lxgr

10 ms·

271.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Stop signals. For legacy train control systems, these still work visually and via wires. ETCS (starting with Level 2) does use GSM-R, but everything is fail-safe: No active communication, no movement authority, so the "virtual signal&q
272.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Yes, I acknowledged that in my second paragraph.
273.
by lxgr 4mo ago
This differs a lot by country and customer. For example, in Germany, without a fixed income, you’ll usually not get access to an overdraft loan. In the US, overdraft is generally considered a very bad thing (almost worse than the idea of cr
274.
by lxgr 4mo ago
> ATM cards are still safer than mobile based payments. > For ATMs, if one has online transactions turned off (default option when you get a new card in India for most if not all cards), it is impossible. One has to walk to an ATM in
275.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Let's not pretend that predatory lending is not a thing in at least some EU countries as well, just because it takes other forms (installment payments, buy now pay later etc.), but as a general trend, I'd agree that it's much
276.
by lxgr 4mo ago
That's not what GP said. They claimed that "everyone" in Europe uses debit cards, and that's just not true.
277.
by lxgr 4mo ago
You are of course free to extrapolate your experience from a single European country to the whole continent, but it's still not a coherent argument for or against anything.
278.
by lxgr 4mo ago
This is not an issue in Europe (and really in most if not all countries other than the US at this point), since both credit and debit cards require a PIN for all non-trivial payment amounts.
279.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Cards (as implemented in the US at least, i.e., with individual purchases not confirmed by the cardholder) are a relic of a different time in many ways. If you're building out a brand new system, why not make use of the computing devic
280.
by lxgr 4mo ago
These insurances are the greatest sales trick of all time: Banks selling you something they're legally required to provide for free already.
281.
by lxgr 4mo ago
The US still hasn't started using PINs for all credit and most debit transactions, and at this point it doesn't look like it ever will. Apple and Google Pay are just as (if not more) secure anyway for the majority of transactions,
282.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Which provider in New York are you referring to?
283.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Yes, because handing over your card to a stranger is considered a fairly crazy thing to do in most countries other than the US, as cards require PIN entry for most transactions (which actually does meaningfully prevent in-person card fraud)
284.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Do you mean debit cards? With very few exceptions, you can't pay with direct debit in-store, and for online payments at merchants that don't know/trust you yet as a customer it's also pretty uncommon.
285.
by lxgr 4mo ago
So you're really using credit cards as a proxy for a consumer-friendly (at least with regard to fraud/disputes) payments product. Credit cards being more consumer friendly than bank transfers is usually an artifact of the concrete
286.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Can we please cool it with the sweeping "most/all of Europe" assertions? This, just like credit use overall, is also highly country/region specific.
287.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Reminder to all commenters that Europe is not a single homogeneous country and somewhat diverse in various things, including payments and finance. Credit cards are definitely a thing in many European countries.
288.
by lxgr 4mo ago
That's a beautiful model only on paper. In practice it didn't quite work out, DAI has several times broken its peg (often upwards, but that's still a problem), and they switched to backing it with more and more traditional st
289.
by lxgr 4mo ago
> After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it For OCR?
290.
by lxgr 4mo ago
DAI (now called USDS) is largely backed by assets well within reach of US financial regulators these days, no? Even a few years ago, it was mostly backed by USDT and USDC, which both can be frozen by their respective issuer. I don't th
291.
by lxgr 4mo ago
This is highly country dependent. Anonymous prepaid cards aren't as widely available as you might think, and often they have very high user-paid fees.
292.
by lxgr 4mo ago
If you're fine with the usual 0.20 - 0.30 USD of processing fees, you definitely can. Cards work well for many things; micropayments are not one of them.
293.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Neither does money "travel between the US and Australia" for a regular old SWIFT and correspondent banking based international bank transfer. When you send money internationally, your bank also "taps into pools of local curre
294.
by lxgr 4mo ago
> In no sense do they send each other "real" money, it's just accounting... a ledger. "Real money" these days is exactly that, i.e. accounting entries on a ledger, and has been for the better part of the past cen
295.
by lxgr 4mo ago
> Gambling is always classed as a cash advance. Many banks do, but there's no hard rule of the sort you're implying. > The gift cards trick has been tapped and closed, the credit companies figured it out decades ago. What do
296.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Having verified somebody's government ID doesn't actually factor into chargeback decisions and outcomes, not least because many forms of online KYC practiced today in the US are pretty laughable from a security point of view.
297.
by lxgr 4mo ago
Contrary to incredibly popular belief (at least in the US), asking for a photo of somebody's ID is actually not a sane way to do KYC. The point of an identity document is to check its security elements in person and compare the phot
298.
by lxgr 4mo ago
It’s really a cash advance whenever the issuing bank decides it is. There is no official definition.
299.
by lxgr 4mo ago
When in doubt, I’ll take a somewhat mysterious pictogram over a written sign in a language I don’t understand.
300.
by lxgr 4mo ago
> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! Ah, so they ported that feature over from ChatGPT?

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