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If that's an A/B test where user agents are randomly added to either control or a test group, and you change your user agent, then you are reassigned, because you changed the user agent
Last startup I worked for hired a Nepal-based QA person. There was a bunch of calendaring and daily/weekly charts in the apps, and she found bugs in _everything_.
I make sure to test with Nepal time whenever I'm testing date/time stuff now.
And, of course, there's the (hopefully apocryphal) story of the French initially referring to GMT as 'Paris time minus nine minutes and twenty-one seconds'.
As it happens, this story isn't apocryphal at all! One can readily find the original law, which was enacted on March 9, 1911, and published in the Journal officiel of March 10, 1911 [0]:
> Article unique. — L'heure légale en France et en Algérie est l'heure, temps moyen de Paris, retardée de neuf minutes vingt et une secondes.
The decree which finally replaced it was made on August 9, 1978, and published on August 19, 1978 [1]:
> Art. 2. — Sur l'ensemble du territoire de la République française, le temps légal (ou heure légale) est défini à partir du temps universel coordonné (UTC) établi par le bureau international de l'heure.
When I built a live clock for some new CasparCG based graphics for a major TV program out of singapore some years back, a colleague reviewing it in London tried to trick it with a Nepal offset — apparently they’d run into an issue with the Viz system they used in 2015 when there were a lot of lives from Nepal.
RealLifeLore just had a video about time zones in that area of the world, there's an area between New Zealand and Hawaii where you can go north/south and jump an entire day.
There isn't a perfect geographical width for time zones. So humans pick something to define the boundaries between time zones. And making boundaries on a map is political.
To some extent a compromise between solar time and political and economic realities. For example, the Eastern Time Zone in the USA stretches almost to 90 degrees West, reflecting the East Coast's powerful pull on that part of the country.
A lot of it was GE's fault at the time, specifically. GE wanted facilities in New York, Cincinnati (OH), and Louisville (KY), among others, to all be in the same time zone and had the economic power at the time to lobby the railroads and the cities to make that happen.
Friend told me that Indiana not adopting Daylight Time until quite recently was due to a struggle between broadcasters, who of course wanted to match their networks, and drive in operators, who wanted it to get dark earlier so they could start the shows earlier.
Yeah, Indiana also had an interesting three way battle between Chicago, Louisville, and Indianapolis. A lot of population near Chicago getting Chicago broadcasts (Central), a lot of population near Louisville getting Louisville broadcasts (Eastern), with the state capital Indianapolis interestingly caught up in the middle (physically closer to Chicago, but maybe emotionally more connected to Louisville) which itself as a city eventually after a lot of back and forth settled on Eastern time following Louisville's lead as one of the westernmost cities in the timezone.
Indiana's Daylight Time mistakes were fascinating. It wasn't that the state didn't adopt it, it was that originally the state allowed it to be a per-county decision as timezones have always been in Indiana. At one point in time if you were traveling I-65 which is nearly due north/south between Louisville and Indianapolis you could experience four different timezones (CST, EST, CDT, and EDT) and which ones agreed with each other obviously depended on which month you were traveling. Since Indiana went state-wide Daylight Time and Indianapolis decided on EDT once and for all, all of I-65 today is EDT I believe, but it is still strange to remember the years where that wasn't the case.
(ETA: one of the underappreciated homogenizing factors here has been the modern cellphone. People would get really confused if their cellphones hopped an hour back/forth every so many miles as you passed county lines. In the eras of paper maps and hand-set clock radios in cars that would have mattered a lot less.)
In Europe, a huge driver for standardization of timezones into "reasonable" slots was railway traffic, including cross-border traffic.
Railways are extremely sensitive to exact time and, indeed, the very concept of unified time across the entire region or country only started developing when railways expanded across Europe. Prior to that, individual towns were happy with their own local solar time, but once railway connections were introduced, time irregularities would cause chaos at best and carnage at worst. That led to introduction of unified railway time which developed to timezones as we know them.
Railways aren't as prominent nowadays as they were 100-150 years ago, and countries like Nepal and India don't have extensive, frequently used cross-border railways anyway; any cross-border traffic is sporadic and mostly freight. So there is one fewer reason to cooperate with your neighbors when it comes to time-related issues. Trucks can take weird timezone changes just fine.
That far south it only varies by a couple of degrees. It does wreak astronomical havoc in Mumbai, though, where the Sun will sometimes be way in the northeast at noon.
because humanity never understood time properly.. so all these facades making it look "simpler" while actualy a lot more complicated.
long time ago there was a special `$ man date` -like page in linux which went into long explaining many "amazing" things about calendar stuff, like whoever feudal in 1553 deciding that certain week was bad and striked it out of his and his country's calendar, or another one that liked certain month and decided to repeat it...
K-9 Mail joined Thunderbird to become Thunderbird Mobile [0]. They regularly publish progress updates [1] and their GitHub repository is regularly publishing releases and merging fixes and features [2].
What exactly do you want synced? Shouldn't the two mail clients just sync with your mail server individually? If you send an email from desktop, it will land in the sent folder, which the mobile client will then sync and show.
settings, calendar, tasks, contacts, I have multiple mail accounts and a lot of info that reside only on my main PC currently, I estimated that redoing everything would take hours to me.
Agreed! However, I also wonder what their ratio of spam vs. actual ASL-requiring-customer calls is. Since it's so easy and quick to connect to a real human with comolete audio and video enabled on both ends, won't it be prone to abuse?
The more such a service gets attention from regular media (instead of the niche, targeted audience it aims to serve), I fear it'll be another case of "why we can't have good things".
It’s already pretty easy for anyone to talk to an human at Apple tbh, be it by phone or by going to a physical store, their support is already really accessible for everyone.
Here if I understand you don’t get access to support but to an interpreter who will call the support for you. It’s of no interest if you don’t know ASL
Agreed, their customer side gets a person very quickly and so does their Apple Business Manager program. After spending many hours fighting AT&T’a automated and unhelpful customer support I got connected with a knowledgeable person instantly with ABM who was able to diagnose my issue at a level I never dreamed possible for what I’ve come to think of as “support” from most companies.
They were able to confirm the issue was on AT&T’s end, give me the exact language to use when talking to AT&T, and were nice and easy to work with. At one point they needed a picture of something and I braced myself for what that process would look like, it was stupid simple, they sent me an email with a link to upload the picture. It literally couldn’t have been easier but I don’t think most support places could have accomplished that task.
I have been an Apple customer for well over a decade and that ABM experience blew me away and made me happy I had gone with iPads for my business over cheaper Android tablets (one of _many_ reasons).
Something that baffles me about modern business is that Apple is far and away the most valuable company in the world, they’re phenomenally profitable, they’ve got an absolute mountain of cash, and they’ve done so by basically eschewing every page in the MBA playbook, and this has had no influence whatsoever on how the business world talks about proper business strategy.
They’re obsessive about quality, they treat design and customer experience as first class parts of the process, they invest heavily in long-term R&D, they have world leading support - they’ve basically done the opposite of what every financial analyst and business consultant in the world thinks is the right move, and as a result they’re worth more than Saudi-Aramco, and yet somehow every company out there is still sprinting in the exact opposite direction of how Apple operates.
Apple had one leader who thought differently, and that paid off, and now there is already some inertia inside apple because that is part of their brand. They put out one bad keyboard, mess with the ports in their macs and the world judges them harshly, everything is something gate.
Because Apple's way works does not mean other ways do not. Those other ways are way easier and cheaper, and businesses are fine chasing lower hanging fruits.
One part is probably because they are so secretive externally and internally, so there have been no business books on apples culture, playbook etc. No TED talks from ex Apple leaders.
I think Tesla is the closest to trying to follow their model, in a much scrappier way of course.
Tesla in no way follows Apple’s model. Musk has a very specific way of running companies reflected in both SpaceX and Tesla. That involves two key things Apple would never do:
- ship 90% solutions to learn very early what doesn’t work
- iterate and make changes very rapidly to the product
This can be seen in the model 3, which has had significant variations even within a year. Both improvements (better fit and finish) and likely mistakes (deleting lidar).
The same is seen on the SpaceX side. The starship launches were wildly successful despite the catastrophic endings. This can be seen in the live streams of the employees cheering wildly at the end (which completely baffled armchair critics).
I’m on the fence if this is a good way to run companies long term, but the general point is that it’s about as far from Apple’s culture as you can get.
That Apple doesn't ship 90% solutions is laughable. The initial versions of OSX, iPhone etc. had a lot of rough edges, and were practically public betas.
The only difference is that Jobs and later his deciples were able to blow smoke up your ass, and sell the obvious incomplete product as focusing on some other distraction, or something. Clearly the reality distortion field worked.
I'm not suggesting that Apple has egregious hardware or software problems, but (as a fanboy of neither company) that you're cherry-picking by claim that Apple isn't "ship[ping] 90% solutions to learn very early what doesn’t work".
Panel gaps or whatever at Tesla are obviously something they know about, it's not like nobody at Tesla is aware that their fit and finish doesn't match a Mercedes S-Class.
Whereas Antennagate is something that shouldn't have escaped the lab, I can't really a similar incident with Tesla.
The recent Starship explosion was a success, if you want to see the cost of avoiding rapid iteration when it comes to rockets look no further than the SLS.
They were in the early days. I remember someone posting about how their Tesla broke down and a Tesla flatbed pulled up with a working car, swapped them out, and left their car as a loaner
> Here if I understand you don’t get access to support but to an interpreter who will call the support for you. It’s of no interest if you don’t know ASL
I might receive some slack here, but I gave it a try (I don't know ASL). Within 5 seconds of clicking the button, I was connected to a live human, with both my video and sound, as well as the other person's, turned on (although I did have the ability to switch them off). There was no intermediate step to filter out spam calls. I did cut the call quickly though to avoid wasting their time!
Not to be that guy that tries to force LLMs into everything, but after automatically importing bank transactions, LLMs like GPT are very powerful in extracting information from the ill-formed, non-standard, transaction description, and subsequently classifying it. You can help train it by manually identifying and classifying the first few, and let it do the rest of the job. I've tried it out myself and works well for me!
How would LLMs really help though if all you get is usually an order number? I mean, it can probably figure out that an order from McDonalds is food related (though does it get categorized as "Everyday Lunch" or "Going out with Friends" or "Work Events"?) and Geico will probably be some sort of Insurance - but that would just be a large database of common payees, no real need for any AI. That said, if you're importing years worth of data, it would be a great starting point to get ballpark estimates of where your money goes, so that has value.
And then there's e.g., "Amazon Transaction AB2314ACWERF" which could be a new Fridge ("Household Appliances"), a 3D Printer ("Hobby Expenses"), a video game ("Entertainment Expenses"), or a giant double-headed adult massager ("Fax Machine Maintenance") - but the bank statement wouldn't have enough information.
Yep, that's one of its deficiencies! For me, something like GPT helps in triaging and "cleaning up" bulk of the transactions, with little micro-categorization left to be manually done.
I played around with this quite a bit with chat gpt 4 with confirmation instructions, and after a bit of time it starts going haywire. I played around with just creating in a simple csv format, transactions date, name, category (asking it to categorize it), and amount. After a couple runs it started going haywire and hallucinating with transactions I never created.
I created an internal rails clone of financier.io and just created a spreadsheet web area i could copy/paste mass transactions in so i could add a batch at a time ( I suppose I could upload a csv also, but the problem is every bank has different formats)
I have tried this and it works very well. I just copy paste my investments data from website and put it as a comment and usually copilot will figure out how to format it as a ledger transaction based on the previous transactions.
I am not sure if it will work with bulk import though. It's easy to spot mistakes with single entry, hard to do when you have lot of them
So far every time I've relied on automatic categorization for this sort of thing it fails horribly. I don't think I've used anything that's GPT based though.
I wrote my own script that uses the GPT API. For automating bank transcation downloads, it's just a cronjob that runs ever X hours and scrapes the information from the banking website.
One of my biggest irks with Google Maps is how aggressively it shows pins for hotels, bars and restaurants, even on their search results map. Do users really feel the need for this constant in-your-face advertisement?
But as I type this, I realized Google is primarily an ad business and whatever will drive that revenue will get pushed further. Oh well.
Yes, there are many possible conflicts of interest in mapping. This is why I'm excited to see the improving usability of Open Street Maps through apps like Organic Maps, and big commercial investments in open mapping data from the Overture Maps Foundation.
In many cases OSM has much more detail than google maps, with business listings and addresses being the biggest exceptions I have encountered. Fortunately, business listings are one of the main things added to the first data release from Overture Maps. For the curious, you can interact with the POI data [here.](https://bdon.github.io/overture-tiles/places.html)
If you really just want a map, go use OSM. I love it as well and even contributed. But Google Maps is much more than OSM. The biggest difference and most important feature is its real-time traffic. OSM is just a totally different product seen through the car navigation lens.
For me the killer Google Maps feature is using it as a search engine. The POI data on OSM has low coverage, is often out-of-date, and lacks reviews, so while it's quite good for (non-car) navigation, it's not very useful at all for finding places meeting certain criteria.
What irks me more is that I'll see pins for hotels, restaurants, etc.. but a search won't surface/highlight the pins I'm looking directly at!
Also attempting to search for a property that happens to have "hotel" or "apartment" in their name automatically switches to the stupid hotel finder interface, which only shows hotels that are bookable from online.
Google telephones most businesses in the world multiple times per year to confirm opening hours and ask what their hours will be at Christmas/other holidays.
Let that sink in. They have an actual human put actual minutes into speaking with every single business in their database. Think how much that alone must cost.
And they put all that money in simply so users can be a little more certain that the opening hours shown are correct.
> They have an actual human put actual minutes into speaking with every single business in their database. Think how much that alone must cost.
They may have done this in years past. I have worked in fast food for the last decades and I get Google's calls. They are all automated and the robot on the other end never understands me because the hours of the places I manage aren't simple enough to explain to Google's AI.
Of course OSM can't be updated with up-to-the-minute opening hours at all.
But nothing on OSM is "up-to-the-minute". Many OSM data consumers are months behind OSM discourages putting anything temporary on the map. While I do add OSM business hours including public holidays a lot, this isn't always possible when businesses don't have pre-planned holiday schedules.
The spec is very detailed and allows a lot of granularity. Unfortunately, real businesses often don't have set holiday schedules but rather play it by ear each year. OSM has no way to add "this business will be closed on these holidays this year, next year might be different". When lots of businesses introduced modified hours during the Covid lockdowns, there was no concept of temporary opening hours so a "opening_hours:covid19" was introduced. Older data consumers simply ignored that tag. More generally OSM is only for data that is (mostly) permanent. Adding "this business will be closed for Christmas this year" is not OSM data. "This business is closed on Christmas" can be added on OSM. But many businesses don't plan that far ahead as to have set announced holiday hours that can be written in the OSM opening_hours syntax.
I own a business in Denmark, I never received a call as described. I received lots of email reminders though, because this is something you can update yourself.
Snarky, but I expect that to be a kind-of circle with a small radius, around their offices and the favorite places their employees in SF visit.
Never heard of this happening, and not something I'd expect google to do. I'd expect them to send emails at most, with a link to some page that is broken for anyone not using Chrome, then no support available.
Maybe my business is a corner case which avoids the automation - I am open usually 9-5ish, but can be open anytime if a customer rings the well and waits for someone to get out of bed.
Google has an actual human call every 2-3 months, who usually just asks the opening hours, confirms one other detail (usually the website) and then says goodbye.
These calls should be automated in most cases [1]. Still an impressive feat, but there is no way they are paying a large number of people to phone through all businesses in the world.
I'm pretty sure only the square pins are ads. So the deluge of hotel pins showing in the map near my house isn't even making them money, it's just an out of control algorithm or terrible product choice.
Many people use hotels, bars, and restaurants as landmarks.
If you know an area, it’s easier to remember something is near so and so resturaunt than to remember street names (if in fact your streets actually have names).
Restaurants, to each their own. A dozen hotels marked within a five mile radius of my home, which Google knows very well about, at all times? That’s just stupid.
You can exclude targeting people on Google Maps ads when they're near their home. If the hotels want to pay for more impressions and not target their ads appropriately, Google is happy to take their money.
This is really more the hotel marketing team's fault than Google's.
Interesting. I have an inherent distrust with reviews and descriptions on Google Maps, at least for where I live (India). I usually resort to other services to look for good restaurant/hotel recommendations.
