I have the same dilemma, but it has even more factors to consider such as different staff entrances and parking lots.
For example, at my work I enter on a different side of the building with my vehicle as a staff. When on foot there is also a different staff entrance than the public entrance. I actually often don't put in my work for navigating, I instead put in a manually saved set of coordinates of where the parking lot entrance is. Because it can make a difference on which way it suggests for navigation.
I used to be a EMS call taker/dispatch (911) in Ontario, Canada. Addresses could be such a pain, especially in the the more rural areas. There were multiple townships around some bigger cities. They had different naming schemes and suffered from a similar problem that you mentioned. Many of the addresses also had old addresses. Our system would luckily often have both versions of the address stored, but not always. Additionally a lot of our roads have both numbers to address them by, such as "Regional Road 12", but then they'd also have an actual name. Almost every went by the actual name, however in the rural areas sometimes they had old real names, but it never was "official" so it isn't even listed.
Overall addresses are such a mess, and they are a mess even for governmental agencies like this one.
That's neat, thanks for sharing! We had the ability to accept a what3word location however it was a really convoluted process to actually attempt to use it. Unfortunately I never personally had anyone use it to give a location, even though it probably would have helped in many cases.
Had some calls where people would be hurt in a forest on a trail system and it was pretty common for people to not even know the name of the trail they are on nor which street they entered it from. Sometimes the GPS location the phone provided to EMS would help, but it also wasn't always 100% reliable, especially if they were in a forest. So being able to have them look at a map on their phone, pin where they are, and give a what3word location would have been immensely helpful.
The kind of system you linked to would also have been quite helpful for the other problems I mentioned.
Anytime I am searching for my live TV PPV "linux iso" streams I always pull up Yandex. Same goes for pretty much anything piracy. Even sometimes searching for research/stats that are more "controversial" are often down-ranked in Google and hard to find. Unfortunately there is a lot of political bias I've noticed more and more often in Google Search results, and resorting to Yandex sometimes results in better results.
I personally am a Kagi subscriber as well as find Google's search results in general to be terrible. Censorship/political bias/blogspam/terrible AI results are all the big factors for me switching away from using them much at all.
100% AI for the cover photo. If you look at their other blog posts it looks like Uber eng doesn't care. They use lazy AI generated images (not even decent attempts at it) for all blog post cover images.
They know what you like, but remember they want to make money. You finding success means you are probably less likely to get desperate and pay for premium options on their app. They drip feed you as little success as possible to still keep you on the app, but make you desperate.
It sucks, but a dating app doesn't want you successful, they want you to use their app for as long as possible.
As much as I try to "de-google" myself and try to avoid being trapped in the Google eco system, I'd definitely choose it over MS Office. I am stuck in the MS Office eco system at work. Some of their products are starting to improve in MS Office, but you can still tell it's a lot of hacks ontop of old systems. Especially when it comes to the whole teams/onedrive/sharepoint side of things.
One of my biggest gripes right now is that we heavily rely on Microsoft Teams. A lot of our work laptops still are stuck on 8gb of ram. I find Microsoft Teams can easily suck back a full gig or more or ram, especially when in a video call. From my understanding, Teams is running essentially like an Electron app (except using an Edge browser packaged).
I have no problem with web based apps, but man, some optimization is called for.
I use a decade-old NUC with plenty of RAM as a daily driver. It doesn't struggle with anything except MS Teams. It can churn through Zoom or Meet calls while compiling code. Teams is a bloated mess that makes the fans spin at max RPM.
It's crazy I can boot a kernel, with an entire graphics and network stack, X and a terminal in less than 200 MB but then the Teams webapp uses a massive amount of resources and grinds everything else to a halt.
Word 365 also becomes incredibly laggy on long documents with tons of comments, whereas Google Docs is just fine. But, apparently, this is also a thing on modern hardware. I guess these days Microsoft has little attention to detail.
It's funny because sometimes Teams uses more resources than the Edge browser. Despite Teams being Edge based for their application.
I think overall many companies have gotten lazy/sloppy when it comes to optimization. Game dev is even worse for this. I like how Microsoft products integrate with each other, but often the whole thing feels sloppy and unoptimized.
From my understanding, don't many places like big retail stores or malls already use facial recognition with their security systems? Whether it be to deal with flagging banned individuals who come on premises, or for things like tracking where people go in a mall. These kinds of things privately I think are already used a lot.
There's probably a legal distinction, but personally I really don't want, say, my grocery store tracking how long I spent in which aisles to add to my advertising profile.
(Yes, I use rewards cards, but I have the option to not enter my phone number and pay cash if I want to exclude a particular purchase from that dataset.)
FYI with a lot of rewards cards you can just get the card and then do nothing but just use the card. Don't install an app and don't add a phone number. I've also been successful using fake phone numbers, even 555 ones.
Not really, it's antisocial behavior either way. This is just splitting hairs anywhere but a courtroom.
Anyway, a mall is a public space in the context of recording without consent. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The law needs to be updated to reflect the vastly more invasive technology we have now compared to when these statutes were written to reflect actual social mores.
Where I live many places even use scanners to scan the barcodes on the back of ID. They claim this is to do things like banning people from the establishment and to try and prevent issues with fakes. However I really don't believe this excuse and think it has more to do with tracking who is visiting their establishments. Even though I'd rather not have Google storing my ID, I'd trust it A LOT more than a sketchy club/bar having such information.
In California I can just file a request on your license plate number for your public information. You will only be notified that I requested it. They will protect your residence address and phone number. Your ID has both a residence address and mailing address associated with it. If these are the same you don't actually get protected there.
This may have changed somewhat since I'm not in a position which requires me to do this anymore but this was the standard for years.
Which is why I always _highly_ recommend Californian's to get a private mail box or post office box and use that as your mailing address. Then your residence information is private and only law enforcement can see it.
> In California I can just file a request on your license plate number for your public information.
Bouncers can use any excuse to decide to let you in or not so I guess they can just say no, show me your ID/driver's license and you are fucked if you don't have one. They can even decide unilaterally to not look at your smartphone screen if you have it in google wallet, you have little recourse. What will you do, sue them because they let your friends in but you stayed outside?
No. You can still request and obtain the information. It's now a crime to use it unlawfully or to lie in order to obtain it, and California additionally added the feature that the requested party will be notified of the request, it doesn't really afford you any "immediate" protections.
I know for a fact hotels (or motels) like to scan or copy IDs to be able to effectively bans, because the person working the front desk has no idea who is and isn’t banned, especially if a single hotel company owns or manages multiple hotels.
If Hilton/marriott/IHG/choice/wyndham were not almost all franchised, then I bet they would institute global bans.
My simple rule is that a system should be categorized for what it does most of the time. I bet that person working the front door has scanned thousands of IDs, and probably only found a handful of fakes, if any.
So AFAIK, they are scanning IDs and collecting data, and every blue moon, a fake is found and it is then the entire system has found it's true purpose?
A long time ago, I worked as a bartender. Rules for checking ID's were very strict. If cops showed up and ever found anyone under age, there were serious penalties.
So yes, even if there's a fake only once every two weeks, or whatever you consider to be once in a "blue moon" -- that is the purpose of the system.
Believe me, bars don't check ID's because they want to. They do it because the legal consequences are extremely serious otherwise, and "but the ID looked real to our bouncer" isn't a defense, hence the scanning.
There's nothing naive. I think you just aren't familiar with the laws around this.
FedEx requires a scan of the barcode on your license to ship packages from any of their locations. When it first started happening a few years ago, I argued with the clerks and said I didn't want my license scanned. I was willing to show my ID as proof of identity but I didn't want the barcode scan. It also reset the originating address to my home address each time, even though I was shipping for business and put the business address on the FedEx shipping form. They said it was required and the managers always confirmed. I stopped using FedEx for this reason. Never went back.
> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.
This is already happening in Canada and it is destroying many governmental services like healthcare, education, and of course housing. There definitely need to be reasonable caps in place otherwise services cannot scale up quickly enough to accommodate. I'm sure USA is like Canada in this respect; many services are already woefully underfunded or backlogged without even increasing immigration rates.
I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.
> I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.
It really depends on how well off you are and the reasons for that. Let's take my home country as an example.
We have IT people earning like 3-5x times more than the regular people (like you get salary 2000$ while the rent will be 200$ at worst, with average salary being below 500$. New apartments cost 100k in the capital but outside the capital even 40k is considered an expensive apartment). And we have police and military earning similar (and more money. Not to mention corruption). Both IT and police can afford buying expensive goods and stuff, can afford apartments, good food and so on.
Both can live like kings, but at the same time people are limited to what they can get and find in their country. It is like to be a king of the village - you are the king, sure, but in the city you have more opportunities, more advancements, more access to resources.
When I was leaving the country we did not even have Spotify, for example. And I was earning like 5x times of the average. But there was no point in that. And that's just a software service - there are issues with medication, education etc. So even if you earn more, it might not be worth it.
However in case of IT, it is not a problem for me to get a relatively decent salary in a foreign country while as a military person or a police officer it will become close to impossible to reach the same level without a lot of things attached to that. So for people like this, being a king of a village is worth more than being an average in some foreign country. But, each and every time, they are trying to send their children to a foreign country to live or to study.
And that's without people who have no opportunities or cannot learn foreign language and thus cannot leave.
In India you have extremely rich and extremely poor, coming from various developed and underdeveloped countries and all know English most of the time and often has IT education - with their much bigger population just sheer amount of people leaving will be a lot. A lot.
Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.
The problem I've been seeing in Canada is that we have A TON of new people coming from India. Aside from all our services being unable to handle things. The other problem is that people from these cultures tend to stick together, rather than assimilate. When the rates of immigration are kept lower and the people being brought in are more diverse, the problem isn't really present. But when about 90-95% of new people are coming from one country, the problem really surfaces.
People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true. Many continue to operate the same way as where they came from. Especially since they can stay within their Indian communities and rarely need to interact with the existing population. Canada has now began shifting towards a more low trust society. Even things like food banks aren't save from many new immigrants as they are viewing them as places for them to keep more of their salary rather than as places for people really struggling.
And I think this is part of the reason many people start to become against immigration. When they see their own countries culture/norms/values start to get degraded. Many people even start to feel real hatred and racist feelings towards groups because of it.
To me, leaving a country for betterment makes sense in a way. But leaving to another country to copy your own countries practices just seems odd to me.
> Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.
Most of the time the improvements are coming from the top. So what usually happens - and we observe it over the course of history - countries reach peak, then decline and decline until they collapse or fall, and then again rise by using some external means (finding cheap resources etc). Every time you need the government that actually does things (forces/gives morale boost to the people) - or a revolution. Any other time it will be endless bureaucracy in democratic societies (nothing is getting done or takes too much time) or nepotism and corruption (with authoritarian flavor) in less democratic societies.
> People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true
It is not true for sure. Especially with many people coming at once or forming their own small communities. When you are alone - you are forced to adapt. But when you are not alone you can keep your own culture and traditions without changes, while having benefits of a developed society.
I see it all the time - if you are used to throw away trash outside of trash box in your home country, then by coming here you will continue doing that sooner or later with more people from your countries coming here. Same with public transportation - in my country in order to travel from one region to another region, we used to have a train once per day. Per day. Here you get trains once every 10-15 minutes. So even if the public transportation will decline (fall apart, more delays and cancellations) I will feel ok (and a lot of people will feel ok) because I am used to such conditions and with bigger populations coming from the same culture and gaining rights to vote and so on - nobody will care about such things because we are just used to have it worse.
Or another example - in my country we are used to have fully crowded buses, coming every 30 minutes. Here if they cancelled a couple of buses and it would start arriving crowded, I would feel "at home" and it would not be a shock me and I would less likely to care about that because I simply used to it in my home country. It would be a minor issue for me. And you can imagine that with more people coming with the same mentality, it will just degrade the quality of living.
That's why adaptation and supporting the habits, rules and laws of your new country is important - because you came here due to them. You wanted to live in that "clean and nice country". Don't bring your bad habits with you.
It's possible they are doing such a thing, however I also am sure there are many legitimate users in the comments. I personally have been using them on the free tier for over 10 years. I signed up soon after Microsoft was stopping allowing you to use your own email domain through Outlook at a free tier. Zoho allowed you to use your own domain name for free and even has support for things like IMAP. The current free tier is a bit more restrictive now with features like IMAP being removed, however they have never removed any features from my account. I personally find it hard not to be loyal to a company who will grandfather me in on a less restrictive free plan. I haven't paid them anything, they technically owe me nothing.
However, while I have not made use of their paid services (as I use it just for personal use), I have referred clients before to Zoho when I have been working on their websites.
I've also made use of their invoice software free of charge to generate a couple invoices and have been quite pleased with that as well.
Sometimes when companies are fair to their customers either via pricing or business practices, it results in people being much more willing to go out of their way to say good things about the company. It would be insane for me to be negative against a company that has provided me a good product for free for years upon years. There aren't even ads.
For example, at my work I enter on a different side of the building with my vehicle as a staff. When on foot there is also a different staff entrance than the public entrance. I actually often don't put in my work for navigating, I instead put in a manually saved set of coordinates of where the parking lot entrance is. Because it can make a difference on which way it suggests for navigation.