tdrp's comments

I'm curious if anyone on here ever used GDPR (or some other legal framework) to get this kind of ban overturned or at least explained.

We removed ads from our app a few years ago after having read a similar story.

In our case we were worried that any script kiddie or bad actor could very easily sabotage us and cause us to go bankrupt without any recourse.

I don't know what they did in VS2019 but there was clearly a ridiculous perf hit in many modules, especially Intellisense related.

While I sort of liked the AI-predictions, they introduced a serious lag in typing and every couple of seconds typing would nearly freeze. After I turned those off, typing became smoother but still slightly laggy (sort of like typing on a remote terminal on the other side of the world), and the predictions would pop up much slower than VS2017.

Lots of other perf issues like "Find in files" being 3x slower than in VS2017. Or adding a new class to a file wastes several seconds looking up templates somewhere. I saw dozens of bugs filed for these issues over the past few months and most were resolved as "Fixed" (allegedly) or "No repro" but in practice the IDE perf is still IMO unacceptable.

I really hope they fixed that stuff with VS2022.

Thanks for the link. I noticed some of these OEMs had started implementing their own "more reliable" PushKits, but I am guessing that the privacy implications are quite bad so it's basically a non-starter.

Thank you for this! It seems like many apps on the growth path go through this same investigation, since we arrived at many of the same conclusions you did (down to calling our own webhooks from within onMessageReceived to retry, or figure out which kinds of devices had the most problems). We spent over a year on this before we hit what I think is our maximum achievable delivery rate of around 85% (short of repeatedly hassling users to go deep into their settings or forcing them to give us an e-mail/phone number to use as backup).

Our app isn't even enabled in China but the points you make in 1 and 2 mean that plenty of devices in South America, Africa, Asia (and even some in North America and Europe) run into these problems.

I think (5) above is a serious unfairness problem since many conversations turn to "I didn't get your notification, let's talk on Whatsapp instead" which affects retention. Now 10-15% failed notification deliveries might not seem like much but if you're talking to 4-5 people either individually or in a group chat then one of them is bound to pull you into a more "reliable" app.

Incidentally we've considered actually reaching out to those top phone providers and ask to be put on the whitelist; not sure if you or anybody on here has tried anything similar.

We've also run an app with 1 million+ users for a few years, and I can confirm that notifications are a wreck on both platforms, but IMO even more so on Android/FCM.

In fact most of our calculations show that we have never gone past 85% delivery of high-pri Android notifications to valid FCM tokens. By high-pri here we mean direct chat messages in an active 1-on-1 chat conversation. This has caused many users to abandon the app since they assume the system to be unreliable. One of the main reasons seems to be that many Android phone vendors have simply whitelisted WhatsApp, Facebook and a couple of famous apps and then dumped every single other app into some kind of "kill if in background and completely forget about it" bucket. In some cases it can be fixed by asking the users to wander deep into the phone settings and toggle some switches. We brought the delivery rate from the low 80s to 85% by literally buying a bunch of the phone models we had heard had issues and trying to repro what was happening then popping up custom instructions for users like "looks like you are running this kind of phone which in general will not deliver notifications, please go to settings -> blah". But the whole thing has been a gigantic game of cat and mouse which really shouldn't be in the hands of individual app developers. In many cases the FCM system does not return any error code.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone here has achieved 95%+ FCM delivery rates on Android apps.

I've been using it as a language learning app. I just join some channels in my target language and listen to various people's voices and accents and try to understand them. Every once in a while if I'm feeling brave I'll raise my hand and utter a couple of sentences. The topics are simple and often very repetitive, which makes it well suited for practicing languages.

The "regular" channels didn't feel very valuable to me after a week of use or so, and a lot of them seemed exclusively made for the purpose of gaining more followers (either on CH, IG or Twitter, etc.).

As a B2C app, we're also really confused by a bunch of them and are waiting to see if they will clarify or refactor it in a better way.

A lot of our entry fields fall under the "if you manually enter it we will use it to refine the results". Sure, you can put your age, or upload your picture to your profile if you want to. But you obviously don't have to.

But it's not clear if that is enough to pass the "optional disclosure" bar that they have which specifies: "Collection of the data occurs only in infrequent cases that are not part of your app’s primary functionality, and which are optional for the user." What is infrequent here, or how far are these features from the app's "primary functionality".

If we don't meet the optional disclosure bar it makes it sound like we're forcing users to give us all kinds of data. They also don't seem to obviously differentiate between data you collect for functionality and data that is used for advertising/third parties unless you click through to the details.

Thank for this discussion, it is really interesting to me!

The surgeon proposed what was probably the algorithmic way to fix the problem.

Given that the OP was having issues because of their heels, odds are that the surgery wouldn't have entirely fixed it and now the ligaments would have been unnecessarily tampered with by a surgeon whose thought was "we should totally reroute those ligaments that'll do it". OP mentioned she was a marathon runner, athletic and in her early thirties - what? did her ligaments suddenly get into a state where they needed rerouting? OK sure but why, why now, etc. I feel like even a non-medical professional could have gotten closer after talking to her for twenty minutes.

I am not a doctor obviously, but I have been to some good doctors and the "imperfect information" can significantly be improved if they actually make a more clever, targeted effort to inquire, rather than just casually prescribing surgery or heavy medication. Good doctors will talk to you, actually tell you what the "algorithm" prescribes and often tell you why they think it is not the case here. The best way I can describe the difference is like talking to a customer support bot vs talking to a customer support person.

I realize this is probably extinct now here in the US because of litigation and insurance requirements but it's still that way in many countries. I am certain that good, fluid doctors there beat the algorithmic approach hands down, whereas good doctors here may be capped and severely restrained by it.

Arrogance because the GP, neuro and cardio all made completely different diagnoses (conveniently from within their field of expertise) based on 15 minute visits and prescribed non-trivial medications. Putting a 24-year old on beta blockers, topamax, cipro and a couple more I had to stop on day 2, just to see if that fixes it, sends you down a spiral of side effects that make the original symptom far murkier.

Even if the algorithmic approach is accurate for 80% of cases, the suggestions it gives you for the 20% makes treatment extremely frustrating. If you are in those 20% then treatment by an experienced, more fluid doctor is night and day. Unfortunately, there seem to be fewer of those in the US than in other countries, probably because of litigation risk you mentioned before.

Yes, except OP being offered surgery for "ligament and tendon rerouting" as the solution to a problem the doctors spent just a few minutes understanding is the equivalent of your IT guy above suggesting the HR person open up their computer and reroute a bunch of wires, and take out a bunch of capacitors, to "see if it helps".

I got back to normal after about a month of supplements and sunlight. It happened to me again a couple of years later to a much lesser degree since I had just forgotten about supplements and then once again was resolved the same way.

Dealing with some specialists feels like dealing with automated bots. They almost sound like they follow a script down to the letter. If A then prescribe B, then C. And almost never look at the big picture. And every symptom that happens they tend to shoehorn into their own specialization, and not realize that it might be an indication that the problem lies elsewhere.

For the same exact issue, you can go to a cardio and get prescribed some cardio-related medication, go to a neuro and get prescribed neuro-related medication, etc. To a hammer everything is a nail.

I was put on antibiotics, beta blockers, topamax and a couple of more serious medication for what was ultimately just a vitamin D deficiency that they had been too narrow-sighted to try catching. I lost a lot of respect for the medical profession at that time.

Here is my story. A few years after coming to the US I started developing some neurological symptoms: confusion, dizziness, lightheadedness.

1. The GP first blamed it on dehydration and sent me home and told me to drink plenty of water. Went back a week later and she prescribed antibiotics thinking it was some kind of infection somewhere. "Let's just try the strongest antibiotics and see".

I did the full course despite some non-trivial side effects and was still not better, but at that point my heartbeat had gotten a bit faster from the whole situation so I was referred to a cardio.

2. Seeing a fast heartbeat, the cardiologist put me, a 24-year old at the time, on beta blockers. Two weeks later, still no improvement.

3. So I was referred to a neurologist. Did a brain MRI, did not find anything so he assumed it was some kind of epilepsy/migraine combo and put me on something called topamax. Mind you, all these prescriptions were given to me within 10-15 minutes of seeing those doctors. Topamax had its own side effects and my health at that point had spiraled out of control. Reported the side effects to the neuro and he thought he'd give me one more medication to counter the other medication's side effects.

When I went back to the GP they said the whole thing was probably caused by "stress".

4. I just stopped all medication, got sick leave from my job, and went back to my home country for a couple of months. I asked my old family doctor to just do a general check-up and see if anything was up. Within weeks my situation had magically started to improve.

Turned out my vitamin D levels were at 7 (forgot the unit, but the minimum was like 30).

None of the doctors thought about it, every doctor had arrogantly assumed that the problem could only be from their own field (neuro assumed it was neurological, cardio assumed it was cardiac), and literally none of them put the slightest amount of effort into looking at the whole picture. This was in one of the most affluent areas and those were supposedly some of the "good" doctors. I am still convinced that a machine trained model would have performed significantly better than these people since they were literally like bots following a rule book.

Side corollary, if you are from a sunny country and move to a state or country in Northern latitudes, keep in mind that vitamin D deficiency can slowly creep on you and basically turn you into a moron. This should be a PSA.

Or the home thermostat that sets itself to "away" mode because you've gone all of 30 minutes without walking in front of it.

As a user I don't like it but as an app/website provider, it significantly delays spammers, giving them the illusion that what they're doing is working so they should just maintain the status quo.

If instead you outright ban them, they adjust or learn about your anti-spam algorithms and just keep going.

Yeah even in online dating, it just turns to "let's meet up after this is over lol" and then you completely forget each other a couple days later.

So if this was triggered by the vaccine (rather than the adenoviral vector), would it mean that this person might have also had TM if they had caught Covid19?

Thanks so much for running this site - as a small start-up we often manually request a snapshot of our privacy policy/terms of service/other important announcements whenever we make change to them (if we don't manually request them the re-crawl generally doesn't happen since I guess those pages are very rarely visited, even though they're linked from the main site). It's helped us in a thorny situation where someone tried to claim "it wasn't there when I signed up".

It might be an interesting use-case for you to check out, i.e. keep an eye of those rarely used legal sublinks for smaller companies.