This is very clever. I've often needed to figure out what some running process was actually for (e.g. because it just started consuming a lot of some limited resource) but it never occurred to me that one could have a tool to answer that question. Well done.
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Edit: Ah, ok, I slightly misunderstood - skimmed the README too quickly. I thought it was also explaining what the process did :D Still a clever tool, but thought it went a step further.
Perhaps you should add that though - combine Man page output with a database of known processes that run on various Linux systems and a mechanism for contributing PRs to extend that database...? Unlesss it's just me that often wants to know "what the fsck does /tmp/hax0r/deeploysketchyd actually do?" :P
Looking up the binary in the package management system would also provide another source of useful information. Of course this would dramatically increase the complexity but would, I think, be useful.
If you could look it up using APT/dpkg first, that would be lovely :-)
My superpower as a staff engineer was having zero shame in asking questions. Anything from "what does that abbreviation stand for?" through to "what will the traffic look like when we go live?" - mostly people are worried about looking ignorant, so weirdly this makes you look both knowledgeable and confident! I wish I'd known that when I was younger...
Unfortunately it is a bit more subtle than that though:
(1) Questions reveal a lot about someone's state of mind, particularly if there are a lot of them. If someone is actually struggling and doesn't maintain a vague silence, the people around them will figure it out even faster. Arguably not a bad thing, hiding things is a weak strategy.
(2) There is a certain type of middle manager who fears clarity, because clarity leads to accountability and at some level they have identified that as a threat to their careers. It is prudent to be very careful what sort of questions to ask that manager - "what does that abbreviation stand for?" is fine, "what is the exact problem here and what do you want the solution to look like?" or "I don't understand, can you get into the details of why you think that?" can be unexpectedly controversial.
So there is a superpower in having zero shame in asking questions, but the real trick of it is being able to identify the set of inoffensive, basic questions that will move a project along. There is a large class of technically-reasonable-politically-imprudent questions that an inexperienced engineer might ask to their detriment. I've never been afraid of asking questions but if the mindset behind the question isn't fairly polished then there can be backlash and a most people learn to avoid questions rather than getting good at being mentally flexible.
Ok, I was a little tongue in cheek, so I agree it's a bit more complicated than just asking any question that pops into my pretty little head.
But I do think that not worrying about whether people will think I'm ignorant for asking is a very important first step that I could have applied successfully when younger. Confidence is hard earned though.
When explaining stuff I've been working on to others I often tell them "what the fuck?" is a suitable question (to try and lower this barrier) :)
I would often ask questions I knew the answer to (or mostly knew the answer to) just to get insight into someone's point of view, or to give insight into my point of view (usually coming from ops/administration/devops pov), and sometimes as a way to subtly point out that they are doing something terribly inefficient from the 10000 ft view (usually to more junior devs who have tunnel vision on their cog).
While I wouldn't say more people shouldn't do this more of the time, there is also a lot of social capital you have as a staff level person that makes it "easy" to do this. (and is part of why it's important to)
Was just about to say this. As a staff engineer your position is (or should be!) so secure that you can get away with asking all sorts of “dumb” questions that more junior engineers don’t want to ask. I will also regularly say things in meetings like “I don’t understand, can you take us through that again” or “can you remind me how <xyz thing> works?”. Sometimes this makes the difference between a meeting being useful and everyone just being confused but afraid to say so.
In an ideal world, juniors would all do this too, but I don’t blame them if they don’t. So it’s very important to do it if you have the social capital.
One of my favorite interview questions for senior positions is "Tell me about a decision you made that you would change in hindsight." Junior level people and people who are otherwise unfit for the role will try to give answers that minimize their responsibility or (worst case) have no examples. Senior level people will have an example where they can walk you through exactly how they messed up and what they would have done differently. Good senior level candidates examine their mistakes and are honest about them.
I do this for everyone, not just senior positions. "If you were to start that again today, knowing everything you do now, what would you do differently?" is a question you can ask regardless of seniority. Even if they've only done some school projects, being able to look back and say "yeah, that could have gone better from the start" is a hugely valuable signal.
The details of how I ask it might change based on seniority, but that I ask it? No.
It’s also true that the kind of people who are ready for staff level work are already doing staff level work. While social capital is a factor, it isn’t necessarily accumulated because of title or experience.
The idea of “disambiguation” is itself ambiguous. The way I recognize other people solving problems at a staff level is we are communicating in terms of properties, constraints and tradeoffs. Crucially, these constraints are not necessarily business constraints, but rather, constraints inherent to an architecture. For example, queuing works for ordering because it append-only, and monotonic. So as soon as you have multiple queues (such as partitioning) or try to reorder it, it also loses its ordering guarantee. Does the problem require ordering?
The first couple chapters of Roy Fielding’s dissertation goes through this. The first time I tried reading it, I did not have experience to understand. It was a slog and I got little out of it. The next time I tried reading it, it was helping me gel and articulate things I had started observing from experience. I recognized that I had previously been so focused on architectural elements and that the properties and constraints were far more important. It is this that determines what is being traded off, and antipatterns pop out. Knowing properties and constraints allows me to quickly identify problems, and start the process of disambiguation. Many of the other staff or principal engineers I have chatted with communicate along these lines.
I don’t try to ask smart questions or dumb questions. I ask questions so that I can understand properties and constraints.
For sure, a staff engineer asking lots of question is "disambiguating" a junior engineer asking a lot of questions is asking somebody else to figure out his/her project. Which is kinda true in a sense, you don't give a super-vague project to an engineer who's just starting up for a reason.
One of my favorite moves is to ask a question that I feel has an obvious answer and then say "what am I missing?" Sometimes I am right, other times I am missing something.
Either way I'm modelling:
- that it's okay to ask questions to which the answer seems obvious
In general people like to answer questions - it makes them/us feel mildly superior - hopefully in a good and positive way. You have to use some judgement on how to approach and engage.
Depending on who you are engaging with, a packet of Hobnobs (other socially acceptable bribes are available) might be needed or perhaps waiting until after lunch.
Now, your next mission is getting something done by making someone else think it was their idea in the first place. It might sound counter-intuitive: "How does that benefit me, they get the credit". Crack that conundrum and you will advance to the next level.
100% this: if you go every axis of what differentiates staff from senior one will see deep down it is about asking questions: either yourself or helping others ask the right questions (e.g. mentoring, impact/are we solving the right problem, etc.)
Yes, after the flurry of Covid cancellations I avoid using OTAs. Where we had flights booked direct with the airlines getting our money back was much swifter than where we had gone through an intermediary. Also EU bookings were much quicker to refund than US ones.
Amusingly my voluntary subscription was just under the cut-off amount and I cancelled it as soon as this came in. I bought a subscription to The Economist instead.
"O’Leary accused the travel agent industry of scamming and ripping off unsuspecting consumers by charging extra fees and markups on ticket prices."
That is ... pretty rich.
A couple of years ago I was going to go see my brother in the UK who lived near Stansted. As such Ryanair would have been the most convenient airline. The shere number of dark patterns I encountered trying to book the ticket was such that when I got to the payment page and they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread in the exchange rate I rage quit. I should have known better even then, but now I will only use them if I have literally no other choice. With luck that means "never."
I'm always happy to see the various EU competition authorities pushing back on this kind of thing.
Ryanair used to do some things that were quite remarkably devious - the option to not by travel insurance was in the middle of drop-down list of countries!
To make sure I had remembered that correctly I looked it up and here is a description of it:
NB I've travelled with Ryanair quite a lot and actually don't mind the actual flights but it is wise to manage expectations about the kind of company you are actually dealing with.
It's not quite as bad as I expected (still bad), since it does at least clearly tell you how to not buy it, in normal size type even. Except then they decided to make it out of place alphabetically (and it seems to have moved at least once, since the other article says it was "between Denmark and Finland" because it was sorted under "don't").
Cool website. It’s a pity it’s no longer a wiki. Perhaps if you used the extension RequestAccount with a restriction of editing to only confirmed users you would be able to keep it a wiki.
Yea quite devious, in a weird way I suppose the dark patterns also serve as an IQ test that favors younger tech-literates who are familiar with web patterns and are also on a budget (though not all).
I used Ryanair a lot while studying abroad in Europe and the €20 flights were real if you jumped through the hoops, which was quite magical.
I once had a flight booked to Paris, but it landed in an airport 2 hours outside of Paris and the train/bus would’ve been 2x the flight cost, so being short of money I just didn’t take the trip and lost €20 :)
The dark patterns favor the patient readers who are able to think through and make informed choices. That wouldn’t be most of the younger tech literates.
> However he disagreed that the ‘don’t insure me’ option was hidden, and said that 98% of Ryanair’s passengers could “find a way to decline insurance”.
I'm not surprised, but still a bit impressed by the ability to lie like this. Somehow I doubt even 9% of their passengers would know it was between Denmark and Finland.
An unknown percentage of people actually want the insurance. If only 2% bought it despite such an extreme dark pattern, the 98-percentile of customers is much better than I would have expected.
It's true you don't know who wants it, but I thought capitalism was supposed to work by mutual consent and transparency of contract. If even one person is deceived, that's a scam! I doubt out of tens or hundreds of thousands of people all of them figured this out and wanted the insurance.
I remember when they were seeking approval to provide blow jobs on flights (free in business class iirc.) The only thing that they won’t up charge. They even tried to get approval to charge for bathroom access.
Wild company, but they are entirely on brand.
To be fair, consumers have driven airlines this way. They’ve shown that they’ll buy based almost entirely on price and suffer any amount of agony in exchange.
I just don’t find basic economy or early flights or shitty airlines worth the bad stress.
The advantage of Ryanair and a lot of the other low cost carriers is that they do a lot of point to point flights between regional hubs - for example we flew Edinburgh to Marrakesh with them a few years back which was fine and I think they were the only airline offering direct flights. Going via Heathrow, Gatwick or CDG would have been a nightmare and we were only going for a few days.
I Will always be grateful to Ryanair for having allowed young me to travel cheaply, and I accepted most dark patterns, but I draw the line at the fact they appear to force you to book near seats when traveling with minors, even tho, by law, they have to allocate seats to you like that.
> they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread
I’m finding this more and more. Uber does it, and even Walgreens does it when I’m in the US and tap my card it suggests that I pay in my home currency. This seems to be a new vector companies have found for ripping off their customers.
What really pisses me off is that this stuff is annoying and sometimes fools us, tech savvy people on a hacker forum. I can't imagine how many elderly/non-techie people are being fleeced out of their money because of these kind of dark patterns.
Yup. Reminds me of how my dad would do his taxes at H&R Block, and then every year take out their “refund anticipation loan” (despite not having some big urgent expense). They deduct their overpriced tax prep fee and a healthy 150%APR interest payment from the proceeds but you get the money same day. You could just not do that and still have your refund in like a week. The APR is unconscionable given they did the taxes — they can be nearly certain your refund will arrive. But they just gloss over those details, probably by saying “Do you want your refund today, or wait on the IRS? With the Today option you can also just deduct your tax prep fee from the refund and not pay out of pocket.” I have a feeling they get a LOT of people with that scam.
Whenever I travel out of the country I always re-read my credit card policies on foreign currency conversion. Some cards are quite reasonable, some are ripoffs.
In 2025 it's decidedly old-fashioned to even think of interfering with the march of the orphan-crushing profit-maximising machine. Each quarter demands a fresh way to rip off people.
How quaint even the 90s seem today, and we though that was hyper capitalism!
This isn't anything new though. Been like that for the last 15 years at least. Always pay in the local currency (your bank/visa/mastercard will give you a better rate then the merchant)
It seems to be built into the credit card terminals. So it's a visa thing, not on the shop.
I had that with very small shops in non-touristy areas of Mexico where it was absolutely clear to not be a scam attempts by the shops owner. They had no idea what the terminal asked.
Their payment processor (the people they rent the machine off of) offers them this oppurtunity to 'unlock hidden revenue for merchants'[1][2][3] and they are happy to do this.
I don't think parent is claiming that the shop owner is trying to scam someone. But these prompts have been around for at least 15 years, I'm also sure about that, this isn't new by any measure. And yeah, also came across shop owners who don't know what it is about, and then you have to chose.
Makes sense that shop owners in non-touristy areas haven't seen them before, as you'll only see that when the card has a default currency that differs from the default currency of the terminal.
On the other hand, almost every merchant and waiter in Spain told me, when handing me the card terminal, to select "local currency" (decline the first swindle attempt) then "don't convert" (decline the second swindle attempt). There's obviously some required workflow where they must pass the terminal to the customer, but they are wise to the payment gateway's trick to extract additional value from the transaction. They don't want their customer bilked, or to take the reputational damage when the customer leaves an angry review.
So if your Mexican merchants "don't know" what their terminal says? Either you were their first foreigner, or they're useful idiots, or they know.
I just think they genuinely don't know. I was years into travelling before I learned about this 'trick'.
For my part, I'd just always assumed the charge would be ultimately converted by my bank in any case. Seems obvious now I look back, but I honestly just didn't think about the trick.
Just as an example that gives evidence for this, sometimes you'll go to the same place multiple times and the norm is they ask but occasionally someone won't. So it's not a policy.
I presume the people who don't just don't know about it, don't want to bother me and aren't aware it will make a difference.
He could have merely been the first to do the math and bring it up. I could easily see most tourists overlooking this sort of thing, or not mentioning it because they're already accustomed to it.
Very true, but the other half is to ensure you don’t use a card with a foreign transaction fee, which will cost you 3-4%. There are free cards like the Amazon Prime Visa that don’t have it, but that fee is very common.
The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports, or buying foreign currency from their banks in advance of trips. They give you awful rates.
Assuming you’re traveling to a civilized country, just stick your card in an ATM when you land and pull out the cash you need. Good banks don’t even charge their own ATM fee, so your total cost is the $3-4 that the ATM owner charges, and you get a pretty fair rate.
When the ATM withdrawal usually costs you nothing, or in some cases when the bank does not have an agreement with the ATM company it can cost you 1,39$ then 3-4$ is a ripoff.
Also people buy currency locally - before the trip - where I am from, and all the rates are displayed, both in a bank or in currency exchange. You can compare. And even when someone is lazy they can just ask friends which place has the best rates, everybody seems to know which (and the answers are true and conistent, I checked). Buying locally at a currency exchange is the cheapest option.
> The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports
If I've just arrived home with $30 left of whatever currency was used in the place I came from, they could be taking a 30% cut and it would still be worth it to just due it there rather than physically visiting a bank.
That is, if the currency is one they're even willing to exchange.
This isn’t that. I understand if you came to a US store with Canadian dollars, they’d be unlikely to give you the posted exchange rate for them, if the took them at all. Here we’re talking about paying with a credit card that will automatically pay in the local currency, and having the POS terminal, on whoever’s behalf, try and intermediate that to charge a higher rate than the credit card would have, under the false pretence of simplifying payment somehow. It’s not convenience, it’s preying on ignorance.
Almost. To such a degree I would call it a very dark pattern.
There is however one very good argument for. Currencies with very high volatility. Think extreme inflation. If you accept their conversion you know what you pay in your own currency. You have then mitigated a risk.
If your own currency is volatile then you might gamble and win. If the foreign currency is volatile you will usually win by paying in the foreign currency. If both are volatile then it is a blind gamble.
The important part here are the settlement dates. Your bank usually do not calculate the exchange rate of the eaxct purchase time.
That is the excuse for the "service". But it is still not wanted and I consider it evil.
When traveling places with rampant inflation you will notice that sellers always negotiate 2 prices. One in the local currency and one in what is considered an easy to use hard currency such as USD or Euros.
Forgeries and less cash flowing around has made it harder to use other less know but otherwise hard currencies.
So sellers never care what currency you choose to settle in as very close to zero sellers have multiple accounts on the same terminal. And those who really need it will always negotiate in different currencies.
You might have experienced something like this at times when visiting Argentina or Turkey.
So the "service" is only there for those who want to understand what they pay in their own currency or mitigate a settlement date. And will pay for it!
Local terminal holders rarely care. But the ATM mafias (such as EuroNet) do very much so. Because they actively are playing the mitigation game and are allowed to add fees.
I strongly feel this field should be very heavily regulated. But too much money is involved. And if you look at where VISA and MasterCard are located you will understand that is not a regulation happy corner of the planet.
Historically (like, 15+ years ago when I did the SEA backpacking circuit) there have been some cards with ridiculous fees for international transactions. Like, a flat $10 per transaction. Back then when I saw prompts like this on card terminals I assumed it was targeted at those cardholders (or people who had heard stories of those and were unsure and worried what they would be charged and wanted to be reassured by a number in their home currency)
Just so everyone is aware, it is still considered a foreign transaction regardless of which option you pick. So if you are using a card that charges for that, then you will be charged a foreign transaction fee. It is a foreign transaction fee, not foreign currency fee.
I think that’s exactly a big part of why this scam was developed. If you aren’t that informed, don’t know your credit card terms by heart, but you’ve heard about those “foreign fees” it’s very plausible that this service would save you money. Not likely of course, since the scam is obfuscated and hidden in a dollar amount presented without the computation.
If you’re in a place that wants dollars or euros because their currency is “bad” (volatile or unable to freely exchange for dollars), they prefer dollars. You can tell because you get a better than official exchange rate.
I have to say I’ve never been somewhere that the currency was so volatile the settlement date mattered. Carrying local currency would be part of your risk? This could only come up in the almost-all-digital-currency modern world.
When O'Leary accuses others of "scamming and ripping off unsuspecting consumers", what he really means is that only Ryanair should have the right to scam and rip off Ryanair passengers...
Years ago when paying with PayPal, there were 2 choices - for them to convert currencies or to rely on my bank to convert them. There was a warning that if I chose the second option, it could cost a lot. Turns out, with my bank the conversion was good and with PayPal's conversion I'd lose like 10%.
Stuff like that is what I say "years ago" - I haven't used PayPal for a while now, and I won't use it again.
Point of sale terminals also do this when travelling - it wasn't especially surprising, just one straw too many.
Of course foreign exchange offices have been doing this scam since forever ("no fees!")...
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Edit - note that with a bureau d'exchange my objection is not that they charge for the exchange; clearly that is the exact business that they are in. It's the "no fees" etc. marketing that hides from the less astute punters exactly how (and how much) they are paying for the service. I'd like to see that outlawed and direct costs of the exchange up front (e.g. "Exchange £100 for $121.5 at a cost of £10 compared to the base rate")
Isn't that fairly easy to estimate? If they're showing you a buy rate and a sell rate, you know the interbank rate is going to be pretty much halfway between the two. I don't think anyone's changing money and thinking the bureau isn't profiting.
Honestly, to me the problem seems more like people don’t know they don’t have to use those things. Just pulling money out of an ATM (and yes, declining the currency conversion scam there as well) is a much more efficient and cheap way to acquire the local currency.
People use these desks because they think that’s just “what it costs.”
ATMs all over are like this. Very annoying. I have to decline conversation all the time. The ATM conversation rate is usually 15-25% markup. No thanks, my bank charges nothing, just passes on the Visa 1% fee for fx.
Great question. Let’s take a deep dive on money. Getting $100 at the right time can be a game-changer! It’s not only a store of value — it’s a means of exchange!
The big scam is some terminals are configured with 17% forex fees (looking at your shady restaurants in Budapest), really funny when it's paired with tips in an EU country.
But this is why Revolut and WISE cards are a god send when travelling, just load them up with the local currency and these issues disappear.
Wise cards are still issued in your home country however. My NZ-issued Wise card still triggers the DCC prompt so it's more or less the same as a NZ-issued card from any other provider. A common misconception but understandable given how Wise markets their card products.
Yes, zero Forex fees cards work. But the terminal detects that your home currency is different to the local currency and you still have to choose the right option.
For example, just the other day I fat fingered the screen and chose the wrong currency.
Do they suggest that you pay in your home currency, or do they give you the choice to select on the ATM? Only once a cashier made a suggestion and it was to warn me of the spread and that generally it'd be better to do it in USD and let my bank do conversion.
You get a prompt on the terminal. I’ve never had a cashier suggest anything to me, and I don’t really want their input. The correct answer is always pay in local currency and let your bank handle it.
I once came across a cashier that thought you had to select the foreign currency option. When I tried to pay in the local currency she cancelled the transaction.
Needed to get another member of staff to explain to her that the local currency option would work fine.
The funny thing is that, at least for American consumers, there’s a good chance you’ll get mildly scammed by using your card in a foreign currency due to a 3%—4% junk fee that is common (I’d estimate 80% of non-premium cards have it). So the discovery of the “let us, the merchant, convert for you” scam has allowed merchants/payment networks to in some cases “steal” the scam from the card issuer (the card issuer then won’t take a fee if it’s in USD, but someone takes a fat margin on the currency). They’re all scumbags, all looking for ways to grift.
I’m not defending this behaviour with Ryanair, but this is not unique to them at all. It’s an industry “standard”. I’m Irish but live in the UK - when we make card transactions it asks what currency we want to pay in, and hides the exchange rate spread.
> I will only use them if I have literally no other choice
Even with the £20 increase they were likely cheaper than the alternative, if it exists. If this is going to push you into not using them, basically every other airline will be ruled out for you. EasyJet are exactly the same. BA/KLM/Air France/Aer Lingus are all the same on their short hop flights (I’ve actually never flown Lufthansa so I can’t comment on them). The short haul European routes are a race to the bottom.
To be clear, the currency scam was a last straw, not the major dark pattern.
When you compare list prices for flights with them versus almost any other airline you are comparing apples with oranges. The only way to figure out exactly what you'll pay is to go through the entirety of their checkout procedure. My experiences with those other airlines for short haul flights are quite different.
I also hate that it continues through the whole flight. I don't want to find out I have to pay to have my boarding pass printed, or that I need to pay for a glass of water on the plane. The other carrier might be more, but the things that come in the bundled fare make the trip easier with less friction points.
The one I found most devious was the ATMs in Stansted that offers to pay out Euro. I was going to Spain and knew I would need some cash on arrival, so I thought I could save a bit of time. They had cleverly swapped the exchange rate so in big letters they showed a reasonable figure, like 0.85 and then in smaller type in the corner showed that actually it was in favour of Euros, so you would pay over 350 pounds for 300 euros. I luckily realised in time, but I expect a lot of people don't. Also it's drilled in from the bad old days that you need to take out cash before going on holiday to avoid being scammed. A whole exploitive service industry seems to exist solely on that misconception.
The only place in I've had any troubles paying with card (or easily find a cashmachine) in recent time have been Turkey outside the big cities.
In fact i find Ryanair booking page the most smooth in user experience out of all major airlines. I am mostly tied to Aegean because i have a top loyalty level, and it is incredibly frustrating to go through extremely slow loading pages, page after page, to do every trivial task, and having to enter SMS OTP on every step. With Ryanair is't one and done, i barely remember it. And every action is blazing fast, pages load in a blink, no spinners.
> coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread in the exchange rate
BoFA does this for international wires as well. And I suspect a lot of companies do this to their international customers too. Unfortunately, it’s become pretty standard
It's easy to book a Ryanair ticket without being upsold. You select the ticket, probably add a bag for about £40, skip the car rental and hotels screens etc, then book. What's the problem?
So you're using Ryanair's own-issued payment card, to avoid the mandatory fees it charges for every other payment option?
You forgot to mention picking the "No I don't need travel insurance" option shoved in the middle of the list of travel insurance prices, which defaults to you buying travel insurance from Ryanair.
Do you already have their spyware app installed and tracking you on your phone, to avoid being charged £50 for a plain boarding pass which you print yourself?
You're describing some other airline's website, surely. If you'd used Ryanair's site you would not be unaware of its fuckery.
Dark patterns are still sketchy and unconscionable, regardless of how easy you find them to get past. They're put there by unscrupulous businesses to catch some people -- can you say no Ryanair customer has ever accidentally purchased Ryanair insurance they didn't need?
Similarly, their latest wheeze, that you skipped over, is to compel people to use their "app". The trading standards regulators need to smack Ryanair about the head with a cricket bat and again force them not to apply such bollocks.
> Indeed, when I checked in for my 12 November flight to Germany a day ahead, I was told: “Make sure to print and bring your boarding passes to the airport or access them through the Ryanair app” and even “boarding passes must be printed for use”.
> But Ryanair says those are no longer acceptable. Oddly, though, you can use a paper boarding pass that is printed out at the airport by ground staff working for Ryanair – at no charge.
Such utter bollocks. They are totally capable of accepting paper boarding passes (or screenshots or PDFs of boarding passes shown on a phone -- better airlines let you download a PDF from their website once checked in, and you can put it on your phone or print it out; no proprietary app needed), they just want to compel you to install their app and get tracked and dinged and marketed at and upsold up the wazoo with zero benefit to you. It is not necessary at all, and I will continue to never travel with them.
If you take your time and read carefully. Because sometimes the colored choice is free, and sometimes it is the non-colored one. 100% dark pattern. As is disabling "paste" on check-in, forcing you to remember the 6-alphanumeric char booking code if you do not have a second device/pen&paper at hand.
Scamming is, sadly, a common practice now for many services. I think the first time I saw it was on Expedia, before the pandemic, when prices started going up at each step.
I still don’t know why all these dark patterns are simply not illegal. What happened to consumer rights? It be a such a widespread practice, I think we will look back at this at one point and will say things akin “how did we let people smoke in planes”. One of those things utterly ridiculous in hindsight
I mean, it does seem relevant that this thread is for an article about them being fined a quarter-billion Euros, so they very much did break the law and the law very much does have teeth.
He's very good at marketing his airline (often with outrage inspiring press releases) and very good at finding ways to squeeze more blood out of the stone of budget travellers. I don't really care whether he's "good" or "bad" but I would like to see the regulators shut down more of these aggressive tactics as they emerge.
Bezos invented 'your margin is my opportunity' (at least that's where I heard it first), but O'Leary has that phrase in his blood instead of hemoglobin.
I just wish the airlines were forced to put their booking behind an API so we could book flights without having to go through mazes that are different for every airline.
Ryanair does lots of shitty things, but I dont see why an airline should be forced to resell to shitty agencies taking a an unecessary cut instead of consumers buying directly with the Airline.
I actually wonder how much traffic they lose this way. My employer doesn't allow me to book with them because the agent doesn't list them. Even though I want to go to Cambridge, quite annoying.
* It's probably too hot there (2000K in the cold part) for fullerene. The atmosphere there is mostly C2, C3 and CO. (CO is mentioned in the paper as a very good guess, but not mentioned in the press release.)
* If you fill a fullerene with H2 or He, it will float less instead of more.
I have a chemistry specification in high school, anyway the conditions are weird. It's like inside a burning coal, but much hotter, 2000K instead of 700K. The density is 2g/ml so it's more like a liquid than a gas. It's far away from the usual conditions in a lab, so my knowledge/intuition are not very useful.
Anyway, at so high pressure and density, I expect molecules with big voids to be crushed.
Indeed, unimaginable what is possible! There will also be traces of H, N, O, S etc due to comets crashing in, so room for carbon chemistry once temperature permits.
Conversely, feature flags can create annoying issues due to compliance requirements.
I worked on an underwriting system where we had to be able to explain the reason for a decision. This meant that you needed to have on file both the state of the flag and the effective logic at the moment in time that a line of credit was offered to a customer.
Right, they add risk both in terms of inadvertently being turned on / off and also in terms of permutations of possible system configurations that need to be tested. Less of a problem for well engineered systems with good deployment practices but it’s rare to come across these mythical things. :)
It depends a lot on the domain. I've mostly worked in high compliance/regulation worlds. It can be kind of stifling, honestly, but "oops maybe we had the feature flag turned on" is not going to cut the mustard.
Most startups can ignore all that at least until they get to a scale where "run out of money, go bust" is not the biggest risk to their business :)
This is very true and is exactly why there is no magic right answer other than “it depends”.
There are different stages of company lifecycle, different industries, different regulatory environments etc.
The processes put in place always have a cost - if picked appropriately it is worth paying, otherwise it is a waste that can hurt or even kills a project. This balance is the “art” of the job that I personally am only starting to probe around at my level and so it is still quite interesting. :)
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Edit: Ah, ok, I slightly misunderstood - skimmed the README too quickly. I thought it was also explaining what the process did :D Still a clever tool, but thought it went a step further.
Perhaps you should add that though - combine Man page output with a database of known processes that run on various Linux systems and a mechanism for contributing PRs to extend that database...? Unlesss it's just me that often wants to know "what the fsck does /tmp/hax0r/deeploysketchyd actually do?" :P
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