Isn't this that website that keeps coming up in my web search results, apparently having a pdf of the thing I searched, except it's actually a badly html-ed version of said pdf with no way to download the original one?
It doesn't do app store reviews as far as I am aware. They do charge an installation fee (I'm baffled they haven't been sued over that yet), but there are free apps out there thanks to Epic covering that fee to spite Apple.
Seems that this €0,50 flat fee per installation has been replaced by a 5% commission on digital transaction made through sideloaded apps as of last August.
I think firefox's search is just cursed. The option that you want to only enable for a single search ("Whole Words") remains enabled, while the option that you want to permanently enable ("Match Diacritics") just turns itself off after every search. (Yes, I know for the latter, you can set findbar.matchdiacritics =1)
There's some shady stuff about JDownloader, afaik mainly that building it from source requires some java binaries that don't have their source available anywhere.
I find it weird that you have to pay every time you get on a bus in the UK it seems?
Are there no passes? e.g. in Budapest I have a monthly public transport pass and I just board the vehicle when it arrives without having to validate or purchase a ticket every time.
Yeah. But this is the US. This is all we’ve got. Having the central bank do it would be communism, and that’s bad. I learned about it from Saturday morning cartoons.
Ironically it's the central bank (and associated regulations) that cause these intermediaries to exist to begin with.
A protocol to support decentralized payments is a hobby project for an individual. You give each institution an identifier (e.g. their domain name) and each institution gives each customer an account number. If you're account 123 at Chase then you sign in as #123@chase.com, tell Chase you want to send $5 to #456@bankofamerica.com, they send the money and Bank of America tells their customer they have a new deposit. If you want to collect money from someone, you tell your bank to send their bank a payment request and they can either approve it manually (e.g. so you can deliver the goods for a one-time purchase) or configure some rules for which accounts get approved automatically up to some threshold amount (e.g. for recurring payments). Also no reason for banks in different countries not to all support the same protocol.
That doesn't require a central bank or any centralized third party payments intermediary. All it requires is for banks to know how to send money to other banks, which they obviously already do and the specific implementation of that isn't even relevant to the customer-facing payments protocol. So how does this not exist? It can't be that no one wants it, so it's got to be that someone (e.g. Visa/MasterCard) doesn't want it.
Zelle, from my understanding, is a “protocol” – many banks support it in their own apps. (Scare quotes because I’m not entirely sure it’s a proper well-defined protocol.)
And there’s nothing preventing PoS from supporting individual wallet apps – see e.g. WeChat Pay / Alipay in China. (Alipay+ is also a “protocol”, i.e. other banks and wallets support it.)
What I mean by protocol is that there is an RFC or equivalent and anyone who implements the spec and has a bank account can then talk to their bank using the standardized protocol. If that exists for Zelle then where's the spec?
I’ve searched for ‘zelle spec’ and came across this line:
> Zelle® is available in over 2,400 banking and credit union apps.
so I’m pretty sure there is a spec because there is no way in hell this many banks are using ad-hoc protocols to talk to each other and/or a centralized system. But yeah, I don’t see anything published.
Chances are it’s something ISO 20022-ish. (Either that or an Excel spreadsheet.) Speaking of which...
> and has a bank account can then talk to their bank using the standardized protocol
...if you’re a big enough business, you probably can also speak ISO 20022 to your bank. If you want it on your personal account however, well, that makes two of us, but from practical standpoint what I care more about is that I can punch in an account number and send money near instantly, which Zelle seems to provide in the US (but I have to make do with whatever Wise provides, probably regular ACH judging by speeds).
https://api.payments.jackhenry.com/docs/zelle/overview/ Is a white label api that you, as a bank, can implement/hit. Just like your local small business vendor can choose to also take Venmo and CashApp, they can also choose to take Zelle. I've bought a burrito with Zelle before.
> Let's say you want to plan a trip to Thailand with your family. You could use the fancy AI to do it for you, or you could build a stupid frontend with minimal natural language understanding.
Except it isn't. Someone else could build that stupid frontend, and essentially create a better booking.com. Or you could ask the robot to make you a stupid frontend. It remains true that a well-designed MCP server goes wildly against the interests of sites like booking.com.
Yes, almost every website on earth is enshittified to the point that it’s user hostile.
Even something as simple as a recipe blog. That one is already solved by chatbots, and it’s glorious. I never have to look at a shitty recipe site full of ads with the recipe buried beneath a mile of fake stories again. LLM finds some, reads reviews, I pick one, if it’s good import to paprika, and that’s that.
There’s at least a chance that enough people demand it, combined with AI hype, that we could end up with a slightly better experience.
And if not, then there’s always the brute force approach of something like grok bot
> skipping the expensive phone network and re-routing calls over the cheap internet instead.
I find this such a bad idea, if I want to use the cheap internet for a call I would use an internet based voice call system directly, rather than messing around with telephone numbers and I guess potentially accidentally doing an expensive phone call (same with RCS/SMS vs. just using an internet-based chat directly).
People with POTS brains trying to make them do Internet things leads to a neverending stream of bad... no actually, terrible ideas. Look at H.323 for example, something that could only be created by someone who has no clue how the Internet (with firewalls, NAT, etc) works, and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the ITU-T standards stream.
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