• 2 Posts
  • 166 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • We’re all here for entertainment. This isn’t news or information about the real world, it’s a hypothetical that’s asking for your advice.

    If it’s fake, it’s a fun thought experiment.

    If it’s real, it’s a fun thought experiment.

    You can choose to

    1. participate, thereby strengthening our community.

    2. ignore it, having no positive or negative effect on our community.

    3. shit on it, thereby weakening our community.






  • This may depend on jurisdiction. Joint accounts were not frozen in my case. A death certificate was only required to remove the deceased party from the accounts.

    What happens if your partner sets up your home network and TV subscriptions and their email account is locked because you’re not the account holder.

    In my case I was able to present the death certificate to the providers and the accounts were quickly closed, with the appropriate billing and hardware returns. It was no more inconvenient than a normal return.

    I was fortunate. The deceased planned ahead and did all of the things I haven’t done: arranging a funeral and burial, keeping their will up to date, writing down their usernames/passwords, and making the appropriate joint bank accounts.

    This is repeated across every single aspect of modern life. Your robot vacuum cleaner is linked to a single person, as are your IoT lightbulbs. It’s absurd.

    My experience was with established services in mature sectors: they have procedures for dealing with deceased customers’ accounts. It was relatively convenient, even at a really shitty time.

    None of that is easy, convenient or handled.

    Why not?

    Newer services don’t have that institutional experience. They haven’t existed long enough. But they’re starting to: Facebook has the concept of deceased users. As time goes on, more “new” services will as well.


  • Can you provide examples?

    From what I’ve seen in Canada, death is handled like a standard event:

    • Most businesses, banks, and government services have fast and convenient closing out paths when someone dies. In most cases a single phonecall/visit is enough to close an account and get the appropriate statements.

    • Lawyers follow an established path when handling wills. Unless there’s contention, it’s pretty easy to “finish” the will.

    • Funeral homes do an excellent job at handling the deceased’s body, providing grief counseling, running the funeral, and ensuring the cemetery accepts the remains. So long as it’s preplanned, the family and friends just need to show up.

    • Government policy around executing a will is generally easy to understand and work with.

    • Banks will act as executors. I’m not sure if they do a good job, but it’s relatively inexpensive.

    • Health care providers do not try to prolong life for the elderly. From what I’ve seen, they are quick to prescribe end of life care.

    • Palliative care is handled by empathic and helpful professionals. There could be improvements in grief counseling.

    • My social group was empathic and caring. Family helped as much as possible, as did friends. I doubt this is true for everyone.

    What else are you referring to, OP?







  • I’ve worked with three incredible developers who I’d consider 10x: people who can reliably build a solution quickly, or debug problems that go deep into the OS. One would fit your description, one is a mom who shuttles her kid to after school stuff, and the other is a really nice music nerd.

    Like the post states, some people are in the right place at the right time: they have the right background and temperament to do really well at their job. They don’t need to be shitty people.


  • I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish.

    There was a leak of Google’s old page ranking algorithm (not PageRank, but how they change the order of results on search) - it looked like they used a bunch of signals from Chrome about the amount of time users spend on a page, how quickly they go back, etc. Chrome gives the search side of the business an advantage.

    Conversely, Android feeds a bunch of extra data to the ad business about what people do in real life.

    Both products give the rest of Alphabet a significant advantage over their competitors, and make it harder for new entrants to get a foothold.