fegul

You could also install am app like Tasker or Macrodroid and set up triggers for handling incoming SMS (e.g. If SMS received, forward using another mechanism)

For outgoing SMS, have Tasker or Macrodroid watch an email inbox and send emails to that inbox with a format like email subject line = recipient phone number, email message body = SMS body. Then parse it through those automation apps and have it send the SMS for you.

I did something like this before and it worked decently well but I haven't had the best luck with getting Android apps to run stable for long periods of time without manual intervention. Not sure if it was battery optimization settings or what.

"at gunpoint"? Seems like you're painting with some very broad strokes there.

In any case, it seems there's more than meets the eye here. Her team INCLUDING her manager appear to be standing by her and they would likely know the details better than any of us.

I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.

Through Cainiao, their logistics arm. It combines a massive logistics setup with pick-up points in some places to improve efficiency.

They also have massive sorting machines basically sitting in idle parts of their warehouses until the next singles day to allow them the elasticity to handle such a large increase in orders.

I had the opportunity to see their operations up close a few years back and the scale was insane.

I'm a huge fan of Metabase and I've used it extensively but the pricing model is really tough.

Taking myself as an example: At the growth stage we're at, we'll start to need more data access logging/auditing, per row permissions to guard PII, etc. but I can't justify going from free to 10k/yr to our board quite yet.

It would be great if the cloud option could introduce some of those features (not all) at a price point that makes it easier for more startups to sign on like mine as we keep growing. Right now it feels like I need to leave Metabase as our needs expand and hope that at some point down the line, we can justify the cost and come back to it.

I think OPNsense (an offshoot of pfsense) has this capability built in.

They're great. I've had less downtime with them than DO and I have several VPSs there. I'd highly recommend them.

Using that quote in this context essentially represents the epitome of first-world problems and privilege.

That certainly looks like it's in the right direction, I'll re-familiarize myself with the docs again since it's been a little while

Big fan of Metabase, thanks for all your work!

I've always been curious if there is a feature in the works for charting or displaying comparisons across defined timespans (e.g. total page views this week vs. last week)

I'm a fan of your work! We use Metabase pretty frequently.

The only nitpicks I have are around the concept of Metrics (still not quite sure what those are or how they're useful for me) and the initial download size of the libraries takes quite a while (especially over unstable VPN links)

I'm wondering if there's a way to have an option where it tries an external CDN first and then falls back to loading from the hosting server.

How?

This "human" factor was also characterized in the movie Sully when it was apparent that just a few extra seconds for pilots to process the issue made all the difference between landing safely at a nearby airport vs. landing in the Hudson River.

Regarding mobile payments in general, it seems Kenya/M-Pesa is always the standard that people refer to but we don't hear much about mobile payment adoption in other African countries.

In your experience, do you think others still lag behind Kenya in terms of adoption and, if so, why?

What other airlines are you comparing it to?

I just flew on a 767 with BA a few weeks ago. The cabin definitely felt dated

The Palm Pre (and WebOS)

When it first came out I thought it was kinda cute so I got it for my gf but I ended up loving it.

The slider mechanism was solid, the OS was a breeze to use, and it was years before Android and iOS fully caught up with the "cards" concept.

It revolutionized the mobile experience in many ways for me.

Did you mean the Nigerian song by P-Square featuring the words "chop my money"? Because that's not about scamming.

How so?

Same here. Just picked one up a few weeks back and used the stock web-gui to upload the newest OpenWRT. Worked without a hitch.

One thing I noticed when I tried it out a year or so ago was the high data usage on mobile devices even when messages weren't being sent or received.

I had set up our own Synapse server but the high data usage, quirky 1-1 vs rooms chats, etc. made it tough for me to adopt fully.

I do hope to use it in the future though as I really like the concept but it wasn't quite there for me yet.

Having lived in a country with similar (and fluctuating) internet restrictions, it's always interesting to see how small design decisions like that can have such significant ramifications on so many people.

I remember one SaaS product we wanted to use at our company had one major js file that had the word "proxy" in the title. The product had nothing to do with circumvention or anything but the national internet filters picked up that word and blocked it completely. Thus, we couldn't use that service at all.

Although I hate that I can't block YouTube on our metered connections with a URL whitelist as Google logins require calls to accounts.youtube.com.

One of my biggest concerns with Matrix was the amount of device data that it exposes.

It's extremely easy to fingerprint the devices that someone is using (it literally tells you right within Riot) and by design could make it easy for someone to track you or target your device if there are any known exploits for it.

I use it almost exclusively on Android. I'll use Brave if I want to keep tabs open for a while and Firefox Focus if it's just a fleeting read.

I also work in tech in Africa (2nd largest population on the continent if that's any indication) and it is certainly challenging.

Love to chat/commiserate more about your experiences

You may be surprised. Certainly the number of people with disposable income will be less than in many other places but those that have disposable income often pay more.

Tax on cars is upward of 200% and traffic is becoming a major issue. When it comes to services, another major challenge is that there are no widely accepted payment mechanisms besides cash and checks. Debit cards only work with ATMs and some very select retailers.

This opens up a lot of investment/business opportunities.

Ethiopia is land-locked and given its not-so-great relationship with Eritrea, uses Djibouti as its primary port. The time-savings of the railway will bring down port-to-Addis shipment times to 12 hours which is awesome considering it can take 3 days now (although the customs process will need to be improved to really speed it up)

It will also reduce the costs necessary to repair the roadways that trucks take to get to Djibouti and back. The incoming lane on these roads is often rutted like crazy due to the weight of the goods and truck drivers are not always the most reliable people.

Ethiopia is also home to one of the fastest growing economies in the world and it is extremely import-dependent. The lower the costs for transit, the lower the costs for the consumer.

RE: wanting to be where the growth is, you really need to be here to see it (I spend most of my time in Ethiopia) You don't have to know the local language and you don't need millions of dollars but you need to have an appetite for risk and be an extremely patient person. Nothing generally works out the way you think it will here so be open to other outcomes and be resilient through it all.

PM if you have any questions.

The title makes me shudder.

1. Africa != Ethiopia and Djibouti. It's a massive continent 2. "Joyous Africans" conjures up some pretty bad stereotypes 3. The reason they're "joyous" is only because someone else helped them?

Yikes.

In Ethiopia's case, it's not so much the connection speed in Addis. There's a great deal of interference from the national Deep Packet Inspection filters that leads to timed-out requests, reset TCP connections, etc.

JS-heavy apps make a lot of requests to background servers and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang. It's quite frustrating and I would often load pages with the console open to see which requests have failed so I'm not left wondering what happened.