So uncomfortably true!
I recall spending a (large) number of weeks struggling through Elementary Stochastic Calculus, which had an incredibly misleading sticker on the cover proclaiming:-
“This book is suitable for the reader without a deep mathematical background.”
The first report I looked at was Entrust refusing to revoke certs because their clients’ manual processes would make applying reissued certificates inconvenient.
Quite fun reading, surprisingly - a mid thread revelation that they’d pulled the exact same shit 4 years ago, an attempt by Entrust to kill the issue because unattributed legal advice said they’d misreported the error. And then, just when their chutzpah seemed to be wearing everyone down, a good ‘fuck you’ from Apple forced them to revoke the certs after all.
I’m not surprised Google had enough & yanked their license to print money.
I think life insurance is already pretty grabby with data, behind the scenes. We had a ton of data on some high value life policies we’d bought - down to records of all doctors visits. And even for lower value policies they can currently just ask you the important actuarial questions (e.g. are you a poor obese guy who smokes, rides a motorcycle & lives alone) and then deny the payout if you lied.
Given how disgustingly evil the US health insurance system is, my hope is that NZ resists the temptation to go there. I don’t have health insurance since moving back to NZ and it’s been fine. All the things I was told by the doctor “go private or the wait will be too long” turned out to have reasonable waits after all.
Europe has GDPR, so you’re not legally allowed to collect data unless it’s necessary for the actual service you’re providing your customer, and you’re not allowed to use data for anything else once you’ve collected it for the purpose you stated.
Having said that, your customer will always have to prove who they are, how they acquired funds, and where funds are going. This is to prevent bribery & corruption, money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion etc.
I was working as a software developer for an EU investment bank when the EU implemented GDPR, and the amount of paperwork required to collect and hold personal data meant we destroyed a ton of data & documentation and rewrote a lot of software. And every spreadsheet containing personal data or which was used more than once had to be recorded in an EUC register with signed commitments about GDPR compliance. Even if data wasn’t strictly forbidden by GDPR we’d be very wary asking for any information which could theoretically be misused to discriminate against protected classes.
The NZ Privacy Act 2020 looks broadly similar in intent to the GDPR, so I imagine there’d be the same disinclination to collect information which can’t be proven necessary to perform the requested service or satisfy regulatory requirements.
I have several NZ insurance policies and they had no interest in transaction history. Same with my mortgage. I sent bank statements, but only as proof of address.
Only my credit card application wanted to drill into my spending, which is not unexpected considering it’s unsecured lending. For sure I’d rather approve the API access than try to find where I can download (& probably pay extortionate fees) for copies of historic statements
And working in finance (in UK & Europe), they generally collect and keep as little data as is necessary anyhow - personal data is a pain to safely manage these days, and I’m always keen to be responsible for as little of it as possible.
They’ll already insist on whatever information they feel is useful. This just saves them from scanning in your statements.
It sounds similar to the UK’s open banking system. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/517885/open-banking-how-to-opt-in-and-out-of-the-new-payment-system
I use UK open banking often. I’m always asked to approve the specific access requested, and this takes place at my bank’s website or app. This could be permission to take an amount of money; or for apps which manage multiple accounts (e.g. Emma) this could be all historical transactions; or my accountant uses an open banking service provider (Armalytix) to request transactions for an explicit date range. So far, touch wood, there’s always been an alternative - for example I can use open banking to send my transactions to my accountant or I can manually download a CSV statement from my bank and upload it into their portal.
Or, from the 99PI podcast a month ago…
Same thing happened to me in January (Fendalton). Broke the quarter window, bent the panel, and made a mess tearing the ignition out.
Seems to be a pretty safe crime: police didn’t bother coming out to look & just gave me a reference number for my insurance.
You’ll lose your no-claims bonus.
Linux font rendering is generally very good now, so I think they’ve gotten past that. Apart from a System76 desktop, which was terrible, I haven’t hated the rendering for many years. It’s just that Microsoft’s font rendering (maximizing clarity at the expense of destroying the font metrics) is exactly what I want to look at all day if I’m staring at code. When I look at screenshots of vscode on Linux and Mac the code looks beautiful, because the font renderer hasn’t beaten the characters with a big stick to make them fit the pixel grid, but when I switch back to windows after using Linux/Mac then it feels like someone fixed the focus and de-blurred everything.
And now that I can have as many Linux installs as I like running concurrently via WSL2, I get to use Linux all day without losing the stuff I like about Windows.
I don’t play games, but I do plenty of dev work including a lot in Visual Studio & SSMS. I always have a few Linux boxes running & try every few months to live on Linux rather than Windows.
Visual Studio can be swapped out for Rider. Rider is quite different feeling than VS, but I guess a lot of devs use another Jetbrains IDE of some kind, in which case it’s a fairly easy switch.
SQL Server runs happily on Linux. But SSMS is harder for me to do without. I have Aqua Data Studio & Jetbrains DataGrip, but they don’t feel as seamless as SSMS.
In the end though, it’s hard to beat Windows + WSL2 now that Windows VSCode & Jetbrains IDEs seamlessly connect to Linux projects. And if you enable nested virtualization and MAC address spoofing then Hyper-V can run anything WSL can’t.
Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens. One day Linux fractional scaling will be perfected or 200+dpi desktop screens will become affordable. Then I might stay on Linux.
Totally OK way of doing it. You basically manually implemented the protocol APIPA uses to allocate 169.254 addresses.
In addition to the excellent https://sci-hub.se suggestion…
I can find the paper for free 90% of the time by googling the authors and visiting their personal page on their university’s website.
Nope. The annual prices went up already
(Tweaked) Verdana FTW.
I liked proportional fonts for reading code - several of my favorite programming books used proportional fonts for code examples - so when Verdana was released in 1996 I switched to using it in my IDEs. I’ve had 27 years of pleasantly ergonomic coding - it has a high x-height, different 0/O, I/l/1, and impeccable hinting and kerning. ❤️❤️❤️