[Klaster_1]

This should be illegal. Megacorps eat more and more of our life and regular people are increasingly at mercy of these hostile entities. They should be pushed more against. If we can't have proper anti monopoly splits like AT&T, then at least ways to prevent them exerting too much power are long due. If you provide an essential service, responsibility should match that.

[jjav]

There needs to be a law that every cloud-based service which has accounts for more than (say) 1% of population, must have a physical service counter presence in every major town staffed by an employee who must be empowered to resolve all account access issues.

Notice how phone carries manage to have a shop in every little strip mall, you're never more than a few miles from the nearest one. Google takes in far more revenue, can easily afford the same. Or they could even just partner with the phone carriers and have a staffed desk in every tmobile/at&t/verizon shop.

[cube00]

Staffed desks would just tell you they need to open a ticket.

No company will give full account unlock control to field employees.

Even the bank teller behind the glass needs to phone their internal fraud dept to unlock accounts.

[jjav]

> Staffed desks would just tell you they need to open a ticket.

That's not how it works at banks nor phone vendors.

(Although, even being able to open a ticket would be 100% better than the black hole of nothingness that is google support.)

When you go to a bank with access issues (something I've done somewhat regularly because I manage accounts for various family members who no longer can) you meet with someone who can authenticate you, and that employee has direct access to talk to their risk and fraud departments so they can sort out any issues while you're sitting there next to them.

There needs to be a law that any cloud service with a non-trivial userbase must have a similarly staffed support center reasonably accessible to all citizens.

[cube00]

> being able to open a ticket would be 100% better

Not with Google, I've had a ticket open for five months counting.

[nottorp]

> needs to phone their internal fraud dept

Except the bank teller has already authenticated you and internal fraud will pick up the phone...

[amelius]

Yes, there needs to be a government public service counter where you can go with all your BigTech issues and complaints.

[dotandgtfo]

This is one of the goals of the digital services act.

[amelius]

The EU isn't as bad as some Americans want to believe.

[brookst]

The EU’s heart is in the right place, which can only rarely be said of the US.

But the EU’s approach is often backwards. When product managers have to ask the government if it’s ok to ship a feature, something is wrong. When the government responds that it can’t say in advance, you’ll just have to ship and see if you get fined, something is really seriously broken.

[amelius]

If a company is about to produce millions of physical products, I think it is quite ok if they first check with the government to see if that is a good idea.

Same with social media features that are rolled out to millions of users.

[brookst]

If the EU was prepared to give advance permission, that would make sense. It would be slow ("Hey we want to rename 'username' to 'login'" -> "we'll get back to you in a couple of months"), but it would make sense.

But, if you'll re-read my comment, my complaint is that the EU will not pre-clear features. They will only punish after the fact if they decide it was a bad feature.

And that's even assuming you're correct that the bureaucrats themselves know what is a good idea. Which I'm skeptical of. I think they're more likely to be correct than, say, Facebook... but that's a pretty low bar.

[warkdarrior]

This is about Digital Services Act, not physical products.

[ToucanLoucan]

They aren't perfect but at least they try. All our government does is bomb brown people and cut taxes for the wealthy.

[loloquwowndueo]

Excreting power. What an awesome mental image.

“Exerting” would be more correct I guess but less fun.

[neom]

Funny because I have dyslexia and read excreting power as exerting power, and then had to read your "Exerting" underneath 4 times to understand the mistake. I guess it's the phonics, dyslexia is so weird tho, ha.

[Loughla]

Hey do you have certain fonts that are better? I was working with a dyslexic student last week trying to find fonts that work better for his online classes. All the research pointed towards a handful that didn't seem to really improve processing for the student.

[justinclift]

Was this one of the font's they tried?

https://opendyslexic.org

[neom]

They tried all sorts with me in school, I seem to recall it's related to trying to add shadow to hint to the brain the direction the letter should be etc. I found it more annoying than helpful. Probably a very unpopular opinion but I think teaching someone with dyslexia to read and write neurotypically is probably unhelpful and finding audio visual learning methods is a considerably better way to have them retain knowledge. I think you can get to a basic level of competency but speed and recall, at least with me, never really came. One thing I found once that was cool was an app that present each word at a time only in the center of the screen, but it felt extremely mechanical I was so focused on the words once I was done there was basically no meaning left if that makes sense. I'm autistic with dyscalculia also, FWIW. I mostly think in sounds, pictures and movies, for whatever reason my brain doesn't have a great framework for symbols that don't have those things inherently attached to them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯