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> According to him, the agent operated largely autonomously, with only minimal guidance

"Minimal guidance" is just vague enough to mean anything, including specifically prompting to encourage the claimed blackmailing.


Notification categories are like mailing lists now. You may have unsubscribed from the daily deals email but you're still going to be auto subscribed to every new slightly modified category in perpetuity. Unless you fully disable notifications for an app (in Android at least, in my experience), new enabled by default notification categories are added all the time.


When they exist at all. Many apps that provide important notifications (like delivery tracking, drop-off time etc) put them under the same category as marketing stuff. You can't have just the transactional tracking, you have to opt-in for the marketing notifications as well.


The ridesharing apps are the most annoying about this. Yes I want to be notified when my uber driver is almost here to pick me up. No, I don't want a notification about yet another sale.


It baffles me that they do this. I have to disable push notifications from Lyft entirely, so instead they send me ride updates as text messages, which surely must cost them way more money. Why not just introduce a "ride updates only" push notification category and stop this madness?


It needs to be enforced by the OS or by law. Like how you get transactional emails without getting marketing spam. I want the same for notifications.


> It needs to be enforced by the OS or by law. Like how you get transactional emails without getting marketing spam.

What glorious universe do you live in where email is respected enough to have transactions separate from marketing, and that this is not only required by law but also enforced?


There's a pretty healthy regulatory environment around it, though I have noticed a resurgence of opt-out marketing communications on signup forms, which is unwelcome (I don't know if some legal decision changed, but it seemed like for a while this was not allowed, and maybe something has made companies think that it is again).

(I decided to look it up, here's the UK rules: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-pr... . It looks like it is allowed to be opt-out if you buy something from them, which I do dislike, but there are rules and the ICO does have teeth)


Not sure about your experience, I’ve almost never encountered a marketing email that didn’t have an unsubscribe link, as is mandated by law in some countries. So I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.

In the past, yeah. But today? Never.


> I’ve almost never encountered a marketing email that didn’t have an unsubscribe link

Have you encountered a "marketing email" that you didn't sign up for? That's called phishing.

Have you clicked on links in phishing emails? That's called getting pwned.


That’s also not relevant to the topic, which was transactional vs marketing app notifications, and making a correlation to email.


It's certainly relevant to the topic: notifications, and a claim of legal requirements.

Legal requirements are useless without enforcement.


Have you looked at the Uber app recently? 90% of it is promotionshit.

I am just looking for a fucking taxi.

Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion dollars to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer experience taxi app market?


> Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion dollars to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer experience taxi app market?

Waymo are rolling out, slowly. No one'll be in a real position to compete against them.


On iOS atleast, Live Activities are separate from Notifications. So I can still monitor food or grocery delivery even though I have turned off their notifications.

Now a few apps have started sending notifications through WhatsApp because they have my phone number. e.g. Amazon


Yeah, but I still see apps that don't implement those features. Mostly React Native/Flutter apps that don't bother implementing native features. On Android it's even more depressing.


I'm not worried about missing food notifications because they send me an email and a text (... and a fax and a hardcopy confirmation letter in the mail.)


On iOS atleast, Live Activities are separate from Notifications.

Should be, but not always. There are plenty of apps that still mix marketing and functional notification.

Hell, even Apple does this, especially on new devices.

[Settings]: Log in to your iCloud account to sync data.

Three minutes later…

[Settings]: You qualify for three free months of Apple Music!


Tbf both of those are promotional. If I'm not logged into iCloud, it's for a reason.


I had to disable from Android settings all LinkedIn notifications. I check it from time to time but I haven't missed anything, nowadays LinkedIn is mostly garbage


There’s the other direction too. You only get a couple toggles, and something you actually need is behind both, so you can’t not get all notifications


Another sneaky behavior in Android is that categories that have yet to send a notification, which of course includes newly added auto-enabled channels, are collapsed under the 'show unused categories' button.


iOS asks you if you want to allow notifications when each new app is started. You can just say no there and you're done.

It would be better if they were totally opt-in of course (1), but that's not bloody likely to happen.

(1) As in off by default with no questions.


I can see a certain category of people screaming that WhatsApp calls are broken if that were to pass… but I do agree that no one would scream louder than app makers wanting to retain their share of human brain attention.


As far as i know my Whatsapp is muted and the mute is muted again. But it still rings for voice calls.

It's integrated somehow with the phone app on iOS, whatsapp calls show alongside GSM calls.


On iOS Scheduled Summaries are really great. That's become my personal default on my phone. Scheduled Summaries roughly every 4 hours during waking hours and the default choice every time the question pops up for a new app is "In Scheduled Summary". I could see with some modest UX improvements Scheduled Summaries becoming the default for more people.

Heavy use of Scheduled Summaries does also lead to me wondering why there isn't a "default notifications to Ask/On/Scheduled Summaries/Off" global setting, though I would want that choice between Scheduled and Off at least.


That's one of the reasons I simply do not allow anything on my phone to auto-update. 98% of app updates these days are effectively malicious. I'll only update individual apps when and if I deem it to be actually necessary.

Except F-Droid. I trust their moderation enough to allow auto updates.


I also like this solar system model from NASA, https://science.nasa.gov/learning-resources/how-big-is-the-s....

They compare it to a US football field.

"On this scale, the Sun, by far the largest thing in our solar system, is only a ball about two-thirds of an inch (17 millimeters) in diameter sitting on the goal line — that's about the width of a U.S. dime coin. ...

The inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — are about the size of grains of sand on a football field scale. They would be dwarfed by a typical flea, which is about 3 millimeters long.

Closest to the goal line is Mercury, just under a yard from the end zone (.8 yards to be specific). ... At this scale, Mercury's diameter would be scarcely as large as the point of a needle.

Venus is next. It is 1.4 yards from the end zone. ...

On to Earth, sitting pretty on the 2-yard line. ...

Mars is on the three-yard line of our imaginary football field. ...

Jupiter remains pretty close to our end zone on the 10.5-yard line. ...

Saturn is on the field at 19 yards from the goal line. ...

Uranus ... is about 38 yards from our end zone.

Neptune is where things start to get way out. It is 60 yards from our solar goal line on the imaginary football field. ...

Tiny Pluto is much closer to the opposing team's end zone. It's about 79 yards out from the Sun ...

On this scale, our little friend Voyager 1 has left the game and is well out in the stadium parking lot or beyond."


It's illegal to mention the solar system and football without mentioning one of the greatest pieces of science fiction on the two, Jon Bois' 17776 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776


Also for focusing a digital camera for astrophotography.


Very common in the Middle East too.


So far I've found 88 combos involving the poop emoji.

Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/wCNxKjzi61rCJUsU8


For any Arrested Development fans out there, a friend sent me this link related to the iceberg today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/arresteddevelopment/comments/13309l...


I've been using VirtualHere since 2015, with multiple paid licenses.

It's a great tool with infinite use cases. I'm glad that it's a successful business for you!


I haven't been with Wells Fargo for a few years now, but I did get a check for about $200 in the mail the other day due to some fees that had been processed in an "unintended manner" apparently.


Similar thing happened to me. I had been a customer for maybe ten years and had my account closed over one overdraft. I got an apology check for a little over $100 a few months ago. I haven't been with Wells Fargo in over a decade, I had changed addresses, I was very surprised.

I had excellent experiences with Wells Fargo up until they closed my account. Instant car loan approval and overnighted loan. At the time they had one of best online experiences. I have no intention of returning, I don't ever want to experience an account closing again.


Microsoft's Edge on Windows lets you annotate and rotate PDFs.


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