It seems to me like they do more than just generate QR codes that download a static document. They’ve built out software that helps the visually impaired navigate pedestrian and transit infrastructure. The software seems pretty complex, beyond what a city would likely have the expertise or budget to build from scratch on its own.
You point out the key weakness to the whole approach (dependency on a single third party). Though I suspect that the content in question is also hosted by NaviLens, so the codes would still stop working if they ever shut down.
Just taking a look at their website, it seems to me that NaviLens’ value proposition isn’t just “codes that download a document”, but an entire framework for building and presenting essential documentation in a way that is accessible to people with vision impairments. I can see why it would be cheaper and more effective for a city to buy a service like this than to hire their own software developers and accessibility experts to build out their own bespoke system.
QR codes are rarely contentful themselves, they are almost always just a URL pointing to the real content.
It’s done this way because URLs are smaller, and you can update the content without needing to go around replacing all the QR code stickers.
A lot of cheap kitchen scales are also just crap. Talk to your local drug dealer about what brand of scale might be right for you.
Food, especially fresh food, used to be a lot more expensive when adjusting for inflation. A canned chicken like this doesn’t look super appetizing right out of the can, but it probably tasted OK after you shredded it and put it in a casserole. And it was significantly cheaper than buying a fresh whole roasted chicken, assuming you lived somewhere that fresh whole roasted chickens were even readily available. Food like this became particularly popular during the great depression, and stuck around for decades afterwards.
Nowadays, between industrialized farming, highly optimized supply chains, and a buttload of government subsidy, fresh food is comparatively cheap. You can get a whole roasted chicken right off the spit for $5-10 at just about any grocery store. So for most people the value proposition of a $3 canned chicken isn’t really there anymore, especially if you don’t have an enormous baby-boom-era sized family to feed.
Yeah, you’re not really paying for the soda. You’re paying for the labor that goes into providing the service, maintaining the equipment, etc. Oh, and the paper cup which probably cost more than the liquid you put in it. The high margin on things like soda also subsidizes the cost on lower margin food items.
The true value of soda is also somewhat obfuscated by the fact that most people’s point of comparison is packaged soda. A bottle you buy at the store also didn’t necessarily cost a lot to make, but actually distributing pre-made soda to retailers is a lot more expensive than shipping syrup which can be mixed with water on-site. That added cost is built into the price of packaged soda.
They aren’t charging for convenient access to the data though, they are charging for bulk access. The limitations of the new API should not impact people casually pulling in subtitles with VLC when they watch a movie, which is the purpose the API was intended to fulfill.
I literally bought monoprice cables (because they are actually USB-IF certified, unlike most) and here you are saying i don’t know how to buy cables.
Those 6’ cables were not on sale when i bought them, and it’s totally unfair for you to compare their sale price to the non-sale price of monoprices lightning version of the exact same cable.
The purpose of the cables on amazon was to show that the lightning connector does not have a substantial impact on price. It’s easy to find cheap lightning cables, even ones that are MFi certified.
I’ve debunked your claims one by one, and you’re trying to weasel out of them on technicalities rather than actually addressing the points you can’t defend.
Those are 58% off right now, their regular price is $10. The regular price for the lightning version of these Monoprice cables is also $10. Right now i can see a three pack of 6 foot lightning cables on Amazon for $8.40, or $2.80 per cable. The benefit to switching is solely because of convenience and standardization, it is not saving me any money.
I also spent a lot more on some of my USB-C cables because i wanted them to support 3.1 speeds. That costs more if you go for USB-IF certified cables, which you probably should if you’re plugging them in to anything expensive.
Now you can join the rest of the world and pay much less for cables
The USB-C cables I just bought were not any cheaper than my lightning cables. In fact, I think they were actually a bit more expensive, because I only opted for cables that are certified for 100w power delivery and some of them for USB 3.1 speeds.
and chargers
This makes no sense, lightning cables always worked with ordinary usb chargers.
It’s not an issue 99.9% of the time, but I would be livid if I forgot to charge my mouse for whatever reason and needed to plug it in while in the middle of work.
But I also hate the general design and ergonomics of the mouse, so it was never going to be for me anyways.
The bigger problem with the trackpad is the low polling rate. It’s fine with a 60hz display but it feels choppy at 120hz (i.e. the native refresh rate of 14" and 16" MBPs). Hopefully the inevitable USB-C version brings this up to par.
I like that my new phone has USB-C, but yeah, I basically have a bunch of perfectly good lightning cables, some of them more than 10 years old, that are now e-waste. We spent $100 buying new cables, because we didn’t have enough to cover all the places we normally stash chargers away for convenience (cars, couch, home office, etc.)
It’s definitely better in the long run, but this felt more like ripping off a bandaid. The bigger deal for me is 10gbps speeds letting me shoot pro res footage straight to an attached SSD, but this is a pretty niche use case.
wait a sec, are you using a bunch of alt accounts with the exact same username from various lemmy instances to upvote your own comments?
let’s think for 5 minutes here.
I know how a NAS works, but other people might not or possibly even mistake you to mean you transfer media to another machine for viewing.
I meant what I said. If you interpreted this incorrectly, that is your problem. stop trying to pretend someone else doesn’t know what a NAS is, they are perfectly capable of looking up words they don’t mean. me using a word someone else does not know is not misinformation on my part, it is ignorance on theirs.
learn to comprehend the whole conversation, don’t reply to individual comments like they exist in a vacuum. language doesn’t work if you interpret everything hyper-literally. do you fall apart when people use euphemisms or turns of phrase? because those are far more vague than anything i said.
maybe most importantly though, don’t be an absolute dick to people when you ask for clarification.
scroll up. my very first comment, which is the top level comment in this thread, makes it pretty damn clear.
read the whole context before you go off half-cocked and accuse people of spreading misinformation when they aren’t.
OK i see the problem. you’re hung up on the fact that i said “streaming” without specifying commercial streaming services.
however, my context should have been made clear by the fact that i was talking about ripping blu-rays to my fucking NAS, where they get streamed from.
i’m saying “you don’t get the same quality from streaming services as a blu ray”. does that make you happier?
i am more than well aware of all of this. nothing i said is misinformation. same algorithm, different settings. the primary means by which you reduce bitrate with h.265 is by reducing the quality setting. there is no magical way to cut your bitrate by 75% using the same compression algorithm without sacrificing quality. no commercial streaming service is offering video at the same quality level as a 4k blu-ray.
few streaming boxes even support dolby vision profile 7, and no commercial streaming service offers it. so saying you can get it through a streaming service is actual misinformation.
i have literally been doing this shit for 20 years
lower bitrate == lower quality when using the same compression algorithms.
most streaming services are using h.265, same as 4k blu ray, but at substantially lower bitrates
streaming dolby vision profiles are also gimped considerably compared to blu-ray dolby vision
QR codes wouldn’t solve this problem, because they would still house a link that has to be opened in the NaviLens app to be of any use.
These codes don’t just take you to some static document. It opens up in the NaviLens app, which when use features like the gps, gyro, and camera in your phone to provide more rich, contextual information.