TechBro8615

The main benefit is that it's easier to have multiple eSIMs than to have multiple physical SIMs. Sure you can only have one active simultaneously (I think?), but that's better than the status quo of physical SIMs.

I'm a US/UK resident, and I use an eSIM for my US provider and a physical SIM for my UK provider. Since I use both numbers for various localized services like 2FA, food delivery, etc., the ability to have multiple SIMs has been a huge improvement compared to just a few years ago, when I had to have two phones to be able to log into my bank.

Most of them are "think tanks," which is a fancy word for "lobbyist."

Would it be global or would it only be the side of the Earth that was facing the Sun at the time of impact?

One thing we can probably agree on is that those centralized test centers were the dumbest idea of the entire pandemic. For the same reasons you state, they always seemed absolutely insane to me. So you think you have Covid? Get in your car and drive to a gathering of a bunch of other people who might have Covid. If you don't have it now, you definitely will after!

That would make sense if the vaccinations had any impact on transmission rate.

Yes, I agree with the general premise, that "as covid becomes more normalized people stop testing / reporting their test results."

But it's hard to reconcile this justification for lack of data, with (a) the current headlines claiming a new surge in cases, and (b) the headlines from two years ago, insisting Covid prevalence was not simply overinflated due to prevalence of testing.

You're attributing nervousness to me when it does not exist. I'm pretty sure we both have as much desire to be right as the other. The difference is, I'm not telling you not to get vaccinated. You do what you want, I do what I want, and neither of us rubs it in the face of the other if we turn out to get the short end of the stick. That's the moral basis I've been operating on throughout this whole ordeal, and so far it's worked fine.

> I just had COVID for the first time. It's been two weeks and I still feel like total garbage.

I'm confused how you open your comment with this statement, as if to express regret that you didn't get the vaccine and that's why you suffered from the symptoms of Covid. But from the rest of your comment, you don't sound like someone who's avoided Covid vaccines. In fact you go onto promote them.

So I feel it's worth asking: are you vaccinated against Covid? How many times have you been boosted? And if the answer to those questions is "yes" and "more than zero," then what is your basis for scolding others into "getting a vaccine?" I mean, did it work for you, or did you still get Covid and suffer from its symptoms?

For full disclosure, wary as I am of karmic retribution (from the universe, not HN users) for admitting it: I've not been vaccinated, I've not been boosted, and as far as I know I've not had Covid. I did have a sore throat and runny nose on a trip to NYC a few weeks ago, but if that was Covid, I hardly see the urgency to get vaccinated against it, and in fact I'm glad that I suffered from such a minor infirmity since it would mean I'm now immune to potentially deadlier variants, and likely to a degree more than anyone who's been vaccinated against earlier variants (research has consistently shown natural immunity from infection to be longer-lasting and more efficacious against a wider range of unknown variants than any vaccine).

I'll stick to my conspiracy theory if you take a second to look at the data for daily Covid cases, and admit to yourself that it shows no significant spike: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Not to be that guy, but isn't there a surprising correlation between the availability of the upcoming booster shot and the "uptick" in covid cases? The shot has been in development for a while, and it was only recently announced to be ready, followed shortly thereafter by a bombardment of articles about the covid uptick. How convenient.

Every time I've read these breathless claims of a resurgence of the pandemic, I've attempted to verify it through data analysis (number of positive covid tests) and the data has yet to validate the headlines. So please forgive me if I assume it's not the risk of contracting and dying from Covid that's suddenly increased, but rather the readiness of the latest pharmaceutical intervention.

> A plaque in the cabin claims this van was upfitted by Innovative Surveillance Technology out of Coral Springs, Fla. for NASA... It’s easy to wonder how on earth a fully-equipped federal surveillance van makes it out of government hands

Why worry about that, when you could just purchase a new one from Innovative Surveillance Technology?

If you're not using the latest, best tools available to teach your students - and if you're not teaching them about those tools - then you are a bad teacher. Period.

Language models should be introduced in classrooms because they're a part of society now, and they're here to stay. Kids should learn about them - how they work, where they came from, how to use them - just like they should learn how to type or send an email.

It does remind me of my experience as a middle schooler in 2002, when our class took a trip to the library, and the librarian gave us a lesson on "how to use search engines properly." In retrospect, the societal worry at the time was about search engines replacing librarians, so it was perhaps notable that this librarian had the humility to teach us how to use her "replacement." Surely the same applies to teachers and ChatGPT: a good teacher will not be worried about whatever impact ChatGPT might have on them personally, but will instead take the opportunity to teach their students about the new horizons opened up by this technology.

(The funny part of that seminar in the library was that the lesson emphasized the need to construct efficient, keyword-based queries, rather than asking natural language questions to the search engine directly - but twenty years later we've come full circle and now you actually can just ask your question to the language models.)

It basically costs nothing and it's a huge advantage for a country to be the dominant sink for international talent migration. Most countries have net brain drain where their smartest people leave... to go to the US. That the US has the opposite problem is really a trivial issue to complain about, and anyone invested in its success should want the imbalance to continue.

And frankly if you're an American high-skilled worker who is concerned about foreign talent "replacing" you (an absurd idea in a labor market where demand continues to outpace supply, and will continue to do so as long as technology advances), then are you actually as highly skilled as you think you are? If you're being outcompeted by foreign talent then you need to "get good" - it's a skill issue.

The argument for foreign workers replacing domestic workers in unskilled jobs makes more sense, because the demand is for commoditized labor and there's negligible difference between employees beyond how little they're willing to be paid. But for high skilled work, by definition, it's your skills that should differentiate you. If they don't, then that's your problem to solve. It shouldn't be up to the rest of society to lower the floor of high-skilled work to accommodate your lack of skill.

The good news is that if you find a prepaid SIM in one EU country, you should be able to continue using it in every EU country as long as you top it up. I often wish I still had my Croatia SIM card that I bought at a Tisak kiosk for €10.

Could this be used as a rubber ducky type device? I remember last I researched making a DIY rubber ducky it was quite difficult for some reason.

It has everything to do with nostalgia. Nostalgia is the only reason you can even express a concept as nebulous as "online freedom," when hardly anyone in the current generation can even conceptualize what that means, nevermind how it's lacking in TikTok, or why they would desire it in the first place. Waxing nostalgic for the "online freedom" of usenet is no different than extolling the virtues of "hard work" that are lost on those damn kids nowadays who don't even need to hike up a snowy hill to get to school.

If we extend the metaphor of a gate, then gatekeeping prevents the introduction of evolutionary bottlenecks, meaning the population stagnates in the absence of any external pressure to mutate.

My childhood was superior to your childhood. Nostalgia is a tale as old as time.

I'm skeptical of the argument that Nvidia's superiority to AMD is due to their software. But even if it were, what would AMD gain by having access to the source code of Nvidia drivers? It's not like they can use it to speed up their own chips.

If you loosen the time constraints, there is a compelling case for self-manufacturing vacuum tube systems. They're more resilient to space environments and easier to manufacture than their silicon counterparts. Who says Von Neumann probes need to be fast?

How?

I don't understand why Nvidia puts so much effort into keeping their drivers as proprietary blobs. It's not like their software is part of their defensibility; they're a hardware company. Not only will opening their kernel modules have zero impact on their hardware sales, but it will actually improve their stability and also earn goodwill from developers who might otherwise go out of their way to purchase a GPU from AMD.

I have a server and it's decentralized? Isn't that a contradiction of terms? Wake me up when my teammates and I can message each other from our mobile devices without the involvement of any other computer...

Eh, these UFO hearings are fairly bipartisan, and to any degree that they diminish the credibility of their organizers, it cuts across the aisle...

I've been wondering for a while whether ftxbro is a satire account... this comment has me leaning toward "yes." Well played either way...

I understand the (rather obvious) basis for this argument, but at what point does the responsibility shift to the doctor? If you don't have a health condition, and you ask ten doctors to diagnose you with one, then isn't the real issue with the tenth doctor who diagnoses you with one, rather than with yourself - the patient - who genuinely believes (given the benefit of the doubt) that you're suffering from symptoms of some condition the other nine doctors wouldn't diagnose you with? I mean, is it really the responsibility of the patient to moderate the quackiness of doctors that are willing to prescribe whatever medication for whatever illness the patient might have? What's the point of doctors if we can't trust them to gatekeep the drugs (and VA benefits) we put them in charge of disbursing?

I think the reflex to blame patients for this situation is revelatory of the real issue, which is that the entire discipline of mental health is disconnected from any physical reality or real basis upon which a "proper" diagnosis can be based.

As far as "malicious" goes, this is like paying with an expired coupon for your discounted lunch. I've seen 100x worse in businesses like social apps. The guy seems kind of insecure by overexaggerating the maliciousness aspect of it. I'd say he's being too hard on himself for following what's ultimately standard business tactics.

So basically getting a second opinion from another doctor is somehow fraudulent behavior? If you have a problem with this, shouldn't it be with the quack doctors making the diagnoses and not the patients?

I was diagnosed with ADHD because I (truthfully) told a doctor I had the symptoms of ADHD. Now I have a prescription for adderall. Did I commit fraud?

"Stay in the US" is not a great consolation when it really means "paid to a cartel of weapons manufacturers."

The MAGA wing of the party is anti-war in general, much like the liberals of the early 2000s. At some point these positions flipped. It's not that these Republicans are "anti-Ukraine," or "pro-Russia" or even "not anti-Russia." It's that they don't want to send hundreds of billions of unaudited dollars to weapons manufacturers and highly corrupt foreign governments, especially given the glaring contrast with the lack of spending on problems much closer to home. From a geopolitical perspective, the position is simple: war is bad, we are prolonging the war in Ukraine by funding it, therefore funding it is bad. And further, it's a misdirection of resources when the real foreign threat is China, not Russia, and that's before considering the many domestic problems going unaddressed while the gang of neocons and neolibs ("the uniparty") redirects our tax dollars into the coffers of the Ukrainian military and Raytheon stockholders.