In a world where a random crackhead is all too happy to steal literally any box placed in your mail box or on by your door it can be quite useful to know exactly when the box shows up, or is at least expected to show up.
Most of us don't have to worry about random crackheads stealing packages from our mailboxes or doorsteps, so I think the parent's stipulation of a narrow segment of society holds.
> Most of us don't have to worry about random crackheads stealing packages from our mailboxes or doorsteps
Well of course, most of HN is extremely privileged and thus isolated from such problems. I wouldn't expect the average tech worker in a gated community or access controlled apartment complex to get it.
It's not a problem for 99% of the country. No "crackhead" is going door to door between cornfields with a mile between houses, scoping out everyone's porches daily. I'm sorry you're having those problems, but the world is a big place, don't assume everyone lives the same life as you.
Even for the narrow segment of society in that situation, you're not required to give your money to Apple and then stay home 24/7 to immediately scoop up your packages. You could get a lockbox too, and guess what, they're cheaper than phones.
> Overall, total estimated annual losses range from a low of $5.2 billion in 2023
to $16 billion in 2024
> In 2024, the U.S. ecommerce market reached an estimated $1.22 trillion in revenue
So... between 0.4% and 1.3% of packages by value are affected, concentrated in specific geographic areas. A narrow segment of society highly affected, complaining often and making the issue seem wider than it is. The rest of us living our lives as normal.
This still feels like an American-biased problem though. Global News covered [0] a FedEx survey with one-in-four Canadians reporting parcel theft... without mentioning the time period. One in four over a lifetime isn't good, but it's not the one-in-three annually that you mentioned in the states.
CTV covered [1] how it was only roughly one-in-ten annually as well, which is again a far cry from the numbers in the states.
Does it happen? Yes. Is tracking a harder requirement for Americans due to a lower-trust society? I would say yes as well. Personally, I consider it nice to have, not required.
In Vienna of all places this has become very common since we got some badly designed mailboxes. Because they don’t trust the delivery guys they don’t have a key but the flipside is that anyone with enough time can get out stuff via the top big slit. Now they also have big boxes with locks but to open them they drop you an nfc letter in your box.
So the junkies look for the bright yellow letters and open your packages. If it was clothes you will find them somewhere on the street close by
You're really moving the goalposts here. You started with "anyone who receives their packages is extremely privileged" and ended with "theft is something that retailers must be aware of in the course of their business". Obviously I agree with the second statement, but not the first.
Going back to your original post, now that we have some numbers to work with, do you really believe that 70.3% of Americans are "extremely privileged" people living in gated communities?
Well, no, I live in Romania and I get a SMS when the package enters the country (aprox. 2 days before) and the delivery guy calls me 10 min before he arrives. We're not priviledged here and I very rarely track a package.
I live in a densely populated suburban apartment complex with absolutely no gating or restrictions on access. People much worse off than I am are close neighbors, and homeless people wander nearby. Yet I have never, ever had a package stolen.
I live in a small farm town, about the furthest you could get from a gated community or access controlled apartment complex, and have never had a package stolen either.
I've been somewhat curious how random any LLM would handle a task like controlling a roomba and have been seriously considering trying it out. An RC car would be a fun experiment, perhaps an RC plane would be too?
By that logic why not fill the hard drive with OS data? This is a company mind you that still sells some laptops with a base configuration of 256GB, so 10-20GB isn't an insignificant amount to many users especially when it's taken by a feature they may not even use.
Depends. They make it pretty easy for people who don't think about the consequences of things.
I worry I am going to get locked out of my Google account, muggles don't. Doesn't stop them from getting locked out.
Apple has a vision where you have an iPhone and a mac at home and a mac at work and a vision pro and an Apple TV and all of that and your passcodes "just work". Doesn't work for the "rest of us", like we're already used to AirPods punishing us for using Windows.
>Apple has a vision where you have an iPhone and a mac at home and a mac at work and a vision pro and an Apple TV and all of that and your passcodes "just work".
I have many of those and I fucking don't want them to "just work". My iPad is not my iPhone. My Mac Mini is not my iPhone. Yet my iPad at home pops up the speech-to-text voicemail notifications from phone calls that I chose not to answer while I am miles away at work. It's so fucking annoying that you can't specifically turn that off.
My usual "go kit" has my iPhone in my leg bag and then my iPad is either my main bag or one of those pouches that waitresses wear which has plenty of room to pack a tablet. I like using the hotspot (being parsimonious with data) and being able to respond to texts with tbe big screen. It's also nice that I can share passwords and passkeys easily between them.
Other aspects of the "Apple Lifestyle" make no sense to me, like I an a mirrorless photographer and use my iPhone like my Sony, I will go out with my selfie stick and shoot 200 selfies, transfer them to my computer, pick the best 3, them clear them all out.
I plugged my iPhone into my Mac when my wife was logged in and it tries to back up the whole 'freakin phone and renames it "Olivia's Phone" which is just nuts. Of course their answer is that you never clean out your phone, you just upload it all to iCloud, where I think the value proposition is you can pay $1 a month and stop all the dialogs nagging you to get it... Now only if I could have made the badge for Apple Arcade to go away by trying the free trial and canceling it!
No, microsoft uploading disk encryption keys to your account is the exact opposite situation. It's microsoft purposely reducing security to ensure there is a recovery path, because average people don't need or want the security tradeoffs where "You permanently lose access and it mathematically cannot ever be recovered" is a failure mode.
If it was possible for a key to your house to have that failure mode, nobody would ever lock their doors
I think I'm just getting old because I no longer see the appeal nor do I understand the hype of new phones. It bends? Wow a useless gimmick for 3000$, just what I need.
I'm sure someone will love it, but it won't be me.
Reddit is a site which I would only recommend to someone I truly hated. It's poison on every level imaginable, more so than basically any other social media I've ever used.
People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.
And it doesn't feel like poison. I haven't used Reddit in several years so I don't know how it is now, but I used to feel yucky if I visited Facebook or Instagram, but not Reddit.
It's one thing when randos on the internet choose to express something vile and stupid, it's an entirely different thing when people you know express something vile and stupid.
I tried to use it a year ago just to see what it was really like.
It ended rather quickly with me staring at my own comment looking for ways to twist what I wrote into something ban worthy. Then it happened again! LOL!
1985 Johannes Paulus II visited the Netherlands and some comedians made a song about it that was on TV. The song text is roughly that he enjoys his job and that he has to visit NL.
The real offence is posting without being a bot. The subreddit has to look a certain way, idk what they have in mind but always something, they use bots to make it look that way, you can also post if you contribute to the project but if you ever go against their unstated wishes, then bam!
All of this existed before, all the way back to BBS culture (minus the bots mostly). What Reddit did was hyperscale it. People are tribal and they enforce adherence to their chosen tribe's ways. It's pretty depressing to look back and see that one of the quickest paths to three commas was to monetize it.
BBS people weren't conspiring to create the appearance that everyone on the BBS thinks a certain way and talks about certain topics. If an operator was doing that, he didn't need real accounts to fake posts.
Reddit sucks so much if you use the defaults or follow any remotely "controversial" subreddit. If you follow subreddits for your hobbies and so on it's generally okay, I have no issues with the various Warhammer subreddits I follow...
The problem with Reddit is that all the news subs and all the politics subs are just massive echo chambers and there is simply no way to interact with them unless you follow the agreed upon views espoused by the mods.
If you go on a conservative sub and say that you agree with 90% of what they offer but not the last 10%, you'll just be branded as a commie/socialist and the opposite is true on the left wing subs.
Nuanced comments are few and far between and the worst of all for me as someone living in Europe is /r/Europe which is very left-wing and honestly reminds me a cult of some sort. US bad, Europe great, left is good, right is bad. It is just insufferable.
I think on the contrary X/Twitter is more balanced as I can choose to follow different people on opposite sides of the aisle without fearing getting banned when I comment on some of their posts with views that may not be shared by the original poster.
I always heard people say most crashes happen close to home and I never thought twice about what they were actually saying.
Then one day it hit me: most people don't regularly drive far from home, so of course of accidents happen close to home.
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