I hadn’t realized how serious infected eye drops could be.
I wear contacts and I’m surprised that there aren’t more cases of infections from lack of proper hygiene and care.
> In 2023, a major eye drop recall was called after drops … were found to be contaminated with a deadly bacteria. Overall, 81 patients were sickened, 18 suffered permanent blindness and four died.
> the drops were contaminated with the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is resistant to standard antibiotics.
> It can infect the eye, leading to vision loss and, in extreme cases, it can spread to the blood and trigger the potentially fatal complication sepsis.
People on TikTok are getting Acanthamoeba just from wearing their contacts in the shower. I'm glad the eye seems to be able to handle most contact use.
Not to diminish his accomplishment, he attached the game boy camera to a 60inch telescope at Mount Wilson. This is a cool project but the quality of the photo is what you’d expect from a gameboy camera.
The headline seems to imply that he custom built a telescope for his gameboy.
I wonder if the cost benefit analysis would show that this is still the best policy - I.e. are more people dying because of overdose of acetaminophen than would have from “behind the counter” + controlled acquisition of codeine products.
I would also imagine that the compliance / nationwide tracking is now much easier than when the legislation was initially conceived.
I think it was a mostly innocent bystander, because they decided to put codeine-combination painkillers (Vicodin, etc.) in schedule 2 but wrote it as just opiate combination medicines.
I found this to be an issue on YouTube. It wasn’t necessarily malicious. I often put on a no-talking video in the background while reading and the ad interruptions became really loud. I eventually just ended up subscribing, but this is great to see.
Voilà, I think you may have fallen for their trap. That's why they've done nothing about this to date even though volume normalisation is a solved problem.
I don’t think YouTube normalizes the audio on their videos. I have no idea why, but that could easily become a quiet video that leads into a -16 LUFS ad that blows your ears out.
Because content creators have a right to produce audio how they want.
If it’s a video of someone speaking in a quiet voice it shouldn’t have to have an average volume level of a new Metallica video. Forcing people to use heavy dynamic range compression to get it there would not be good.
The ads sometimes being loud on YouTube usually doesn't bother me (except recently when it was an extra loud woman shouting something like "My husband fucked me all night last night" and proceeded to extol the virtues of the product that I am supposed to believe allowed for that bedroom performance--that was so annoying and it was so different from the ads they normally show me it earned YouTube a week with the ad blocker on [1]).
What I find most bothersome is the timing. On linear TV the ad breaks are planned to fit with the show. On YouTube they can happen at pretty much any time and often step on a dramatic moment or compelling scene and totally break the mood.
With their ability to automatically make transcripts of video, and their AI models, surely they could make something that could look at the transcript ahead of time and figure out places where ads could go that would avoid this problem, couldn't they?
[1] For several months I've started the day with ad blocking off on YouTube. If they annoy me too much it goes on for the rest of the day. I follow these rules. (1) Ads that are relevant to me do not change my annoyance level, or maybe even lower it. (2) If the ad that interrupts what I'm watching is skippable in 5 second or it is non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and is not followed by another ad it does not change my annoyance level. (3) If there is a second ad and it is skippable in 5 seconds or non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and not followed by a third, it will raise my annoyance level, but they can get away with this a small number of times. (4) A 15 second non-skippable ad will raise my annoyance level enough that as soon as I get back to what I was watching I note the time, turn on the ad blocked, hit refresh, and seek back to where I left off if the refresh loses my place. (5) Too many ad breaks will also raise my annoyance level enough to turn the blocker on.
For the first few months this worked great. It was is if their algorithm had figured out what I was doing and adapted. I'd always get 5 second skippable ads, and they would be spread out far enough apart that most days I wouldn't turn ad blocking on. But lately, over the last few weeks, they are doing a lot more non-skippable 6 second ads following by skippable ads or a second 6 second non-skippable ad, and they are more likely to insert way more ad breaks than they used to. They now almost always are in the ad blocker by the middle of the day.
Your willingness to try to play fair to advertisers (a group with an earned reputation of going out of their way to avoid anything resembling good faith) is admirable, but won't show up in metrics.
Protect your attention (and frustration levels) by running adblock full time. If you want to influence their behavior so everyone stops running annoying ads. You have to give the ad sellers a reason to re-evaluate what ads they're willing to show. The only way you can do that is increasing the number of users who don't view ads. Starting with in off, makes you a user who views ads, not the kind making a point.
It's unlikely that you're meaningfully able to influence the system. You're much more likely to respond and adapt to the system, so it's more likely that youtube has trained you to watch ads.
Why would you willingly turn off ad blocking? Get Youtube Premium if you want channels to get some revenue out of you, but why would choose to get blasted by ads, with these complicated rules. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
This is a good solution. I have invidious running on my home server, and my phone is permanently WireGuard’d to my home network. Front end is completely configurable. No ads, no suggested videos, no comments. There’s even a download video button.
You can't just actually shed all your low value users and then poach the high value users, because then you're only competing for customers who are already large and have already long since integrated one of your competitors. This is often a somewhat harder problem than taking a lot of low and even slightly negative value accounts and hoping some of them become high value.
I’d posit that even if you somehow do this in a neutral way, consumer adoption will fall in three buckets: (1) largely supportive, (2) largely unsupportive, (3) ambivalent/silent majority.
People who are largely supportive are already seeking out additional data points in their news consumption. Similarly, people who are largely unsupportive will gravitate towards their chosen echo chamber. The silent majority will remain largely ambivalent and, if they vote, will remain single issue voters.
The risk is that the government doesn’t find an effective neutral way for deciding what’s included and what’s not.
We're not encouraging spam with this. We're mainly focused on existing conversational use cases that's currently done over SMS/RCS. They can be more human and expressive when done over iMessage.
what you encourage and what actually happens are two different things, though. gmail does not actively encourage spam, yet most spam emails i receive are from gmail addresses.
you have to actively fight against malicious uses, like spam. "not encouraging" is nowhere near enough.
what systems/processes/safeguards do you have in place to prevent abuse?
I agree. We're not completely self-serve right now, so we get to talk with each potential customer and learn about their use case before onboarding them onto the platform. This way, we can prevent use cases that involve spam or abuse.
"right now", which implies that you plan to move to self-serve. and obviously manually checking in on each and every customer is not sustainable if you scale.
do you do periodic checkups now? hoping nobody lies during onboarding is risky, in an already-risky endeavor. have you thought about anti-abuse systems for when you go self-serve?
We do run checkups and keep very closely in touch with our customers. We don't plan to go self serve in the near future and will most likely still have a very personalized onboarding process.
For iPhone only users, so right off the bat your product is targeting 50% ish of a companies customer base. And the non iMessage people get a worse experience?
In North America iPhone/android split is far from 50/50. I have 4 different apps running and the split is about 80/20 and has been for a decade. Internationally android is used at a higher rate - but that is decreasing as lesser economies play catch up.
Not sure what bubble you live in, but that is incorrect. Maybe in California it's 80/20. Every single statistic globally is nearly 80/20% for android. There is a few rich markets and they may be 80/20 for Apple, but realistically Android wins every single time, no matter what market you look at.
China/India are like 30-40% of the world, and they are both under 20% usage.
Europe - 60/40% split for android
US/Canada - 40/60% split for iPhone
Even some of the higher countries are only 70/30% for iPhone.
Ignoring that is fine if your target is rich North Americans.
Apple doesn't inherently prohibit programmatic messaging. In fact, they actually developed Applescript for people to do that. What they are against is spam and abuse. Therefore, as long as we stay compliant and prevent spam, Apple is not necessarily against this.
> iMessage is intended for communicating with family and friends, and is not for conducting commercial activities or disseminating unwanted messages. iMessage misuse may result in service limitations.
Apparently, they are against ANY commercial messages. Even if I personally sent marketing messages and typed them myself. So of course they are not going to like you making it easier for people to do that at scale.e
Technically, you are right that being programmatic is not the issue (so presumably those openclaw adapters are okay).
But let's not mislead investors or customers -- Apple has clearly stated your use case is not welcome (except through the iMessage Business Program they control).
They developed AppleScript for people to do this individually, at limited scale.
Push notifications, attached to an application or website, and controllable by a user on that basis, are the solution for corporate messaging at scale.
This will get you banned. It’s not a question of if, but when. Users will hit the report spam button. Apple will shut you down.
People don't report our phone lines to be spam because the use cases that we focus on are either mostly inbound (e.g. customer service, the user is the one who texts first) or warm opt-in outbound (e.g. form-fill text back or follow ups). Businesses want a better medium to communicate with their users and users want something more conversational and native to their messaging behaviors.
I genuinely can’t tell if this is naivety or willful ignorance, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.
This is in direct violation of the terms of service, and Apple invests a lot of money in keeping iMessage clean of this kind of misuse.
They control the servers, the client, certificate provisioning, hardware identification, and user identification. They can trivially trace a registered account to the point of sale and the card and PII used to buy the hardware on which the account was registered.
You will fly under the radar for just as long as it takes to annoy enough of their customers that Apple brings down a massive ban hammer.
Elsewhere in the great they said they can't support the customer in the right way on RCS. I can't think of any technical reason for right vs wrong support, but I can think of deception as a reason (gaining trust through using a closed platform).
SMS/RCS is better for some use cases (e.g. transactional messaging, promotions, or order updates) while iMessage is better for others (e.g. customer service). iMessage is better for these use cases because it feels more natural to the users texting the number
That "opt-in" is going to be a vaguely-worded auto-filled checkbox and the "consent" will be stretched far beyond what any user thinks they're agreeing to.
How are your financial incentives aligned against sending spam? From this side, your words seem hollow and the typical viability of these businesses relies on sending spam.
I wear contacts and I’m surprised that there aren’t more cases of infections from lack of proper hygiene and care.
> In 2023, a major eye drop recall was called after drops … were found to be contaminated with a deadly bacteria. Overall, 81 patients were sickened, 18 suffered permanent blindness and four died.
> the drops were contaminated with the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is resistant to standard antibiotics.
> It can infect the eye, leading to vision loss and, in extreme cases, it can spread to the blood and trigger the potentially fatal complication sepsis.