don’t let apple tell you they invented it.

Why always the knee-jerk anti-apple reaction even if they do something good?

FYI: Apple isn’t telling anyone they invented this. In fact, they didn’t even tell anyone about this feature and declined to comment after it was discovered and people started asking questions.

Summertime is terrible, especially in summer. You have one less usable hour in the evening.

During the summer you cannot really go outside until the sun goes down. It’s simply too hot in direct sunlight. Summer evenings are nice, after the sun goes down and the world starts to cool down a little. By moving the clock forwards we have an hour less of usable outdoor-time. It also means you have less time for things to cool down before going to sleep.

DST makes it so you have to go bed too early, being unable to enjoy the evening, and when you go to bed it’s too hot to sleep, but you have to because you have to get up at a ridiculous time the next morning.

Instead of DST we should introduce MST (Moonlight Saving TIme) and move the clock an hour backwards in summer. Then we can actually enjoy our summer evenings and go to bed once things have cooled down a little more. The earlier sunrise doesn’t matter since there is such a thing as blackout curtains.

Yep. The best people will leave first because they have options. It’s called the dead sea effect

I’ve never been to a grocery store where the self checkout doesn’t weigh everything. That’s why people keep getting the “unexpected item in bagging area” error that requires an employee to come over to check and clear the error each time.

Sounds like a stupid system.

What stores in what country are you referring to?

Pretty much every supermarket in the Netherlands.

Here is a video of it in action

The anti-theft equipment for a system like this that would prevent someone stealing by simply not scanning something is probably a lot more expensive than the usual self checkouts.

There is no anti theft system other than randomized bag checks where they check up to 10 items from your bag to see if you scanned them. Takes about 1 minute and with daily supermarket visits this happens maybe once a month or so. (I think there is some kind of reputation system linked to your store loyalty card).

Do you exit the store through a specific gate that scans stuff or what?

You scan your receipt af the exit gate (you can also scan a barcode from the store’s app or choose a tiny receipt that only contains the exit barcode). You have to go through one or these gates regardless of wether you go through self checkout or not.

If the store is busy I never try to self checkout since there are lines at all of them

There are almost never lines at self checkout. There are 16 self checkout stations vs only one regular cashier. Self checkout is super fast and even if they are all occupied one usually frees up in less than a minute.

Your entire comment seems premised on the mistaken assumption that every self checkout system is implemented in the exact same way.

It basically is implemented the exact same way in every supermarket in my country.

The Netherlands.

Here is a video of the hand terminal in action (in Dutch, but you’ll get the gist of it)

Clothing and tech in a supermarket?

I’ve never seen anti-theft devices on items in a supermarket.

Self checkout works fine for large amounts of items. You grab a portable scanner at the entrance and scan items as you put them in your cart. When you arrive at checkout you already scanned all your items and all you have to do is pay.

Self checkout customers cannot verify their own age for age-restricted items.

Age verification happens asynchronously and causes zero delay for anyone who doesn’t look like a teenager. The employee overseeing the self-checkout gets an alert on their tablet-thingie, they take one look at me and press approve. You can just keep scanning items while this happens. Usually the ‘your age may be checked’ alert disappears within seconds.

Self checkout customers cannot scan something and report the number of duplicates (e.g., scan a can and punch in that you’re buying 8 of them).

They can where I live.

In most stores, self checkout customers are policed by the system to make sure that each item is placed onto a scale that weighs everything, and stops the process if weights don’t match up.

I’ve never seen that, and I’m not aware of any supermarket chain in my country that does this.

The ergonomics and flow of self checkout doesn’t allow for a conveyor belt style rapid scanning, because a self checkout station is a tighter space and tends to require bagging as you scan, instead of scanning and bagging separately and independently.

The conveyor belt slows things down. You take an item out of your basket, scan it and put it in your bag in one go instead of it being two separate actions. You’re only handling each item once instead of twice. Besides, if you’re planning to get a lot of items you scan while shopping, not at checkout. You get a portable scanner, put it slot on your cart and just scan each item as you put it in your cart.

As a result, self checkout tends to be slower for customers who have more than 20 items.

If you scan while you add items to your cart it takes less than 10 seconds to check out, regardless of how many items you have

That might be offset if there’s a longer line for regular cashier, but if there’s no line the employee cashier is much faster.

My local supermarket has a grand total of 1 regular cashier, versus 16 self checkouts. If you go during a busy time you have to stand in line. Since the regular cashier is basically only used by people who don’t want to or can’t use self-checkout for some reason (that is: usually elderly people) this line doesn’t move very fast.

When it’s a quiet time of day there often isn’t a regular cashier at all and you have to ask the person overseeing the self-checkout who then has to call someone to help you out as they cannot leave the self-checkout isle unattended so you end up waiting for a cashier to arrive.

Self checkout is always faster, by an order of magnitude.

Why would you be pro self checkout? Besides the extra time and effort for the customer to check out if they have more than a couple items

In what alternate reality does self-checkout take more time and effort?

• If you go to a cashier then you have to wait in line. At my local supermarket there is one cashier vs. 16 self-checkout machines. Even if you go at an extremely busy time there is almost always a self-checkout machine available.
• With self-checkout you simply scan the items from your basket and put them in your bag. With the cashier you have put all your items on the conveyor belt, wait for them to be scanned, then put them in your bag.
• If you have more than a few items you simply grab a hand-scanner or just use the app on your phone and scan the items as you put them in your cart. Then you just go to a self-checkout machine and pay. No unloading the cart at checkout, you just pay and take your cart to your car.

the problems and delays they cause where they have to provide employee assistance anyway (“Unexpected item in bag”, etc)

What do you mean unexpected item in bag? The self checkout machine can’t look into my bag.

The article also talked about people getting in trouble for accidentally not getting something scanned.

Never seen that happen. You get random bag checks before you pay (so at that point it’s technically not theft). If you missed something, they simply re-scan all the items and you pay the correct amount, that’s all.

I mean, you have to explicitly give permission before apps can access the camera.

How can an app turn on the camera without your consent?

There are disappointingly few epic space battles in fantasy though.

And yet, I’ve never run into RAM problems on iPhones, both as a user and as a developer. On iOS an app can use almost all the RAM if needed, as long as your app is running in the foreground. Android by contrast is much stingier with RAM, especially with Java/Kotlin apps. There are some hard limits on how much RAM you can actually use and it’s a small fractIon of the total amount. The actual limit is set by the manufacturer and differs per device, Android itself only guarantees a minimum of 16MB per app.

The reason is probably because Android is much more lenient with letting stuff run in the background so it needs to limit the per-app memory usage.

Those apps also use more RAM than an equivalent iOS app, simply because they run on a garbage-collected runtime. With a GC there is a trade-off between performance and memory usage. A GC always wastes memory, as memory isn’t freed immediately once no longer in use. It’s only freed when the GC runs. If you run it very often you waste little RAM at the cost of performance (all the CPU cycles used by the GC) if you run it at large intervals you waste a lot of RAM (because you let a lot of ‘garbage’ accumulate before cleaning it up). In general, to achieve similar performance to non-GC’d code you need to tune it so it uses about 4 times as much RAM. The actual overhead depends on how Google tuned the GC in ART combined with the behavior of specific apps.

Note that this only applies to apps running in ART, many system components like the web browser are written in C++ and don’t suffer from this inefficiency. But it does mean Android both uses more RAM than iOS while at the same time giving apps less RAM to actually use.

It basically comes down to different architectural choices made by Google and Apple.

It’s not hard to target the older models, with iOS it’s mostly just a few small tweaks.

It depends what you are doing. Targeting the iPhone 7’s GPU can be quite a PITA.

Upgrade your dinosaur of a phone.

Doesn’t matter either way because everyone uses WhatsApp anyway.

RCS will never be able to compete with either because it’s a GSMA standard. Apple or Meta can think of a cool new feature, add it to their client and roll it out to all their users with the next update.

If they want to add a new feature to RCS, the GSMA (An organization with over 1500 members) will have to form a committee, they can then talk about their conflicting interestes for a few years before writing down a new version of the standard, then dozens of clients and servers at hundreds of different operators need to be upgraded before everyone can use the new feature. Due to this bullshit RCS will never be able to keep up.

Not entirely true… the American Android users care about it;

Then I guess it’s nice for both of them that iOS will support RCS.

Literally no one cares about RCS.