimes their posts take days to surface leading to all sorts of chain-mail posts on how to “get your feed back”. None of which work because the whole business model is about jamming sponsored shit down your throat.









  • Why the fuck isn’t there just a simple status LED that is on the same circuit as the camera?

    Because cameras aren’t simple on-off devices powered by a single wire, that’s why. It’s always got power, and it’s turned “on” (send image data over the data bus) and “off” (do not send data) by software commands over the same data bus.

    So the most convenient solution is then have the camera IC have an output that can drive an indicator light. And as camera ICs are basically full computers in their own right, they can be reprogrammed so that they don’t turn on that output.

    End result is that you are much better off either having a physical cover over the camera lens, or having a USB camera that you can unplug.






  • You’ve got the motive back to front.

    yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs

    In modern cars those buttons are an input to a body computer which then sends commands over the vehicle data bus to another module that performs the appropriate function. The touchscreen option is much cheaper once you have more than a few buttons to deal with.

    Buttons have different physical shapes, the little decal for the button on each one has to be printed and put on top, each one needs to be connected to power, each one needs to be slotted into the dash somewhere , each one needs to be backlit so you can use it at night, and the signal for each one has to be routed somewhere through increasingly bulky harnesses, etc etc.

    A touchscreen sits on the vehicle data bus and with a bit of software, sends whatever command is needed.

    Is it a great user experience to press fiddly buttons on a touchscreen while driving down a bumpy road? Fuck no. But it is definitely cheaper and less complicated for the manufacturer.