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The promise is that it informs you quickly about flight delays, flight cancellations and gate changes. In my limited experience, it didn’t work satisfactorily for a flight delay of a few hours. It could not provide any reliable updates.

It’s a nice app and service, but I wouldn’t trust all those reviews that are like “I knew before the aircraft pilot knew”. It has its own limitations.


I don’t see any value in knowing before the pilot knows. I’ve mostly flown American the past few years and with their app I get updates about delays and gate changes on my phone just fine. I suppose there might be some advantage to getting the notification a bit earlier, but I doubt that they can reliably give information faster than the airline itself.

I think I figured it out - if you can figure out a cancellation before everyone else you can get to the counter and get on another flight before everyone.

I've had once cancellation in my life so I see why the need hasn't presented itself very loudly.


Yeah, the most notable "use", not necessarily "value", is when the airline is still prevaricating over the delay, you're approaching boarding time and you can see from ADS-B that the inbound aircraft hasn't even begun initial descent.

I still don't really see the use, but maybe there are large swaths of people who stay home until they can leave at the very last minute.

I'm almost certainly going to be waiting at the airport anyway by the time the delay is confirmed.


Last year Flighty literally saved me from an overnight delay because it notified me the incoming aircraft was still on the ground at the previous airport. I was able to snag the last couple seats on a later scheduled flight which actually departed. My original flight ended up getting canceled.

Thank you! That's the use case and I see the value; I learned to compensate by never taking the "last flight out" if I could avoid it.

What do you do with that information though?

As airline crew, I stay in the lounge (employee lounge, not bar lounge) when I know I'm not going anywhere on time.

Flighty gets heavy use from US airline employees. We're frequently in the airport with a brief break before flying the next flight. Usually, this next flight will be on an aircraft that hasn't arrive to the airport yet. Most of us will find a quiet place to relax for awhile and it's really irritating to pack stuff back up and walk to the gate just to find out there's no plane.

Another scenario is you arrive to an airport and need to switch aircraft. The "turn" time might be scheduled for 45 min. It's really nice to know as you walk off the aircraft that "Hey, it's actually delayed. Now I have 2 hours." I'll go grab a bite to eat or catch up with family back home etc.

My particular airline will show you what the next inbound aircraft is and it's flight number and ETA but it's a "fetch" experience. You open the app, wait for a refresh, click like 4 times to navigate to the right page, get the tactical information. Flighty keeps it on the lock screen. Just lift your phone and it's there.

We're constantly asking our employer to emulate Flighty. Tech isn't their strong suit though.


Sounds like you identified a business opportunity for Flighty - license the functionality or just sell app access to the entire airline, at least for employees.

Nah they’ll ruin it. I’d rather Flighty charge a couple hundred bucks and maintain a comfortable business than let my employer wreck a good thing.

In a way, this is like saying that one trusts total strangers in some random large tech company and total strangers in government agencies to read and/or manipulate conversations that kids have. This also paves the way to disallow E2EE for other classes of people based on arbitrary criteria. I don’t believe this is good for society overall.

The reason we are having this discussion, is because the private route worked up to a point.

Firms have a fiduciary duty to shareholders and profit.

On the other hand, You ultimately decide the rules and goals that operate government organizations, and do not have a profit maximization target.

They aren’t the same tool, and they work for different situations.

The E2EE slippery slope is a different challenge, and for that I have no thoughts


> “My Location Ledger” https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-location-ledger/id675780680...

How can anyone trust such an application that declares in the App Store listing as “Data Not Collected”?


Do you have any recommended links for such a setup? I don’t connect my TV to the network and use it with an Apple TV. But I’m interested to know more on this.


Sure, first you check if your TV is rootable: https://cani.rootmy.tv/

If not, you can try and find one on Ebay or local classifieds that is. That's the hardest part.

Then you setup a VLAN (I use OpenWRT, which has great support for this) and some firewall rules that forbid all traffic that isn't port 80 or 443. Then you create a dnsmasq blacklist for all the LG domains (good list is [1]).

Then you install this: https://github.com/webosbrew/youtube-webos

Enjoy Youtube on a large screen under your control without ads, and without annoying sponsors.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists/main...


> Is there any smart TV that I can actually just use a TV how I want?

I’ve heard that large computer monitors and TVs intended to be used as displays can be used without connecting them to a network.

> Or am I reduced to buying an Apple TV device and unplugging the TV from the internet entirely ?

An Apple TV is a good choice even otherwise. I’ve never seen a smoother and quicker interface on a native Smart TV (granted that I’ve only seen Android and webOS). I use my Apple TV as the only network connected device while my TV is not connected to any network ever. Once in a while, I update the TV’s firmware by downloading it to a thumb drive and plugging that into the USB port of the TV.


Better yet, use a Linux HTPC. The Apple TV box is comically restricted. For example, because there is no web browser, there is no straightforward way to watch YouTube ad-free on it.


But the Nvidia Shield has (or had?) ads from Google, right? I recall there was news coverage and some uproar when this happened a few years ago.


The default Google launcher is a disgusting mess. But since it is an Android, you do not have to use it and can use one of the many ad free ones. I use Projectivy


This is quite surprising to me, since I thought the percentage would be a lot lesser.

But I don’t really know what the Firefox team does with crash reports and in making Firefox almost crash proof.

I have been using it at work on Windows and for the last several years it always crashes on exit. I have religiously submitted every crash report. I even visit the “about:crashes” page to see if there are any unsubmitted ones and submit them. Occasionally I’ll click on the bugzilla link for a crash, only to see hardly any action or updates on those for months (or longer).

Granted that I have a small bunch of extensions (all WebExtensions), but this crash-on-exit happens due to many different causes, as seen in the crash reports. I’m too loathe to troubleshoot with disabling all extensions and then trying it one by one. Why should an extension even cause a crash, especially when its a WebExtension (unlike the older XUL extensions that had a deeper integration into the browser)? It seems like there are fundamental issues within Firefox that make it crash prone.

I can make Firefox not crash if I have a single window with a few tabs. That use case is anyway served by Edge and Chrome. The main reasons I use Firefox, apart from some ideological ones, are that it’s always been much better at handling multiple windows and tons of tabs and its extensibility (Manifest V2 FTW).

I would sincerely appreciate Firefox not crashing as often for me.


It is hard to judge, but a crash on exit seems to me a possible consequence of a damaged memory. Firefox frees all the resources and collects the garbage. I expect it to touch a lot of memory locations, and do something with values retrieved.

> this crash-on-exit happens due to many different causes, as seen in the crash reports

It points to the same direction: all these different causes are just symptoms, the root cause is hiding deeper, and it is triggered by the firefox stopping.

It is all is not a guarantee that the root cause is bitflips, but you can rule it out by testing your memory.


Surely hardware issues would manifest in other software or overall OS as well?


Can you share a link to a crash report from about:crashes? Sounds like some kind of shutdown hang getting force-killed maybe?


> Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com

I don’t know, but it seems like it’s overselling its capabilities. I tried with Firefox Focus and it said I’m using incognito (private mode) and assigned a unique visitor ID. Immediately tried with a private tab in Safari on iOS and it said I’m not using incognito (private mode) and assigned a new unique visitor ID. Then I switched networks and tried. One more unique visitor ID.

I’m not claiming that fingerprinting is not possible, but this website is not good at it. Seems like it uses plain cookies.


When I use Windows, Everything is one of the first tools I install. I also disable Windows search and indexing.

I use this with Keypirinha [1], which is a launcher (kinda like Quicksilver [2] on Mac) that integrates with Everything using the Everything package. [3]

This combo makes finding files as well as launching programs (or doing quick calculations or currency conversions) a breeze!

[1]: https://keypirinha.com/

[2]: https://qsapp.com/index

[3]: https://keypirinha.com/packages/everything.html


It doesn’t explicitly state anything about the email contents in the privacy policy page. People generally trust their email providers to not snoop in their emails. I wonder why anyone should trust a cloud based service (such as this).


There's also no names listed of anyone associated with the project, nor they mention the country where they are located, so you don't even know which sets of laws applies.


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