I use POP and Thunderbird to download all my email and erase it from their servers so they can't later use it for AI training, ad personalization, persona tracking, etc.
Unfortunately deleting your email probably doesn't "erase it from their servers". This was the substance of one of the old google location history lawsuits, where "erase my history" only erased your device's access to it. They retain a possibly transformed copy for training etc.
You don’t have an ability to “erase it from their servers”. There is no way to be sure they actually delete anything when you erase it, they could just be hiding the access.
Speaking as someone who worked in a large company before (although perhaps not Google-sized), and several smaller ones, they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible. Sure they could be "just hiding the access" immediately after you request them to delete, but that storage will likely be overwritten soon by something else.
Training off data you published for public consumption, e.g. pretty much user-generated content on social media, or anything publicly accessible on the web, is one thing. Training off private conversations is a whole different thing. I doubt any major company is doing the latter. Would be a PR and legal firestorm. Which doesn't serve the interests of companies training AI models either.
Part of our process is to ensure this is covered in the terms and we encourage all merchants to explicitly show this in the product for visibility but also because a significant percentage of customers will add a backup to avoid risk of downtime.
Edge has been freezing on me for months with over 100% CPU usage. I finally figured out it was a youtube downloader extension. I disabled it and the problem went away.
I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.
Meanwhile, there's no apparent way to pay for a train using an American android phone (or at least I couldn't figure it out last year). One of the two apps refused to install on non-japanese phones, the other installed but refused to run. Had to pay with cash and it was a huge pain. Half the time I inexplicably had to do a fare adjustment, a hugely embarrassing moment blocking the turnstile, especially considering the culture there.
That’s thanks to Android phone manufacturers, which don’t want to pay for a global license for the NFC tech involved. Apple on the other hand does pay for a global license and so iPhones and Apple Watches from anywhere work perfectly with Japanese cash card terminals. I use a digital Suica on my US iPhone during my visits.
Supposedly Pixels have the requisite hardware, but Google software locks the functionality to Japan. Some have been able to hack their Pixels to force it on but from what I’ve gathered it’s flaky when you do that.
Why should they pay for a licence? Once a technology reaches such ubiquity, there's a strong case for it being part of the technical infrastructure of that society. To me, that means that governments have a responsibility to ensure that the technology is widely available, and arbitrarily locking it behind commercial licences does not help achieve that. To the extent that patents and licensing provide an incentive to develop such technology, it's beholden on governments to foot the R&D bill in some other way.
The "standard" in question here is NTT Docomo's Osaifu-Keitai, which is used only in Japan and requires both licensing and a special flavor of Sony's Felica chip:
I can't really fault Android manufacturers for not wanting to pay extra for every phone in the world to get a bit of proprietary tech that's completely useless outside Japan.
The same company that has a weird dichotomy between sometimes using other industry-standard data formats, but at times either succeeding (UMatic, Betacam, Professional Disc, Video8/Hi8) and sometimes failing (Betamax, Memory Stick) to have a dominant media storage standard. And sometimes they have products that accept industry standard formats (I have an older prosumer camera from Sony that supports SD, Memory Stick Pro Duo, and a proprietary flash format that is mostly used to record two formats at once, and they made plenty of VHS VCRs).
Why the F should an interoperability fundamental like NFC require any such thing as a license in the first place??? It's utterly absurd to have ever allowed such a condition, despite it being a fact that everyone has been just living with for decades. If there is a problem, it is very definitely not thanks to anyone failing to pay a license.
FeliCa isn't NFC -- it's a close standard but it's technically different enough and has different requirements that it has licensing attached because it wasn't made freely available. It's technically also called "NFC-F". FeliCa predates NFC's wide adoption in consumer electronic devices because it was in use in Japan in the early 2000's.
Hilariously, the physical cards can only be topped up at add fare machines (cash only) or ATMs (cash only).
If you go down the "add a pasmo/suica on your phone" then you get into licensing issues with the other cabal (credit card issuers): you need to use an Amex to charge it via Apple Pay (IIRC Visa is now supported, but when I tried it last week my card was declined, so... YMMV).
Assuming you’re a tourist, are you sure it’s not your bank flagging the transaction?
When visiting in April I too thought it was an issue with the card when trying to reload on apple wallet, but after two cards declined, found out the transaction was flagged haha
Same experience with reloading on the physical machines. It’s quite amusing
Same card worked via Apple wallet for other transactions, and the Visa thing is a known issue historically (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255018680?sortBy=rank). A local friend confirmed the fix, but I can't seem to find any info from Apple or Visa about it.
It's working now (https://atadistance.net/2023/12/15/apple-pay-suica-visa-rech...) and has been working since ~2023. The last hurdle many face is that if you disable location services, sometimes the transaction is still blocked as they can now geofence it to just Japan with foreign bank cards.
A few years ago, while I was in Japan visiting, they ran out of SUICA cards and visitors arriving couldn't get them. Left a lot of folks in a real bind. Fortunately I had already had cards for my family- and when we left we returned them for the deposit so they could be re-used, but they had a shortage for a few years! They should have used standard NFC, but being an early adopter has its downsides I guess.
You only need to buy it at the airport if you want a Welcome Suica. You can buy a regular Suica at any station with a multi-function machine.
The only real differences between the Welcome Suica and a regular one are the 500 yen deposit (Welcome Suica doesn't require a deposit) and the limited validity (Welcome Suica automatically expires after about a month).
In some stations now there are some entry points that use "standard" visa touchless payments that can be used now I think.
Your android phone likely doesn't have the right NFC tech that iPhones have (google Felica, it's a separate NFC standard used basically only in Japan. Apple builds it into all of their iPhones, most android phones outside of Japan do not). It's mostly just a case of divergent tech, along with Apple being willing to spend money to avoid SKU differentiation/support people traveling in Japan.
There’s not a reasonable solution using global Android phones, but you could obviously just buy a physical IC card and use that, which is what I was suggesting here in the first place.
Single core performance isn't just clock frequency. It must be multiplied by average IPC, but really it's more difficult since you have to account for factors like new SIMD instructions. Effective IPC improvements are where a significant fraction of single core speedup came from in this period
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