Whilst not quite UPI, the UK has a pay-via-text (sms or Whatsapp) system that nearly every person has access to but barely anyone uses. It amazes me how people naturally gravitate to card-based payments, even when Visa and MasterCard are taking a cut.
Having done a UPI integration for a well-known multinational tech company, I consider it a mixed bag. For the end-user it's a great concept and continues to revolutionize payments in India. It's convenient and it will help India transition away from a cash economy. UPI is clearly the future.
However, UPI currently has a lot of problems. Number one is that to use UPI as a payment method for your product you have to integrate with one of India's banks, which in my experience are almost uniformly technically very bad. They provide almost no documentation, have frequent and often severe service outages, and don't even come close to meeting their availability SLAs. I'm sure over time it will improve but as it stands many of India's banks are not technically capable enough to support UPI with the level of reliability that most businesses require.
Yes, there are middlemen in Bitcoin, but there are also ways around them, unlike in banking.
And yes, I definitely trust million of men who are constantly checking each other, rather than 10 bankers who found out that sticking together makes them more money.
That fraud argument is a double edged sword because I might be on the receiving side and falsely accused of fraud as any small business hit with chargebacks would confirm. When it's sent, it's sent, that's how it should be, no backsies. In the CC world you never know. Plus there are also escrows if you really need them, except unlike in banking world, Bitcoin escrow won't force you to eat a 30% haircut on your savings account when the bankers fuck up the whole economy while paying themselves big bonuses.
Bitcoin is actually more expensive than SEPA transfers or girocard payments, and slower to resolve (and just as impossible to reverse as SEPA transfers).
Which bank is this? Since 2014, SEPA-ICT has been introduced, and since this year, every bank should support it.
Normal SEPA transfers are mandated to be free and < 24 hours, and SEPA-ICT transfers are mandated to be < 1.5€ and < 15 seconds, but most banks implement those for free.
As you can freely choose any bank in the EU, you might want to consider German Commerzbank, which implements free < 15 seconds transfers to any other SEPA bank (except for student accounts, those have to pay 1.50€ for those transactions).
There is a central provider called NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India). They run the entire network and control who gets on or not. Banks are used as the integration point because UPI necessitated a bank account to run out of. Since you’re directly debiting money out of someone’s account you can’t exactly turn away the bank and when they are on-board it makes sense to use them as an integration partner for legal reasons (as well as customer support).
> IMO the 2015 MacBook Pro is the best Mac out there, mainly because of its beautiful retina display, perfect weight, and most importantly, a good keyboard.
Yep. 2015 Macbook Pro is the last best mac. Probably this is why refurbished 2015 MBP commands premium over other models.
That's funny, because I call the Late 2013 MBP the last best one :) Among other things, it was the last one to feature a physical trackpad click, as opposed to the fake "taptic engine" all-glass trackpad of the 2014 and newer which doesn't physically move when you click (similar to newer iPhones).
To be honest, I actually prefer the fake click of the new trackpads. It feels very real, it's not at all comparable to the taptic feedback on the buttonless iPhones.
The fake click feels so real that people don't even realise it's a fake click if you don't tell them.
The mechanical trackpads only allowed clicking in the bottom half (since it was a hinge), and in my experience it was unreliable. After a few years, clicks started registering twice, or not at all, etc.
The fake click track pad allows clicking everywhere, it lets you configure activation force, and for me it has been working flawlessly every day for years.
The haptic trackpad works beautifully imo, you can click anywhere, there is force click, the clicky sound can be turned on or off, the feedback can be adjusted. And to me it feels real.
Ah right, it turns out I misunderstood the EveryMac page about the Mid-2014 [0], with the wording 'a "no button" glass "inertial" multi-touch trackpad'. Thought that was their wording for the non-moving trackpad! haha :) It's the 2015 that had the taptic engine trackpad first, I think.
Oh, turns out I was one model off, the next model afterward ("Mid 2014"[0]) still had the physical trackpad click, while they introduced the taptic engine with the Early 2015 model[1]. I misunderstood the EveryMac description of the features!
My 2012 one jammed up one day and the glass actually shattered upon a click. Still works and somehow I'm not getting splinters, but that's definitely an inherent flaw in the physical keyboards as batteries expand over time.
Pardon the wild analogy but I think it says something about this era. Star Wars 7 and 8 were already sold cheaper than the original movies on Youtube movies.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of movies from 1977 were crap, but we only remember the ones that weren't, like the original Star Wars. Comparing all movies of today to the best movies of the past is unfair.
It's not really the same here. Both SW trilogies made rounds of moneys worldwide (ep 7 is in the top 10 I think). But the latest movies, which are brand new, and were somehow successful are already deprecated. It's like processed food, taste doesn't last.
I think they discount the newest movies so they can get as many people to watch them as they can in order to sell them related merchandise. It is Disney Star Wars after all.
Not many things quit at their peak. You tend to notice less things which were past their peak when you were growing up and remember things which peaked while you were around.
It might have something to do with why people get more conservative as they get older. There's a bias towards thinking things were better before than they are now when people just don't remember the crap from when they were younger and things actually are pretty much the same (or really are generally getting better by most metrics)
Nono it's not my tastes. I'm speaking about youtube pricing. Even they realize that new sequels don't hold much value, even though to most of their audience (new generations using youtube often) has no reference to favor the past movies from the new.
Oh I meant it in a different way, maybe I could rephrase:
You have a tendency to notice things getting worse that you personally experience. When you're younger you have had less time to experience something you care about declining than when you're older which leads to a cognitive bias where it seems that things were generally better when you were young.
However old you are, there were plenty of things in decline when you were young that you just didn't notice or care about because you never experienced them at their best and are much less likely to experience them. So many people have experienced Star Wars because it's super culturally relevant, but slide down that scale and there will be tons of things your parents saw the decline of that you might not even know existed.
> Why so much "new" is actually worse these days..
New stuff in general is not worse. New versions of old things quite often are! So upgrade your taste and try new things instead of newer versions of the old things you know you like, because with these you're very likely to be disappointed.
In this context maybe the answer would be to try something else than a macbook. Tbh, and iPad pro capable of running Xcode and docker would rock for me.
Indeed. I have an iPad Pro that admittedly doesn't see much use because I'm very much tied to my MacBook, but having played with iPadOS I'm blown away by it and I had a very sudden realisation of "So this is where Apple's development efforts have gone!".
I can't wait until the day where I can genuinely do some development on an iPad.
Regression to the mean may be part of it. Even for a master of their craft success and quality will depend on random factors beyond skill, so pieces of work following a great one are more likely to be worse than better, assuming skill remains constant.
Chrome 69 on Mac puts Close/Minimise/Maximise buttons in an additional bar when in fullscreen mode. It's super irritating to see an additional bar when you move mouse to top of screen.
I have downgraded to Chrome 68 and disabled auto updates.
I built a kind of similar stuff as a side project in 2011 - [redacted]. It allowed you to leave notes for a URL which your friends / followers can see when they visit that URL.
In the beginning when I was testing this with my friends and colleagues, I sent every URL a user visited to the server to check if any of his friends have left any notes and then alert him via notification badges. I disabled it when I started seeing a lot of private URLs (like Google Docs links with share access) in server logs. I then changed the extension to query server only when a user clicks on extension button.
This made it a bit safer, but the extension still needed access to all the sites a user visits. And with Chrome's auto updation of extensions, one may never know if the extension author has started sending every URL back to server again.
After developing such extension, I am quite suspicious such extensions and only install extensions from trusted authors (Buffer, Pocket, etc).
I agree and will say that I'm as pleasantly surprised by the review process Mozilla has for its add-ons -- as I am dismayed that Chrome has no equivalent process. I'm in-queue of the Firefox review (takes on average 10 days) and have exchanged emails with their volunteer-team on best practices to adopt.
Ultimately it comes down to winning the user's trust, and I'm trying to address as many questions as I can up front.
In response to another comment, I've also un-minified the Chrome extension code and will keep it un-minified going forward (will take up to an hour to propagate [update: fresh installs are now un-minified / and the current-install base will get the update within 6 hours])
In India, pre-pay call rates are like 1.5 cents per minute and 2-3 USD for 1 GB of data. Data gets cheaper with volume. Nearly all of texting happens via WhatsApp.
My and most of my friends' monthly costs do not exceed 500 INR (~8 USD).
For one thing, myspace was largely a network of early adopters.
Therefore it was not a surprise these people would look for something new soon.
For another thing, "everyone" is on facebook and thus it is not convenient to leave. Most people don't like change after all. We all know how long people stuck with IE6 (and that was just a browser).
