ciferecaNinjo

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[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

The premise of the question is when the bank refuses you access to your money, which manifests in a number of circumstances. Receiving a check from the bank is useful only in scenario 1, and only possible in parts of the world that still have checks.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 4 points 2 weeks ago

Indeed, and it’s useful to be aware of that.. things like pinger numbers. But I certainly would not cut the bank any slack for their oppressive mandate that excludes people without a mobile phone.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

That’s not an ATM machine.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 4 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

It’s not about the last €20¹. It’s about the last €18.45. How do you get €18.45 from an ATM?

Well, shit, that could be an answer too.. cashless banks could have a special kind of ATM that has no denomination limitations. Even my local grocer has a cash machine capable of dispensing all small denominations.

So there are several reasonable things they /could/ be doing, but there is no pressure on them to be competent.

¹ I will edit my post to make this more clear.

(edit) it just occurred to me this is a human rights violation. A very minor one, but against international law nonetheless. You cannot deprive someone of their property. UDHR Art.17:

  1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
  2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 3 points 2 weeks ago (12 children)

The answer is in what you quoted: cash.

There should always be an option to cash out when closing an account. The ATM can get all but the last ~~€20~~ €19.99. It’s foolish and embarrassing that the bank cannot handle the remainder.. that they are so anti-cash that they refuse to have some petty cash around for micro transactions.

Or the bank could accept a small cash deposit. If the balance is €18.45, a customer should be able to deposit €1.55 so that they can pull €20 from the ATM. But cashless banks refuse to accept even the tiniest of deposits.

It should be illegal. It’s a kind of “binding”, where a business requires you to use another business. People should have a right to exit the banking system, full stop. Forcing someone to open another account as a condition to exiting (in effect) is absurd and denies people autonomy.

Apart from that, if a cashless bank insists on being 100% balls-to-the-wall anti-cash in their war on cash, they /could/ give customers who close their account a prepaid credit card funded with their account balance. Customer still has the problem of spending an exact amount but at least they could deal with it later, without fees eating away at their balance. They could do the split restaurant bill at a time of their choosing.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Worth noting that some banks are pushing this transition in a more subtle way. By gradually removing options from their web banking and making functions that are smartphone-only.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 24 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

Yikes. I am disturbed to hear that. I was as well appalled with what I saw in a recent visit to a university. It’s baffling that someone could acquire those degrees without grasping the discipline. Obviously it ties in with the fall of software quality that began around the same time the DoD lifted the Ada mandate. But indeed, you would have to mention your credentials because nothing else you’ve written indicates having any tech background at all.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

How have I made your point at all?

You have acknowledged the importance of having multiple points of failure. It’s a good start because the defect at hand is software with a single point of failure.

You're a bit incoherent with what you're talking about.

I suppose I assumed I was talking to someone with a bit of engineering history. It’s becoming clear that you don’t grasp software design. You’ve apparently not had any formal training in engineering and likely (at best) you’ve just picked up how to write a bit of code along the way. Software engineering so much more than that. You are really missing the big picture.

This has nothing to do with software design or anything else along those lines.

What an absurd claim to make. Of course it does. When software fails to to protect the data it’s entrusted with, it’s broken. Either the design is broken, or the implementation is broken (but design in the case at hand). Data integrity is paramount to infosec and critical to the duty of an application. Integrity is basically infosec 101. If you ever enter an infosec program, it’s the very first concept you’ll be taught. Then later on you might be taught that a good software design is built with security integrated into the design in early stages, as opposed to being an afterthought. Another concept you’ve not yet encounted is the principle of security in depth, which basically means it’s a bad idea to rely on a single mechanism. E.g. if you rely on the user to make a backup copy but then fail to protect the primary copy, you’ve failed to create security in depth, which requires having BOTH a primary copy AND a secondary copy.

This is a simple thing. If your data is valuable you secure it yourself.

That has nothing to do with the software defect being reported. While indeed it is a good idea to create backups, this does not excuse or obviate a poor software design that entails data loss and ultimately triggers a need for data recovery. When a software defect triggers the need for data recovery, in effect you have lost one of the redundant points of failure you advocated for.

When you reach the university level, hopefully you will be given a human factors class of some kind. Or if your first tech job is in aerospace or a notably non-sloppy project, you’ll hopefully at least learn human factors on the job. If you write software that’s intolerant to human errors and which fails to account for human characteristics, you’ve created a poor design (or most likely, no design.. just straight to code). When you blame the user, you’ve not only failed as an engineer but also in accountablity. If a user suffers from data loss because your software failed to protect the data, and you blame the user, any respectable org will either sack you or correct you. It is the duty of tech creators to assume that humans fuck up and to produce tools that is resilient to that. (maybe not in the gaming industry but just about any other type of project)

Good software is better than your underdeveloped understanding of technology reveals.

Thinking that a federated service is going to have a uniform or homogenous approach to things is folly

Where do you get /uniform/ from? Where do you get /homogenous approach/ from? Mbin has a software defect that Lemmy does not. Reporting mbin’s defect in no way derives and expectation that mbin mirror Lemmy. Lemmy is merely an example of a tool that does not have the particular defect herein. Lemmy demonstrates one possible way to protect against data loss. There are many different ways mbin can solve this problem, but it has wholly failed because it did fuck all. It did nothing to protect from data loss.

on your end and a failure of understanding what the technology is.

It’s a failure on your part to understand how to design quality software. Judging from the quality of apps over the past couple decades, it seems kids are no longer getting instruction on how to build quality technology and you have been conditioned by this shift in recent decades toward poorly designed technology. It’s really sad to see.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Exactly. You’ve made my point for me. Precisely why this defect is a defect. The user’s view should be separate and disjoint from the timeline. Lemmy proves the wisdom of that philosophy. But again, it’s a failure of software design to create a fragile system with an expectation that human users will manually compensate for lack of availaiblity and integrity. I know you were inadvertenly attempting again to blame the user (and victim) for poor software design.

It’s a shame that kids are now being tought to produce software has lost sight of good design principles. That it’s okay to write software that suffers from data loss because someone should have another copy anyway (without realising that that other copy is also subject to failures nonetheless).

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Who cares?

Anyone who values their own time and suffers from data loss cares about data loss, obviously.

This is a serious question.

Bizarre.

Anything that is important to you should be backed up and/or archived. Relying on a third party social media app is folly.

This is a bug report on faulty software. If you have a clever workaround to the bug, specifics would be welcome. A bug report is not the place for general life coaching or personal advice. If there is an emacs mode that stores posts locally and copies them into a lemmy or mbin community and keeps a synchronised history of the two versions, feel free to share the details. But note that even such a tool would still just be a workaround to the software defect at hand.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 1 month ago

Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.

Effectively, the government has outsourced the duty of governance to private corporations -- without rules. Under capitalism.

The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.

We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop engaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.

tl;dr: is it a good idea to put Elon Musk in control of who gets to talk to their government?

 

I often supply documents as evidence to regulators (e.g. GDPR regulators). A document is normally in A4 format and I digitally superimpose that onto an A4 page. Thus generally without shrinking or expanding.

I label it by printing “exhibit A”, “bewijsstuk A”, or “pièce A” in the topmost rightmost corner at a 45° angle and give a small margin to avoid unprintable areas. I do that on every single page. If it would overlap something, I shift it down to avoid overlap. It seems to do the job well but a regulator once requested that I resubmit the evidence without my markups.

So apparently they don’t like my style. Maybe they wonder if I could be making more material alterations. What is the normal convention in the legal industry? These evidence submissions are not for a court process but they always have potential to end up in court in the future.

I have some ideas:

  • (only for paper submissions) I could stick a Post-It note to every document (every page?) and hand-write evidence labels. This would be inconvenient for them to scan. If they remove the notes to feed into a scanner, then the digital version is lossy and so they cannot dispense of the paper version. Or they must be diligent with entering the label into the file’s metadata or filename.
  • (only for electronic submissions) I could make the evidence label a PDF annotation, so when viewing the doc and printing it the user can decide whether to show/print annotations. This seems useful superficially but it’s problematic because the PDF tools poorly adhere to the standard to w.r.t. annotations. Many tools do not handle annotations well. A recipient’s app does not necessarily give them control over whether annotations appear, and how they appear (different fonts chosen by different tools and if a tool does not have the source font it may simply ignore the annotation). The 45° angle that sets it apart and makes it pop-out better is apparently impossible with PDF annotations. And with little control over the font it might look good in one viewer but overlap in another.
  • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could shrink the doc to ~90% of the original size, put a frame around it, and push it low on the page to leave space at the top for metadata like evidence labels. The the label is obviously not altering the original.
  • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could add a cover page to each doc with the sole purpose of writing “exhibit A”. Seems good for digital submissions but I really don’t like the idea of bulking out my paper submissions. It would add €1 to the cost for every ten docs.
  • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) Perhaps I could get away with rotating “exhibit A” 90° and finely printing it along the edge of the margin. This could even be combined with bullet 3 and maybe with less scaling (~95%).

Any other ideas?

5
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/french@sopuli.xyz
 

I would like to understand this paragraph:

§ 2. Lorsque (un opérateur d'un [¹ réseau public de communications électroniques]¹) a l'intention d'établir des câbles, lignes aériennes et équipements connexes, de les enlever ou d'y exécuter des travaux, elle tend à rechercher un accord quant à l'endroit et la méthode d'exécution des travaux, avec la personne dont la propriété sert d'appui, est franchie ou traversée.

Argos Translate yields:

§ 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish cables, airlines and related equipment, to remove or perform work therein, it tends to seek an agreement on the location and method of carrying out work, with the person whose property serves as a support, is crossed or crossed.

I think tends is a false friend here because it seems unlikely in this context. A commercial machine translation yields:

§ 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish, remove or carry out work on cables, overhead lines and related equipment, it shall seek agreement as to the location and method of carrying out the work with the person whose property is used as support, is crossed or is being traversed.

Sounds more accurate. I’m disappointed that there seems to be no requirement that the telecom company obtain consent from property owners. Is that correct? The telecom operator does not need consent on whether to use someone’s private property, only consent on how they deploy the cables?

 

The FOSS app Argos Translate enables people to locally translate their documents without depending on an external service and then hoping their content is not snooped on (while simultaneously hoping to get translation service for free). Argos does okay with quite popular language pairs but it’s really not up to a good standard of quality overall.

The machine learning input into Argos known as “models” are trained on samples of (hopefully manual) translations. The models require huge amounts of data. Apparently the effort to gather large volumes of input leads to grabbing poor quality samples, which ultimately leads to bad translations. To worsen matters, you have a sparse scatter of different projects making their own models. So the effort is decentralised in a detrimental way. End users are then left with having to experiment with different models.

Shouldn’t Académie Française (the French language protection org) have some interest in the public having access to resources that give high-quality translations into French?

Consider that Académie Française members each spend €230k on clothes (yes, that “k” after the number is correct), surely they have money sloshing around to promote French. If playing dress-up is worth €9.2 million (€230k × 40 members), just imagine how much money they must have for their mission of supporting the French language.

 

This question is inspired by Belgian law but there is no Belgian law forum and I think it’s likely that Netherlands would have the same problem. So answers w.r.t. Dutch law would be interesting enough.

It’s increasingly common for law to mandate that people give the government their email address in various situations. If someone has no email address, I have to wonder how can they be expected to comply with the law? When the law requires disclosure of information that does not exist, is it implied that we must take necessary steps to make that information come into existence in order to disclose it? Is it implied by that law that we must enter the private marketplace and subscribe to email service, then periodically check our email?

I happen to have email addresses but I refuse to disclose them to users of Micosoft Outlook or Google. That includes government offices because the gov uses MS Outlook and simultaneously does not use PGP. Since my workflow of non-disclosure to MS & Google has ensured that email has the tiniest of roles in my life, it would not be a big step for me to nix email altogether and end my subscriptions. But I need to know if it’s even legal for me to do so.

 

French law often adds a “bis” (e.g. “Article 29bis”) if more law is added later and for whatever reason they don’t just append it to Article 29.

It’s ugly in text, but I’m writing a document in LaTeX so I have freedom and control to do something better. At the same time, I don’t want to invent something that alienates readers. I just want to know from people who have read a lot of well typeset French what style is common. I think italicizing the “bis” is common. But what about making it a subscript or superscript? What about putting a ½ space between the bis and the number?

 

The rumor I heard was that if you buy a product that fails before the warranty ends, you do not need to contact the manufacturer (in #Belgium). You can simply return the product to the merchant and the merchant must deal with the warranty service.

A store manager refused to accept my return of a device that died after 2yrs+2 months, which was covered under a 3 year warranty. He said I must deal directly with the manufacturer. I threatened to complain officially and the manager gave in. But then as he was angrily returning money to me, he said he is only required to handle warranty service for the 1st two years and that he is making an exception for me. I figured he was confused because 2 years happens to be the length of the EU implied warranty. I had not heard that it was also a limit of the store’s obligation as an intermediary.

To complicate matters, the product was marked down on liquidation because the store apparently severed ties with that manufacturer. Though I doubt that’s relevant to my situation because it would not void the warranty. But the article also says merchants must accept returns for any reason in the first 14 days, yet the store makes that zero days for liquidated goods. Does that break EU law?

Anyway, I need answers. Maybe I owe the manager a bottle of wine. The EU article indeed confirms sellers must handle warranty returns for up to 2 years. But that’s EU-wide #law. What about #Belgian national law?

Next question, out of curiousity: normally manufacturers have a choice whether to replace, repair or refund. Is that choice passed through to merchants? Or are merchants required to handle this with one instant transaction (thus no repair as the consumer would have to return to the store later)?

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