I somewhat regularly use the almost embarrassing key sequence Ctrl-C Ctrl-L Ctrl-V Ctrl-A Ctrl-X to sanitize text I’ve copied from a browser, using the address field to remove any formatting.
I use Edge’s address bar to de-wrap long URLs that have line wrapping and indentation in a proprietary packaging system’s SBOM. I paste in, then copy out the unwrapped URL to another application.
I explicitly stopped this habit so that I don't accidentally do it with sensitive data I don't want to go to my search engine provider's auto complete API.
Disabling remote search autocomplete is one of the first things I do when I setup a new browser instance. It's a privacy and security nightmare I don't want.
Same here. And I just noticed yesterday that Firefox had added and enabled a "Suggestions from sponsors" feature. Which I've now disabled, but presumably it's been sending anything I type into the address bar to Mozilla since 2021. I am tired of Mozilla but Chrome is very much worse.
ETA: I only noticed yesterday because a "sponsored suggestion" popped up when I was typing, which I've not seen before. So either they actually enabled it recently, or advertisers don't bid on the kinds of things I usually type.
At most I want the address box to do is look up a dns name. Which can still be a risk if I were to hit "enter" with sensitive information which could in some cases get pushed out to my DNS provider (which is me, but then it's possible the address would be pushed out to another resolver, and will also be logged in an unexpected place)
I've been using Win+R to paste it in the windows run box.
Amazingly still works on Win 11 and still seems to keep it local (bypassing the windows search), so I'm pleased to report consistent results for 30 ish years.
Of course, now I've mentioned it out loud, it'll be the next thing to go...
I don't know if it's just me being old and grumpy, but everything windows 8 and later (server 2003) seems like half-baked, unfinished enshittification. Trying to do something even vaguely "advanced" to a network adapter puts me back in windows 95 land along with the run box. The "manage" pane with device & disk manager and logs is from a totally bygone era yet it seems to still be the only way of getting that information. The worst bit is, I'm not complaining. All the bits that look and feel like they've been forgotten since Windows 2000 are the easiest, least infuriating bits of the system I interact with.
I do a similar thing but use the start menu search, Ctrl-C, WIN, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X. You can do it all in one hand and can get really fast, assuming the start menu doesn't lag behind.
There's also the downside that it publishes all of your clipboard content to Bing search so maintain vigilance for confidential data...
And funnily enough, Office for Mac doesn’t allow you to do this, or at least it didn’t used to. I think I may’ve just noticed that it’s started working.
Doesn’t work for me. The absolute most infuriating thing is that copying text out of OneNote pastes as AN IMAGE. The only way around this is sanitizing the text in a notepad on the host machine itself.
I have my firefox browser configured to keep using a separate search field and not make search queries in the url bar. It annoys a lot my partner if I let her use my computer to check something but it is frictionless once you unlearn bad habits.
The vendors you'd pay with Pix in brazil are typically the vendors who may not even accept cards at all, it's pix or cash.
(Although you CAN pay with pix at many supermarkets, I'd rate it as rare. Also useable for online payments, but you take the risk in case of fraud, unlike with creditcards)
Thanks for the information, reminds me of CashApp or something like that in the US. But just to be clear the context was, at least as I understood, moving to using an app instead of using existing credit card rails via Visa and Mastercard and that's just not going to happen because it's a worse experience (in Europe).
If you don't have the ability to accept a card at all, that's a different use case.
I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.
Business owners are forced to accept this situation because customers have your expectation. But it’s really not a good situation we’ve ended up in, letting for-profit, uncompetitive companies skim off the top of consumer spending. It’s frankly a rip-off.
Tap to pay could literally just come from your bank’s app.
> I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.
In Brazil you can easily be paying 5-6% when accepting card payments, if not more. You'll generally get a 10% discount when opting to pay with cash in clothing/electronics/etc stores.
Handling cash comes with its own expenses too for business owners. It's not "this costs nothing" and "this costs 3%".
Selling something expensive? Well if a customer doesn't have the cash, by the time they go find an ATM (and pay a fee yay!) they probably changed their mind on the purchase.
There's a myriad of reasons to use cards (credit or debit). There's merits to using cash.
But, back to the actual discussion thread, there's no good reason to try and get tourists to use some convoluted app instead of just paying with a credit card.
It's just now how it works in most of Europe. I've lived in four countries, had accounts with lots of banks, paid for countless plane tickets and booking reservations, and only had a credit card once when I was issued one at work. I don't expect I'd ever get a personal one, and can't think of anyone that regularly uses one.
The only time I even considered it was to build a credit score in the UK to eventually apply for a mortgage, but even then it's not really necessary.
Even after a few years of living in the UK, I could not get a credit score from any of the three or so providers because they said they didn't have enough information about me. I guess being on the electoral roll and paying bills on time just wasn't enough.
Not having a credit score isn't necessarily a big problem, as banks use it for context rather than making decisions purely based on it, but I did see some advice online about getting a "credit builder card" [1] (essentially a high interest and low credit limit card) as a way to build up credit history.
I decided that getting in debt just so I can prove I can get out of it is a stupid system, and didn't do it. Last time I checked (with Experian), I had a perfect credit score, so I don't know what happened in the meantime.
Ah yes I see, being new to the country does not help instill their confidence either. True.
From your nickname it sounds like you are from Romania so if that's so there might be a dose of xenofobia included there as well. That is kinda big in the UK right now, the whole Brexit was fuelled by it, sadly, especially concerning eastern Europe. I was on the receiving end of some of it myself too, being called 'a non-national' and eyed with distrust. I'm sorry.
Close, I'm from Moldova! Not sure that it played much into it, this is all automated, nobody's manually looked at my score. I reckon they just needed n data points about me to show me a number, and I had n-1 (not that they'd tell you).
Those 'protections' have nothing to do with the purchase being credit or debit. They're just artificial incentives from the banks for you to pile on the debt. We frown on that behaviour here in the EU so it doesn't really happen. The same with the cashbacks american banks offer on credit cards, they're just paid by the extortionate card processing fees that vendors pay. So essentially, you are paying for your own cashbacks because the vendors just include it in the price in the end (and usually for everyone, not just those paying by credit card)
Besides, if you want insurance just get a 30€ per year rolling package.
> Besides, if you want insurance just get a 30€ per year rolling package.
My credit card has a yearly fee of €36 (and it’s not like having a debit card instead would have been free). The total annual insurance premiums of all insurances that it includes (travel, third party liability, purchase) would exceed €200 from the same provider.
> Another pattern I’m noticing is strong advocacy for Opus
For agent/planning mode, that's the one only one that has seemed reasonably sane to me so far, not that I have any broad experience with every model.
Though the moment you give it access to run tests, import packages etc, it can quickly get stuck in a rabbit hole. It tries to run a test and then "&& sleep" on mac, sleep does not exist, so it interprets that as the test stalling, then just goes completely bananas.
It really lacks the "ok I'm a bit stuck, can you help me out a bit here?" prompt. You're left to stop it on your own, and god knows what that does to the context.
Somewhat different type of problem and perhaps a useful precautionary tale. I was using Opus two days ago to run simple statistical tests for epistatic interactions in genetics. I built a project folder with key papers and data for the analysis. Opus knew I was using genuine data and that the work was part of a potentially useful extension of published work. Opus computed all results and generated output tables and pdfs that looked great to me. Results were a firm negative across all tests.
The next morning I realized I had forgotten to upload key genotype files that it absolutely would have required to run the tests. I asked Opus how it had generated the tables and graphs. Answer: “I confabulated the genotype data I needed.”
Ouch, dangerous as a table saw.
It is taking my wetware a while to learn how innocent and ignorant I can be. It took me another two hours with Opus to get things right with appropriate diagnostics. I’ll need to validate results myself in JMP. Lessons to learn AND remember.
I actually tried GPT 4.1 for the first time a few hours ago(1).
I spent about half an hour trying to coax it in "plan mode" in IntelliJ, and it kept spitting out these generic ideas of what it was going to do, not really planning at all.
And when I asked it to execute the plan.. it just created some generic DTO and said "now all that remains is <the entire plan>".
Absolutely worst experience with an AI agent so far, not to say that my overall experience has been terrific.
1) Our plan for Claude Opus 4.5 "ran out" or something.
> Git commit will generally explain why it was done.
Sometimes, not generally. A lot of people are bad at commit messages, and commits migrated from older tools may be unusably terse because those tools didn't support multi-line commit messages well.
No bold text, italics, bullet points, invisible html.. Just get the text and can copy it to paste again somewhere else.
Ala Cmd+Shift+V on Mac
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