I know French people who live near the Swiss border and who file their tax returns in a matter of minutes because all the information is pre-filled via their employer's income statement and their bank.
They are two different countries, and Switzerland is not a member of the EU.
When French bureaucracy is simpler and more efficient than your tax collection system, you have a problem.
As a reminder, we are on a subreddit called ‘r/strava’ made up of loyal users.
The story about user data is that in 2024, Strava changed its terms of service and API guide. They decreed that the data belonged to them because they had processed and collected it. They also declared that they had the right to disconnect and kill any projects that vaguely competed with an existing Strava feature, such as ‘displaying public statistics’. The backlash was significant.
Strava is a social network, and its user base is its added value.
If I want training data, I'd be better off with TrainingPeak or Intervals.icu.
Strava has been stagnating in terms of features for athletes for years. They are just starting to roll out a report on hours spent per week in different power or heart rate zones, for example.
The latest features are either designed for posting stories on Instagram or are gimmicks like AI that interprets the results of a workout in natural language and gets it wrong half the time without ever saying anything interesting.
Strava's second function is to serve as a data hub when using multiple devices from different brands.This point is also relatively overlooked, and duplicate synchronisations and incorrect reports are quite common.
Meanwhile, Strava focuses solely on segments and rankings. They are extremely aggressive with anything that could resemble a ranking or one of their paid features. Even when it's a small personal project that doesn't generate a penny.
Once JavaScript is running, it can perform complex fingerprinting operations that are difficult to circumvent effectively.
I have a little experience with Selenium headless on Facebook. Facebook tests fonts, SVG rendering, CSS support, screen resolution, clock and geographical settings, and hundreds of other things that give it a very good idea of whether it's a normal client or Selenium headless. Since it picks a certain number of checks more or less at random and they can modify the JS each time it loads, it is very, very complicated to simulate.
Facebook and Instagram know this and allow it below a certain limit because it is more about bot protection than content protection.
This is the case when you have a real web browser running in the background. Here we are talking about standalone software written in Python.
This is just one element among many others. They probably have many available and others in reserve in case one becomes obsolete.
I recently discovered that audio codecs, frequencies, resolution, mix volume, etc. are accessible via JS in the browser and that this allows fingerprinting. Since we are talking about YouTube, the same type of technique should be possible with video codecs.
Because the expected values are not fixed, it is possible to measure response times and errors to check whether something is in the cache or not, etc.
There are a whole host of tricks relating to rendering and positioning at the edge of the display window and canvas rather than the window, which allow you to detect execution without rendering.
To simulate all this correctly, you end up with a standard browser, standard execution times, full rendering in the background, etc. No one wants to download their YouTube video at 1x speed and wait for the adverts to finish.
Many scammers have sources in government agencies, companies, insurance companies, etc.
The day my mother asked to receive her pension, she received calls from scammers, even though she had been relatively spared until then.
I have had similar feedback from people who have to call for help with mental health, depression or addiction issues.
These people have no scruples and are willing to pay others without much hesitation.
Scammers tend to create ecosystems of fake accounts in large cities or communities, such as the expat community in Paris.
These are easy to fabricate and maintain, and consist of a social network of individuals who are either loosely connected or constantly changing.
They use these accounts to collect data about key people, events, meet-ups and news events.They have developed a full lifecycle for these accounts. Creation, enrichment, data collection, then consumption and end of life when they are used for scams.
Most of these founders are performative. It's like the rash of cringey overproduced startup videos, just meant to try to get eyeballs in a time where sadly startup founders are trying less to be good at tech and more to be cluely-like marketers. I hope to see us get back to people who love tech and building and let those folks move back to different fields.
My least favorite genre of this are the ones who crow about working 60-70 hours per week and still making time for family or whatever, but it's because they're paying to make 30-40 hours of work that ordinary wage-earning folks do, go away. Laundry, lawn maintenance, getting the car in for an oil change, child care, running errands, cooking, doing your own accounting, waiting on hold to deal with erroneous medical bills, fixing that toilet that keeps running, cleaning the gutters, patching that hole a damn woodpecker put in your siding—people for whom all these things are purely optional activities that they can and do pay others to take care of, will act like they're just such hard workers, while actually working, in total, less than their employees.
Gotta promote bootstrapping somehow, because you just know most of these folks won’t see one thin dime from their equity, and those that do will be worshipped as visionaries while conveniently ignoring the piled masses of unsuccessful bodies behind them.
Right? Like if one's identity is found in you work and one doesn't step back there's a good chance they think amphetamines are a good thing one should take to stay awake and work more.
More and more of this software is moving to the cloud and only requires a web browser.
A distribution that is very difficult to break and can launch a web browser would already meet many use cases for receptionists, hotels, consultation stations, etc.
Also the limitations of fax sort of end up being it's differentiator to email and it's biggest advantage. Not needing an email server is a big boon, not really being susceptible to phishing is a boon, and with modern fax over internet it's virtually indistinguishable in user experience from email.
I remember fax phishing even before I had ever heard of email. From many large companies, simply paying a sub $100 invoice was standard procedure without even checking with the other internal bodies.
If only a standard existed to do this... Hint: it exists since ages in Italy and it has been extended to Europe recently (See Registered Electronic Mail - RFC 6109 and ETSI EN 319 532 – 4)
The United States is not the only country in the world. In France, it is almost impossible to make an appointment without using Doctolib, which is SaaS software for booking consultations (and lots of other things).
Doctolib is a B2B model. Patients are not the customers; medical practices are the customers. Doctolib saves on the cost of a medical secretary, which is why it is so popular.
What's more, this is a sensitive and regulated field, where trust is essential. They can't afford to mess around if they don't want to quickly find themselves subject to moe restrictive regulations.
They were heavily criticised in France because they allowed charlatans and people with no medical training to register (particularly for Botox injections).
As soon as this became known, they quickly rectified the situation.
Doctolib is not the problem at all. he real problem is the lack of government proactivity on these initiatives.
If the government had already thought about this in advanced (even in 2013 when doctolib was just starting out), then there could be very strong protectiosn for data which would then allay all of these concerns, and we might have had multiple players in this space.
The best use of Doctolib for me is that I can make appointments without having to speak perfect German on phone. I can make appointments in evening when I'm back from office and can relax a little bit. So, doctolib is a godsend for me as an immigrant here. and I'm guessing for a lot of people too. I can look up doctors who are available without having to bother the receptionist. This is much more efficient way of doing things.
> It will inevitable be enshitified.
that only happens with the western venture capitalist model in private companies. doctolib makers already have income from all these government contracts instead of just relying on adverts and hype
Not just in the US, they‘re surprisingly popular still here in Switzerland. I‘ve written interfaces to fax gateways (convert incoming fax to pdf, extract metadata, save in DB) multiple times.
Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work.
What's more, it's Google, so we're not safe from a ‘Lol, we're discontinuing support for Chrome OS. Good luck, Byeeee.’.
Some offices still have bad memories of Google Cloud Print, for example. I'm not saying that being an early adopter of a distribution that's less than a year old is a good solution. Just that Google's business products don't have a very good reputation.
> Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work.
ChromeOS Flex exists, it is free of charge, and it runs on more or less any x86-64 computer, including Intel Macs.
Nordic Choice got hit with ransomeware and rather than paying, just reformatted most of its client PCs with ChromeOS Flex and kept going with cloud services.
Being #2 with tens of millions of users is OK, you know. It doesn't mean you've failed.
Sure it's less popular. It came in under 20 years ago, competing against an entrenched superpower that was already nearly 30 years old back then. It's done pretty well.
The Google Apps for Business bundle has outsold by far ever single FOSS email/groupware stack in existence, and every other commercial rival as well.
Notes is all but dead. Groupwise is dead. OpenXChange is as good as dead. HP killed OpenMail.
Desalinating water requires a lot of energy and equipment. Seawater must be tapped, filtered and passed through membranes in a process called reverse osmosis.
All of this requires lot of electrical power, large pumps, cleaning, corrosion-resistant materials, etc.
Desalination is generally the last resort when there are no other options.
It is much simpler, more efficient and less expensive to properly manage freshwater resources, maintain networks, eliminate losses and leaks, etc.
I have worked on a reverse osmosis unit (to produce demineralised water for industry) and I maintain that this is not the right solution.
Great Britain is not an oil rig or a desert devoid of fresh water. It does not have cheap energy such as natural gas to produce electricity at low cost. Nor is it Israel, which has only the Jordan River and reuses every litre of water two to three times.
The UK has chosen to delegate the maintenance of its water and sanitation network to private operators who chronically underinvest in the maintenance, renewal and improvement of the network.
That's the bloody problem. Injecting a little fresh water from desalination into a leaky network by importing natural gas for the necessary energy is a monumental waste.
Desalination is at the bottom of the list of things to be addressed.
As a reminder, the British water treatment system was privatised in the 1960s and has been a huge joke ever since. When they were still in the European Union, common environmental and health regulations prevented the worst from happening.
But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel.
They are two different countries, and Switzerland is not a member of the EU.
When French bureaucracy is simpler and more efficient than your tax collection system, you have a problem.