I guess Oura hasn't heard the feedback about outsourcing their support/engineers yet! Enjoy knowing you made their app better, I'm sure with time it won't work anymore, sadly
I'm surprised you said he couldn't afford Switzerland, I thought they weren't supposed to make money off help with dying? Are they secretly making money then, or is there paperwork that's expensive to file?
The last time I checked Switzerland was still your best bet to exit with dignity rather than spending the last several years of your life as a bedridden vegetable kept barely alive with drugs, like several of my relatives were. As an (apparently) rational person I really can't fathom why we put people through this slow torture, is it based on some medieval religious superstition or something?
If you want to have a browser with a different engine you need a whole different developer account org, you need to maintain two different code bases and you need to very specifically set everything up to pass all of Apple's tests, which are incredibly onerous in time and work, so it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to do so for such a small market share (hell Google doesn't either, and they're a lot bigger than them)
> hell Google doesn't either, and they're a lot bigger than them
It’s more likely that Google is trying to boycott EU initiatives to the extent it can since giving them any support would only turn the public opinion more favorable towards more US tech regulation, and that’s very much against Google’s own interests.
Also, Google is quite comfortable with the current duopoly in the EU market which works in their favour. The last thing they want is chrome becoming even more dominant on the mobile market there.
It's actually the importer's info from the Chinese manufacturer, not the OP, since it's the switch packaging (it'd be inside the original package they'd have received from Aliexpress)
AliExpress shipping is wild.. as far as I understand it they try to find the cheapest place to send packages from, so (living in Europe) I've received packages from Australia and Azerbaijan. They probably send a palette of stuff to a country that has cheap International postage, and from there the palette of goods get broken down and packaged for the 1000s of end-consumers..
I once noticed that there were eBay auctions with free shipping closing with no bids, minimum 1 cent bid. I wrote a script and bid on 1000 random items, all from China, all Aliexpress style items. Every single one of them was shipped from Mongolia.
Yeah, I used to get stuff directly from China, then after the postage rate changes I was getting packages that had gone China -> Thailand -> Azerbaijan -> USA. Nowadays they seem to batch packages for the good shipping, from Aliexpress in China to (I assume) some US subsidiary, and then from there it gets parceled out to a shipping company seemingly at random (Maersk, Amazon, USPS).
So the US had the USPS stop subsidizing Chinese postage rates... and they innovated to leverage subsidies elsewhere.
Just stop subsidizing international shipping period seems the smart play. If they want to undercut their own high-end domestic competition and destroy foreign competitors then they can at least pay fair rates.
Which part of "send a giant box of stuff to the US using regular shipping channels and pay whatever duties and/or tariffs are due, sort it out into individual destinations once it gets there, and then deliver with USPS at regular domestic rates" involves this subsidy that you speak of?
You used to be able to get knickknacks on AliExpress (incl shipping) for less than the cost of a US domestic postage stamp. Nowadays it seems like free shipping has a higher minimum, and most of my items use unreliable gig economy services like uniuni for the last mile delivery
I regularly get addressed Aliexpress packages that contain multiple addressed packages (e.g. from the same order), so they may in fact be sending pallets full of packaged and addressed items to another country for re-packing and re-shipping
ATProto is closer to how RSS works than ActivityPub. In the same way talking about "RSS instances" makes little sense, the same goes for "ATProto instances".
It makes sense to talk about “RSS aggregators”. Especially it makes sense to talk about “RSS aggregators that speak a specific vocabulary on top of RSS, host 99% of content using that vocabulary, and if you host your own RSS feed with said vocabulary they’ll show it in their aggregator but can ban it any minute”.
Did I just describe Apple Podcasts? Huh. Regardless, yeah, there’s no “ATProto instances” technically, but there are ATProto apps and the single biggest one now owns the trademark to the protocol name.
i guess that's fair, but i've never listened to a podcast from a non-foss app; i'm not really "in" the podcast sphere, but from where i'm sitting it seems podcasting would survive and migrate just fine if apple podcasts had to go away suddenly
I guess that’s fair, too. I’m not really into podcasts either, and the ecosystem seems healthy enough. Many FOSS podcast clients use Apple for discovery, which I guess make sense; but there’s probably other databases, and the contents themselves aren’t usually hosted by Apple, just the metadata.
So yeah, podcasts are in good shape. In fact, they are probably the most used decentralized media right now (apart from torrents, maybe). I hope Bluesky gets to that point, and I do wish them luck, but we’ve got to see the incentives are not that well aligned. As for the trademark... it’s surely weird, it’s not the end of the world if they continue to hold it, but setting up a non-profit (not in US, perhaps) for the protocol itself would probably be more appropriate down the road.
The thing with ATProto is, there is little incentive in creating apps that speak the app.bsky vocabulary. If I understand correctly, there is one other full-fledged app that does that, Blacksky [0]. By full-fledged, I mean they host a PDS, a relay, an app view, a moderation service, and a bunch of feeds and other doodads. If Bluesky goes down, Blacksky will probably be fine. They are, however, yet another US company [1], which is not ideal.
I remember seeing stories about Adobe not being able to, or not wanting to, write a good energy efficient flash renderer for the iPhone, thus being another reason not to support it for Jobs (Adobe being of the mind that "Flash is so big, they'll have to support it" and Jobs proving otherwise)
They also either could not or would not write efficient Flash clients on Mac OS or Linux, while the Windows version was fine.
I bounced around a lot between the three OSes at that time, and Flash was bad enough on the other two that I would almost automatically reach for Windows when I had to use it.
Honestly there's lots of details so I can see why it would need to be 44 minutes, and it's still a video that also has to explain complexe schemes with multiple companies too
Interesting, does that mean we might get root support on the old unsupported Quest devices too? The Q1 is already discontinued and no more updates yet still locked down, and they did something similar for the Ofulus go, providing a rooted boot image for it
Next would be recovery tools too, so they're not paperweights
Pretty sure Carmack had to fall on his own sword to get the Go unlocked. Not sure anyone still there is as passionate about unlocking old devices, but maybe this is a sign of changing times...
That's true, it sucks only the Go got unlocked, I hope they let the older Quests do so too in the future, especially since I think the Q2 is going to be deprecated soon-ish too, that'd certainly be nice
