It’s interesting to me how quickly I’ve soured on the concept of open banking, which on paper sounds fantastic and originally I was very much in favour of. And which I’ve used personally to make it easier to extract my own data for my own use.
However more often than not now I’m seeing it used for really invasive applications. Such as when I rented my most recent apartment and they asked to use open banking to verify our finances, which as far as I know would have given them access to every single transaction going back a decade or so. The agent was confused as to why I wouldn’t go ahead with it and ultimately let us opt out, but I do worry that at some point I won’t have much choice but to accept.
I’ve also seen credit scoring companies that suggest you’ll get a better credit score if you use open banking to hand over your transactions. I have no need to use that but I suspect others who are desperate to increase their chances of getting a mortgage, etc, won’t have much of a choice.
I feel the same. The convenience will likely outweigh the security concerns in the not too distant future.
What I would like is some middle step - that instead of allowing open access to accounts, I get to choose how the data is summarised and presented. e.g. just show total income and outgoings, fortnightly, over the last 6 months. Things like that.
Yes, I could export the transactions, do some Excel hand waving and make a report, then make a PDF and send it, then they would do data entry into their system summarising what they read. But automating that data sharing step would be fantastic.
I am in the process of applying for a home loan at the moment, and the amount of documentation is significant. If I were able to automate 80% of it in a fairly anonymised data way, that would be really useful.
> Such as when I rented my most recent apartment and they asked to use open banking to verify our finances
There was a Launch HN recently that did just this, but for people like Uber drivers wanting to borrow money to buy their own car. They handed over their Uber credentials, and the service scraped their Uber history to determine whether they were a good risk or not.
I'm not usually into slippery slope arguments but what your landlord asked of you is just that little bit worse than their service (worse as they have access to your bank account, not just your payroll data).
I think the moral of the story is that as a provider (Uber, a bank), you should be proactive about providing read-only access to data, removing the need for screen scraping and providing better security to your drivers/customers.
My partner and I had been working with a personal trainer up until the lockdown hit and had sold most of our exercise equipment before we moved to London, so without the gym we were a bit stuck. Thankfully we did have a rowing machine and some dumbbells so have been using those with an app called FitBod. You enter the equipment you have and it builds a workout based on that. It also has body weight exercises too. Once we’re out of lockdown I suspect we’ll skip the personal trainer and keep using FitBod, just at the gym instead.
Yes, the company I’m contracting at currently has done exactly this. We’ve kept Slack around for calls and for monitoring alerts, but other than that it’s all in Basecamp.
It has made an incredible difference. As a remote worker, I always felt stressed if I didn’t respond to a message straight away as it might appear as if I’m slacking off. With Basecamp, a delay is expected, so I finish my tasks before taking a look through my Basecamp notifications. I’m vastly more productive and far less stressed.
In addition, the proposals and comments on Basecamp are in far more detail and conversation is typically better thought out.
I've read more in the past 12 months than in the past few years, purely because I discovered a company in the UK called the Folio Society[1]. They sell beautifully bound and illustrated editions of fantastic books, although at rather high prices (£30-40 on average).
Previously the majority of the books I read came in the form of cheap ebooks from the Kindle store. As a result, I often abandoned them (or even just forgot about them), only reading a few chapters. Now though, when I spend £30 on a single book, damn right am I going to finish it.
Plus, as a result of the curation, there isn't a single book on their site that isn't at least worth a glance. The same can't be said for many physical bookstores, let alone Amazon, etc.
And, the best part is, I don't really need these expensive books anymore. I've gotten into such a habit of reading because of them that I'm buying regular books again and I'm reading for at least an hour or two a night.
b) you are a reasonable person, and value your money enough to care
I tried to use this tactic many times, mostly to hone my programming skills - didn't work. Damn, I recently entered a postgraduate program at the university, for 2500$ cost - didn't help much, still can't force myself to spend more time learning things.
A similar phenomenon are the various ways people try to trick their procrastination habit, not with money (fake price) but with time (fake priorities).
However, as you correctly noticed, these techniques don't work well. That's normal, don't worry if these simple solutions don't work. Maybe you think they should work, because you often hear from people for whom "that one weird trick" worked. Or that one complicated technique. But usually these are the same people who try to sell you their book on that topic.
Instead, you need to the root of this issues, which may involve finding your true priorities, and may involve actively changing your habits. All this may be really hard, and you'll fail and retry many times - especially when trying to do this alone. Heck, there's a whole profession around helping people to fix these types of issues - some of them are highly qualified, others are charlatans. (The latter often call themselves "coaches" as that term doesn't require much qualification, so that they can't be sued if they do a bad job.)
How do you find the highly qualified? How are they called? How do you find the fitting one, without having tons of money to through out like a big manager would have (but probably enough, specially if the result is promising)
Since this is about treating human beings, of course the best qualified people are physicians. More precisely, medical psychotherapist and related professions. Among various treatments, behavior therapy is quite common, but there are others.
There is certainly some stigma around this, because most people think that going to a therapy means you have some serious mental illness. But that's nonsense. There's a huge variety of issues, small and lager, and all physicians are fully aware of this broad spectrum.
The defining criteria is always: Does the person suffer from that issue? (Sometimes also: Do the people around that person suffer from it?) And, of course: What's the best way to help them?
Moreover: If they can help people to get away and stay away from alcohol and other drugs, and are able to talk a violent to cooperation, which are both much harder tasks than anything discussed here, then they can help with "smaller" psychological issues as well.
And compared to people with some 3-months crash course, they know exactly what they do, and have all forms of therapy applied to themselves as well, that's a vital part of the training.
For reference, I'm talking about the situation here in Germany. But I think this should be very similar in other countries, too.
I've had a similar problem. My studies included a lot of econ and I'm very familiar with sunk costs. I was trained to not care about them, and now I don't.
Buy a month's worth of gym visits as a commitment mechanism, quit after the first one without regrets. Sunk costs are sunk.
Killer feature for me is being able to cmd+click on file paths in the terminal to open them. I use this constantly. There are plenty of other features too such as being able to reopen a tab you closed accidentally.
Creating a checklist for my morning routine has been such a great time-saver and anxiety-reducer for me. I have everything on there, even the most obvious items such as "eat breakfast", and all I need to do once I wake up is tick things off from start to finish. I haven't forgotten to take my umbrella or laptop charger since, and it's relieving knowing that - because I've checked everything off - there's nothing left for me to do. No more worrying about having forgotten something.
Not saying that these are valid reasons however two that spring to mind are thickness (USB-C is fairly significantly thicker) and elegance (one could argue that Lightning is a more beautiful and slightly more pleasant to use connector).
In addition, Apple controls Lightning completely so when you buy an accessory that uses Lightning, as long as it isn't counterfeit, it has been tested by Apple and is guaranteed to work. They can't guarantee that with USB-C.
That said, it's an awkward situation. Overall I'd like USB-C on my phone however if they were going to do it, surely it would have been with the iPhone 7. It wouldn't be great if they announced it with the 7S after people had gone out and bought Lightning headphones.
I'm on mobile so not sure if anyone else has pointed this out but Apple mentioned in the keynote that the escape key is still present when using the terminal. There is also a way to bring up the full row of function keys.
Personally I think this is the great advantage of the touch bar. The only app that I personally use the Esc key in has it available, but all other apps use the space for more appropriate shortcuts. Plus it can be customised too (finally I can add a screenshot button!), although not per app yet, as far as I can tell.
Interestingly I was getting occasional black screens (i.e. the entire screen, status bar and all) in Safari on iOS 10. Not seen that on any other site before.
However more often than not now I’m seeing it used for really invasive applications. Such as when I rented my most recent apartment and they asked to use open banking to verify our finances, which as far as I know would have given them access to every single transaction going back a decade or so. The agent was confused as to why I wouldn’t go ahead with it and ultimately let us opt out, but I do worry that at some point I won’t have much choice but to accept.
I’ve also seen credit scoring companies that suggest you’ll get a better credit score if you use open banking to hand over your transactions. I have no need to use that but I suspect others who are desperate to increase their chances of getting a mortgage, etc, won’t have much of a choice.