I was watching the news last night and they interviewed an older woman who left her high paying finance career to work as a florist. It's far less pay, and she finds her life much more rewarding and happy now.
Based on your post, you would look down at her florist job and think it's unfortunate she never achieved her dream in life. Meanwhile, she realized her dream, and she left her high paying comfortable career to achieve it.
In short, stop making assumptions that other people have the same dream as you or want to be in your position. Not everyone thinks a comfortable job is the definition of success or happiness in life. You know nothing about these people, their families, their friends, their hobbies, or their goals. It's really rude to assume they need your large tips or that they have a less fulfilling life. You'd probably be surprised how many of these people have no interest in trading places with you.
Credit card transactions are much easier to reverse. For example, I went to a restaurant and a few days later I noticed they double charged the bill. I called the restaurant, they wouldn't fix the issue, so I called the credit card company and it was quickly reversed. That doesn't happen with a debit card.
Credit cards also come with all sorts of benefits. You can easily get 1-2% off all purchases through cash-back or gift card rewards. You can get free insurance with car rentals. Many cards also offer an extra one year warranty on most purchases, so if you paid for your laptop or phone with your credit card and it dies just outside of the manufacturer warranty, you might still be covered.
The scenario you described will absolutely fall under most card networks' transaction dispute rules. In day-to-day spending a debit card is just as safe as a credit card when it comes to fraud or malicious merchants.
The only time a credit card will be better is grey areas where a card network dispute doesn't succeed, in which case the law in most countries forces the credit card provider to eat the loss. In some of those cases, the reason why a credit card chargeback succeeds is not necessarily because you are right (if you were, the dispute process would've succeeded anyway) but because the amount is too low for the issuer to care so they just eat it to not have to investigate and/or litigate the issue.
I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google.
1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion.
2. You block Google from indexing the sites.
3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit.
4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarantee them decent traffic because they'll only be competing against a dozen sites on your search engine, instead of millions on Google.
5. A large number of respectable sites leave Google and are only available on your search engine. Businesses start becoming eager to join your exclusive network and ask to join your mission.
6. Google is left with blog and affiliate SEO spam, and you become the hero of the search engine world.
As your search engine tips in to popularity all sites on it are overrun with spammy SEO content as marketers search for the next way to get more eyeballs on their ads.
Both Reddit and Stack Overflow have plenty of sites scraping their content and hosting copies. People would just go to those sites from Google instead of the real ones.
Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?
So in the last couple of days I've ended up doing a lot of research into equipment that I wasn't familiar with - commercial coffee equipment - and what I quickly found is that standard Google results are pretty much all blogspam. Not terrible info but it all feels like advertising while what I want is shared experiences from people who have actually used the equipment, not blogs that are actually ads from people who are trying to sell it to me.
So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit.
YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.
Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.
Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?
Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.
Ranking results by author's credibility (site karma) could help, at least for the time being.
It's not that the comments are plain ads (these will be easy for the reader to discern), it's dishonest product reviews. It's an unsolved problem in e-commerce websites and even in real life.
A lot of people add "reddit" to their search results for certain types of searches, including product reviews. It provides a ton of information from real people and cuts a lot of the garbage out.
If a site allows crawling by at least one public-Internet spider, is there any legal protection it has against other crawlers who choose to ignore robots.txt and crawl anyway? Because I feel like that's exactly what Google would do here, as long as it wasn't literally illegal for them to do so.
It's kinda unclear at the moment, but it's working its way through the courts! See HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn [1] in which HiQ was scraping public profiles and was blocked from doing so by LinkedIn. This made its way to court and the 9th circuit ruled they were allowed to scrape but SCOTUS later rejected the decision and sent it back. So—murky!
Google has prepared counter-moves for every step of your path. E.g. can you guarantee (2) against all moves Google could make?
Even if you succeed in securing an island of quality content: How big is your audience? I don't remember the exact quote but somebody said that television is the way it is because that's what people want.
Yahoo should have chosen to become a media company. Now they would have all the knowledge to mix search results in a way that is rewarded by the market. It's the academics of the early internet who want the best results. Everybody else wants to be entertained.
Huh? What counter moves? You buy Reddit, Google buys X? Why would that be inevitable, and why, if there is a counter move, would it function as a stopper or defeater rather than just as some separate thing that also exists? What even is the other reddit? Why wouldn't google's prospective counter acquisition just say no to their offer? And is it an acquisition, right, or does Google build something to compete? And why would that work, given googles history of abandoning it's own projects to the Google graveyard? And where even is the precedent for this kind of reactionary behavior as a strategic actor? Wouldn't Google just ignore it, focus on it's core products like it always does? This just sounds like a kid playing with action figures.
And that's just the first sentence!
It's also just kind of frustrating because it's the kind of response that comes from a place of refusing to engage with a hypothetical exercise. Failing to meet these exercises with the spirit of open-ended curiosity, as they loosen suspension of disbelief just enough to make it possible to canvas the space of strategic possibilities, is a misunderstanding of the exercise, and it's just the kind of sleepwalking response that turns potentially fruitful conversations into dreary dead ends.
Couldn't that backfire though. Most people imo would find it it infuriating to jump between search engines at first leading to plenty new alternatives taking over ultimately leading to the demise of the above mentioned sites.
I think this would spark all out search engine war. It would further degrade quality of search engines actually their usability since web content would be fragmented between different search engines.
But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.
As a customer, I find these type of sale strategies absolutely exhausting. I hate booking flights for this reason. I find a fair price, try to coordinate time off, accommodation, my partner's schedule, and then I go to book and... the price has doubled. Ok, cancel that plan, I'll search for alternatives and wait a few days to see if the prices improve. Ok, there's a deal again, but I'll need to shift things by a week. I'll just make that adjustment to my schedule and get confirmation, go to book, and... the prices have changed again.
For another example, I'm thinking about buying a laptop this month. Companies like Lenovo completely turn me off with their $4,500 prices minus $2,450 in "eCoupons". Another pain point is manufacturers that give different prices for the identical laptop configuration, simply because I started the customization wizard with different base models. I have no respect for these companies as they waste my time. I like the Apple pricing approach. I can feel confident making a purchase at any moment, because I know their prices don't fluctuate weekly, and they're not going to have a 30% off coupon code a month after launch that makes me feel like a fool.
Nice work, it's lightweight and fast to load. A few notes after using it for a bit...
1. There's far too much white space and unnecessarily large headers. Reading content in cafes seems to be the heart of the site, however, this is what I see when opening a cafe on my 1920x1080 monitor - https://i.imgur.com/1j0exRM.png. There's literally not a single piece of content for a returning user to read without scrolling.
2. Something weird is happening with post times. I saw a comment that was posted -666 seconds ago, which snapped to 3 minutes ago after refreshing.
3. The background color is too light and it blends with the discussions, making it difficult to visually separate them. Here is the existing background - https://i.imgur.com/wVr0RYs.png and a darker one to add more structure - https://i.imgur.com/U5sekNI.png.
4. Overall I find the content a little hard to read. I prefer sites with discussion titles (Reddit/HN/forums) as they help to summarize an entire post or image in a few words. Without them I need to spend too much time reading each discussion trying to parse what it's about and if it's relevant to my interests.
Thanks this all helps a lot. I am adding it to my feedback document and I will make some changes. The time thing sounds like the JS failed to connect for a second to the backend endpoint, thats what tells the site what the timestamp is now for it to calculate times.
I had this happen as well about 8 years ago. My Gmail account one day just said it couldn't log me in, even though my password was correct, and I was logging in from the same home address and browser as always. It said I needed to complete the security question to access my account. I didn't know the answer because I just set random letters and numbers for the security answer when configuring the account recovery, because I was confident in my password and backup system. Since I couldn't answer that question, and because Google has no support, I could never access that account again while knowing the password.
Fortunately this was a secondary email address, and my primary email was on my own domain.
You might want to wait for the new Intel Alder Lake processors or upcoming AMD options. Early benchmarks look promising with a decent jump in performance and efficiency and they should be rolling out in laptops the next few months.
I've seen some work on, and expect some games have used, a similar method where they'll have a bidirectional process to generate something from a seed, AND create a seed after having crafted something, allowing them to mix and match, and still achieve a super high compression rate (as, at the end, all that is stored for each face or other element is the seed that generates it).
Certainly, there are similar things in user space where you can share your creations from some games using a code that was generated or similar.
I believe this is done to get answers for unsolved captchas. For example, I have a million photos of streets filled with cars, buses, motorcycles, streetlights, and crosswalks I want to add to my captcha database. I don't want to categorize them all myself, and I want the answers to be what the average person will identify, not what I or a machine will identify.
So, I send everyone two captchas. One has a known answer and is required to be correct to access the service. The second captcha answer isn't yet known, so it doesn't matter what the user selects. However, when they get the known answer right, we log their answer for the unknown captcha. Once we get a large enough sample, we then have our top answers for the unknown captcha and can start using it for verification.
I always assumed that's how it works so would do the first correctly and random clicks for the second. This is as I was uninterested though doubt it is still that simple.
I wonder, what are the minimum number of labels per image to ensure clean data?
I have some older family friends that frequently go mushroom picking. I went with them one day and had a great time. We spent the afternoon walking through a beautiful forest enjoying the weather, bonding, and collecting mushrooms. We then went home and they cooked up a tasty meal with the mushrooms from the day.
It reminded me of going out fishing with my father, where we'd spend the day on the lake just talking and tossing some lines in the water. Every once in a while we'd catch a fish, occasionally there would be some excitement and we'd catch a large or unusual fish, and then we'd go home and fry them up for the family. Sure, we could have went to the grocery store and bought a few fillets, but that was never the point of the day out in the first place.
You're right, the fish are safer to eat. However, I know a relative that died ice fishing and a friend of my fathers that died in a boating accident. Being on the water comes with its own set of risks.
I've never picked a toxic mushroom. So while it's a risk one should be aware of, and you should know how to do it right, it's not that dangerous if you follow the safety advice. Just like most people don't get killed by sharks or fall of anboat.and drown when going fishing.
Based on your post, you would look down at her florist job and think it's unfortunate she never achieved her dream in life. Meanwhile, she realized her dream, and she left her high paying comfortable career to achieve it.
In short, stop making assumptions that other people have the same dream as you or want to be in your position. Not everyone thinks a comfortable job is the definition of success or happiness in life. You know nothing about these people, their families, their friends, their hobbies, or their goals. It's really rude to assume they need your large tips or that they have a less fulfilling life. You'd probably be surprised how many of these people have no interest in trading places with you.