• 3 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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    1. Just because I have heard of NordVPN doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily use it (in fact I use arch mullvad, btw.)
    2. Let’s see some numbers that ads work. You can’t just calculate how life would be without ads, but I wonder what would happen if ad expenses for all companies would be capped somehow. When cigarette companies were severely limited in terms of advertising they saved a ton of money. Of course people already knew their brands, but still.

    I think ad space sellers wildly overestimate the effectiveness of ads and google has made it far worse with targeted ads. People have gotten used to saying things like “ads work” and “brand recognition” but does anyone know the numbers? Or is this just repeating some phrases you’ve heard?

    I don’t know the numbers myself, but I’m quite skeptical.













  • Bizarre. But the article outlines a lot more vulnerabilities. Seems like every part of this device is poorly secured.

    IOActive’s hacking technique exploited glaring security vulnerabilities they found in the shufflers, the researchers say: They bought their own Deckmates for testing from second-hand sellers, one of whom told them a password used for maintenance or repair. They found that this password and others they extracted from the Deckmates’ code were configured in the shuffler with no easy way to change them, suggesting they likely work on almost any Deckmate in the wild. They also found that the most powerful “root" password to control the shuffler—which, like all the Deckmate’s passwords, they declined to publicly reveal—was relatively weak.

    This is just ridiculous / hilarious.



  • Yes that’s indeed great and I have contributed to OSM, but even for places with tags in multiple languages the search still didn’t work great.

    Perhaps it’s been improved, but I think Organic Maps first searches for the primary name tag first and only later name:es or name:ca. But that means that when searching in Spanish in Valencia (where the name tags are in Valencian/Catalan), it would often give me results outside of Valencia but that would have the name of what I was looking for.

    That’s not impossible to improve, but it’s difficult to get those things consistently right. Google knows so much about its users it can make really accurate predictions about which results are most relevant.

    But what’s for me way more significant is that OSM is quite unforgiving when it comes to typos or slightly inaccurate spelling. Organic Maps has that problem and openstreetmap.org as well. As an example: there is a part of the city called l’Eixample. If you search for l'Eixample on OSM you will find it no problem: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=l’Eixapmle

    But if you forget the apostrophe, lEixample, or if you switch around the m and p, l'Eixapmle, you get no results: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=lEixample

    For me that is really frustrating when I’m outside somewhere and have to quickly look up some place on my phone. Most of the time I can still find it with organic maps, but it can definitely be more cumbersome than with google maps.


  • I use Organic Maps as much as possible. For public transport I use another app (not google maps but a local app for my country). Sometimes I check google maps if I can’t find a place or if the opening times are missing on openstreetmap (the source for organic maps).

    The main issue with organic maps (and I think any map app based on OSM data) is search. Especially in places where multiple languages are used I’ve found it quite frustrating.

    Valencia, for example, has Valencian/Catalan as its main language on OSM, but Spanish is very common. If I search in Spanish I don’t get good results. A small typo will also mess things up. That’s pretty frustrating and means I often have to go to the website of wherever I’m going to get the proper name in Valenciano without typos, or I have to look it up on google maps.