It’s funny how exciting Apple Pay was when introduced, only Apple pulled the lock-everyone-in card and now we’re all using QRcodes.

Most developed countries I've been to use NFC/Apple Pay. Where you see the use of QR codes is in China, Africa, and other countries that VISA/MC/AMEX hasn't penetrated (for either political or socioeconomic reasons).

In the US you can use Apple Pay anywhere NFC payments are accepted. It's generally completely open on the acceptance side at this point

It's anywhere close to open and requires vendors to seek approval from Apple for every implementation - Apple just has the market share to make everyone dance to their tune.

Apple Pay works on any terminal that supports NFC tap to pay payments. There are thousands, tens of thousands of terminals in the US that are not "Apple Pay" that you can use it on

Same here in australia. We had NFC payments ("tap and pay") since ~2006. Nearly a decade before apple pay launched in Nov 2015. For us, apple pay was like "oh, I can use my phone instead of my credit card? Neat."

People use it everywhere here, just because its easier than carrying around a card.

I'm in HK, most HKers use ApplePay with NFC, and don't use QR codes. Over in mainland China, however, it's all QR codes (with AliPay, WePay).

I guess the "we" depends strongly on location - I've no problem using Apple Pay basically everywhere except Walmart.

No idea what this is referring to...

Many countries in the world have local systems for quick, direct bank transfers encoded with QR codes to be used by local payment systems or local banking apps.

> how corrupted elites are

The commission is defined by councils and policy from each member state. Many member states send their right wing nuts so there is a bigger picture than just "corrupt".

The movie M3GAN 2.0 had the exact same plot twist. The kid in the movie even explains outloud what the bot had to do to deal with the limitation. So in other words, since 2025, even teens know this "sandboxing the LLM by layering prompts" thing is never going to work.

I saw the video and still have no idea what they are. Also, “never locked in” but then “pricing” and why is one paying for “apps” but self hosting relays?

As I understand it- you can use free community provided relays, self-host your own, or pay for their managed services with an SLA and monitoring built in

Vacation months*, plural. All project timelines were aligned to wrap up important things by the end of May. June is still operational but mostly focused on reporting, shaping and generally preparing for September when (mostly) everyone will be back, refreshed and ready for new adventures.

Time to start looking for a work visa.

Wait till you figure out what happens around the month of December

Having seafood lunch in 40C temperatures at the beach on Christmas Day?

Fortunately December chills work out in the US (IT-wise) too, no one wants to mess with prod changes between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Not to mention OpenAI/Anthropic’s newly found appetite for keeping data (made public with Fable but we don’t know what actually happens there anyway).

There is so much role play going on for people to convince themselves that any of this is fine.

> continued use of this … implies acceptance

One of the biggest crimes in tech world

So Apple built a feature that’s not good enough to use in a “competitive market” and now wants to wiggle their way out by blaming the very laws designed to protect people from shady corps.

I think the DMA is working just fine. It’s not like Apple had no idea this will happen.

All it takes is one announcement that the US is cutting on efforts to understand future climate disasters for that “influence” to disappear.

You’re right that it’s all policy making and that’s why you’re supposed to elect competent politicians and administrators.

Regardless of your stance on AI, we shouldn’t normalise tracking of this magnitude at all. Some safety guardrails for security and IP protection - fine, most tools have that builtin. Anything beyond that is abuse, plain and simple.