An interesting thing to understand about Klarna and other buy-now-pay-later products is that a major part of their profit is the very high merchant fees they charge; retailers have to pay ~2-4x what they do for credit cards if they want to offer Klarna. 57% of Klarna's profit comes from these merchant fees compared to just 24% from loan interest [1].
It turns out it's worth it to merchants because when you're not paying now, you end up buying more than you would otherwise. Order sizes are ~15% higher [2]. Probably similar to how it hurts more to pay with cash than debit because it's so tangible.
I view it kinda similar to gambling apps with their endlessly optimized special offers designed to exploit the human monkey brain.
It's interesting psychology. You can do buy now, pay later + get it later without Klarna.
Just go to checkout, divide the sum by how many instalments you want to pay. Then open your banking app, setup a monthly transfer for that instalment to savings account, setup reminder in 3-6 months, then in 3-6 months just buy it.
Just few more steps, but for a human it's more attractive to get item now and feel the pain later, rather than the other way around.
That's how they make money.
If you do have money, it also means that you get item now and keep your money invested. If it’s the sort of BNPL that has no fees as long as you pay on time (not sure if Klarna does that, but I’ve seen a lot of those), technically it’s better to always use that.
Technically, yeah, but the overall benefit is pretty small. If you average $x/BNPL period, you're dealing with the cognitive/time overhead of buying everything with BNPL for the reward of whatever investment return you can get on $x. For an average household, that might be like a hundred bucks per year on average?
That's a big problem we have right now. It's just way too easy to buy shit you don't need with money you don't have. And the trap of paying over time completely warps your perception of how much you're spending. Even if you're responsible and make all the payments on time and don't pay a massive amount of interest.
You have to clear credit checks to get a credit card. Theres also generally a more involved application process (at least a little bit). The added barriers helped prevent the most financially unstable people from getting them.
There's plenty of problems with the system, but at least it's more difficult for people to get preyed on by credit card companies.
I see these companies like Klarna as not any better then payday loan places.
Predatory lending is a specific kind of targeted, exploitative lending. The form it takes is irrelevant (See below). And 2 wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do.
Having a credit card allowed me to cancel my non-savings account and not pay bank fees. I use my credit card to pay for everything and then pay the credit card from my savings account. They are so dumb lol.
> It turns out it's worth it to merchants because when you're not paying now, you end up buying more than you would otherwise.
This applies to credit cards too. And Klarna offers 6 week interest free loans (with partial payments along the way), not really that different from the 30 day loans from credit cards. So why is Klarna worth the extra merchant fees to the merchant?
Because the terms are way friendlier. Merchants get the money right away, and there is no risk of chargebacks. The article doesn't mention this specifically though the overall confusion is the same: Klarna is a slightly different form of credit card.
And yet, Klarna cannot figure out a way to make a decent profit, even with less than 40% of the employees (from the VC funded glory years) and dozens of acquisitions of actually profitable companies.
That link has pretty much all the info I was after. Pity it doesn't reach anywhere close to the theoretical speeds though, but hey at least it's better than 10GbE. :)
The main other problem is that the kernel doesn't register default signal handlers for signals like SIGTERM if the process is PID 1. So if your process doesn't register its own signal handlers, it's hard to kill (you have to use SIGKILL). I'm sure anyone who has used Docker a lot has run into containers that seem to just ignore signals -- this is the usual reason why.
> also, why can't the real pid1 do it? it sees all the processes after all.
How would the real PID 1 know if it _should_ reap the zombie? It's normal to have some zombie processes -- they're just processes whose exit statuses haven't been reaped yet. If you force-reaped a zombie you could break a program that just hasn't yet gotten around to checking the status of a subprocess it spawned.
This is a neat visualization. It makes me want to build something like this with actual screenshots (scraping from places like old forums, image hosting sites, etc.) rather than web page renderings.
One of my most prized possessions is my collection of personal screenshots -- I've managed to save basically every screenshot I've taken over the past ~20 years. It's very nostalgic to put them on shuffle and see how my desktop has changed over time, remember what random thing I was working on, etc.
Could be cool to extend the concept beyond one user.
I screenshot all new sites I visit. A UI interaction catches my attention, I screenshot.
My files system is 60% images. It's an habit.
As a self-taught software dev; it helped me hone good design skills and also off topic - I poke around a lot when I visit certain websites to see which technologies they are built with. Maybe it was me testing js scripts or verifying the API/Object properties of certain functions - the habit stuck haha.
Same here. It sounds like you even started when I did, ca. 2006. Starting from the blackberry era to my current pixel I've tried to do something similar with my cell phones, but I never usually program in that environment so I never got it off the ground. When LLMs got good a couple years ago getting a screenshot task up and running on my android was one of the first things I tried, but it's been a pain. Apparently Android has been putting in guards against that type of application for security/privacy reasons.
I have an Android, and use the free Tasker app to automatically take a screenshot of my active phone screen every 19 minutes. It takes only a few minutes to set up the Tasker script.
I have vague plans to do something with these one day. But until then, I hoard!
Did tasker do it for you? I tried about 10 yrs ago but with no success. I'll give it another go, thanks. I don't have any future plans for these but similar to OP I see them on a "pictures screensaver", sometimes on chromecast to a TV. I certainly regret not having done this in the 90s, particularly the BBS era, so that is justification enough for me to continue doing it.
I kind of wish I had that.
The closest thing I have to this is my Steam screenshot library, which is just memories of games - or social interactions. on games. I just checked and the oldest one is back from 2011. Prior to Steam they would have been on Xfire, but as that service died, all of those are lost.
Rarely any get added these days, and they're all on private. But it's fun to look back at which games I've played over the past ~14 years.
> Lina Khan and the US government in general blocked all kinds of tech acquisition and merger to the point that companies got creative and as a result many Windsurf employees got screwed. On the other hand, it's totally normal that a handful companies control our food supply chain.
Lina Khan's FTC also successfully sued to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger...
Knowing you will get paid back (i.e. credit worthiness) is part of it, but another part is that the currency holds its value, and the global demand for dollars is an important part of that. If the global demand for dollars decreases, then borrowing is more expensive because you need to offer a higher interest rate to entice people to purchase bonds, because they have other more attractive options to store/grow their money than US bonds.
One way to think of it is that the US benefits from the current world order by essentially taxing the rest of the world to pay for its spending by devaluing their currencies relative to the dollar.
Sorry but your point is just completely wrong and I am not sure why you have this belief. It is extremely normal and safe to backup SQLite via block device or filesystem snapshots. Are you under the impression that SQLite cannot recover from a power loss...? The whole point of using a log is that you can recover from crashes mid-way through updating the database file by replaying the writes from the log.
If it will convince you, I went and asked ChatGPT like you recommended and it agrees:
> If you want to use snapshots:
> Use a filesystem or block-level snapshot tool that guarantees a point-in-time, atomic snapshot (e.g., LVM snapshots, ZFS snapshots, Btrfs snapshots, or VSS on Windows).
If you were going to "Tell SQLite to create checkpoint (write the WAL contents to the main DB) and suspend writes" as you suggest is necessary, why even bother with a snapshot at that point?
Isn't "monopolies suppress competition" one of the classic reasons people think they should be broken up? I'm not saying you have to agree with that theory, but just observing a current lack of competition doesn't by itself seem like an argument against breakup.
Google is not suppressing competition. There are plenty of competing browsers and search engines, they all suck. On the Mobile OS side there is less but substantially more robust competition, even though I, personally, hate iOS. So breaking Google up because of a theoretical problem that is refuted by reality is nonsensible.
> There are plenty of competing browsers and search engines, they all suck.
Maybe our difference in viewpoint is that I see this fact and wonder why it's seemingly impossible for anyone to build a financially viable alternative, and I'm at least open to the idea that it's very difficult to compete with Google when they can leverage their successful ads business to subsidize the investment into their browser.
Yes the alternatives are worse, but is that because Google is inherently smarter, or because the newcomers have a tiny fraction of the investment and usually fizzle out within a year or two? Google doesn't have to be actively trying to kill the competitors for it to have an anti-competitive effect in the market.
Also because Googles is part of the web committe because of Chrome, so it gets to dictate how much complexity is in a browser and stiffle competition like that.
It turns out it's worth it to merchants because when you're not paying now, you end up buying more than you would otherwise. Order sizes are ~15% higher [2]. Probably similar to how it hurts more to pay with cash than debit because it's so tangible.
I view it kinda similar to gambling apps with their endlessly optimized special offers designed to exploit the human monkey brain.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/stocks/how-does... [2] https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/the-leap/klarna-se...