buffington

Honest question from someone who isn't an expert: why would they need to encrypt that data on my machine?

If the concern is that someone might gain access to my computer and see unencrypted things, what about all of the other things on my machine that aren't encrypted?

This is tricky. It feels like it's an obvious conflict of interest. But if the researchers are free to do real science, no strings attached, this seems like a good thing.

Even with no strings attached, it's hard to trust PMI. Imagine the researchers discovered, with data to prove it, that PMI's new smokeless tech truly did make PMI's products safe. I doubt anyone would trust it.

But if the research discovered that smokeless tech was worse, with data to prove it, I suspect it'd be a lot easier to trust.

Weird, because in another comment, you said:

> it's literally the same thing. anyone who claims otherwise is uninformed.

That they are chemically different is a fact, but their physical effects have also been proven to be different as well. I've never tried meth, but I know people who have, and who have also used Adderall, and the descriptions of their experiences would suggest the two drugs have different effects, regardless of dosage.

But I can't prove those differences, so won't argue further.

Adderall has been significantly beneficial in my life, for which I'm grateful, but yeah. There are problems, both with the drug, and with how easily[1] it's prescribed.

That anyone has ever said the drugs are benign is insane. I've been on Adderall for close to 20 years now, and there are consequences. Heart problems are the biggie. I'm very fit, eat healthy, don't smoke, run a few miles a week, bike, hike, etc, and there are some alarming issues with my heart that are likely due to Adderall use. Maybe I'd have the same issues even without Adderall, but odds are, it's the Adderall.

[1] "easily" is a tricky word here. It's hard to get Adderall, as the article describes pretty well, if you're someone like me - someone who actually uses the drug for its intended purposes. My experiences have often been worse than what the article describes. Because of the shortage, my local pharmacies require that you bring a physical copy of the prescription to them, with a fill date of the exact date you're trying to get it filled. One day too late? They need a new prescription. One day too early? They need a new prescription. You're also required to pick up the same day. If you don't pick up the same day, they'll send the pills back to inventory so they can fill for all other people stuck in the same boat as me. I've not been able to consistently fill meds that help me function for at least 3 years now. Maybe if I'd turned to the black market, I wouldn't have this problem?

It's so weird to me that people use Adderall recreationally. It's as "recreational" in my mind as functional shoes are. I usually need them, but they're usually not what makes an activity fun.

How is crushing up Adderall and snorting it even worth doing?

I've accidentally taken my "normal" Adderall twice and it's an extremely uncomfortable experience. The last place I'd want to be in that state would be at a party, getting drunk. Sitting in a quiet place and rocking/sweating/puking until it's done is more what comes to mind.

For what it's worth, there's no "quick release" Adderall. There's a normal kind, and an "extended release" kind (officially Adderall XR). The latter encapsulates little beads of the drug in coatings that dissolve at different rates, allowing the dose to be spread out over a longer period of time. What I think you're referring to when you say "quick release" is the non-XR variant of the drug.

The drug found in Adderall XR is identical to that of Adderall with the exception of the coatings on the beads. I think crushing up those beads would likely work the same as crushing up an Adderall tablet, assuming the coatings on the beads were also suitably crushed. Not something I'll be testing any time soon though.

There is a difference. Adderall is a combo of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, while "meth" is typically mostly methamphetamine (with other "enhancements" or impurities). They are chemically different.

While Adderall isn't the same as meth, there is a ADHD medication that is pure methamphetamine: Desoxyn, and it's significantly more difficult to get a prescription for, and comes with far more warnings about its use since it is pure meth. I've never tried it, nor have I ever had a doctor recommend it.

The doctor who I was seeing when I was first diagnosed with ADHD explained the differences between Adderall and meth by saying "Adderall is like a bright line painted on the ground helping remind you of where to go. Meth is like riding a bullet train. It'll lock you in tight and take you for a ride, hurtling at full blast whether you want to be a part of it or not until you and everything you love shakes to pieces and you die. And it'll tell you it's fun while it's happening."

I had a friend who'd been addicted to meth and is in recovery say "Adderall is like taking a comfortable stroll around the block, while Meth is like travelling to the moon and back. Yeah, they're both 'getting you somewhere', but they're not remotely the same activity."

> what is the point of re-starting this now I've gone through the hardest part of getting off it?

For me, the point of re-starting would be because I have ADHD.

I've had to jump through the same stupid hoops, even going without for months, and I can say that the single hardest thing for me is not having the meds.

I’m currently renting a new Ford F-150 ICE truck and all of its UI is controlled through the enormous touch screen. There are physical buttons too, but they’re just remote inputs to the central UI. It also has a video display behind the steering wheel, where half the display is dominated by a menu, and gauges are displayed on either side of the menu. You can barely see the speedometer.

I own a Tesla Model 3, and have ranted about how awful its touchscreen only control is bad for ages, but the Ford is significantly worse. Just today, the truck’s UI bugged out in such a way that half the exterior lights were blinking, while a period bell sound would blast every few seconds. A message on the screen complained that the car “needed to be running to…” with the rest cut off by a nondescript grey square.

It's fair to say that I introduced the idea of "race" into this conversation. That wasn't a fair assumption for me to make. The only thing it says about me, however, is that I've seen a lot of anti immigration arguments made that were actually just people being racist.

That said, and to be perfectly clear - I'm not trying to find a reason to argue with you. I'm trying to understand what it means to "spend $800k on US health care as a Canadian."

Normally I'd shrug and move on at this point, but frankly, it's seems a bit crazy to suggest that you, a Canadian, spent $800k on US health care because of immigration. You were the one who spent the money. Why not make it crystal clear how and why that happened?

Are you saying immigration caused you to spend $800k for US based health care, as a Canadian?

No appeals to thought exercises either. You're the authority on this. Tell HN how this isn't just some convoluted xenophobic rant.

Shop around? In the US, that's not really a thing. Your choices are very much restricted by the health insurance you have. Some health insurance plans are better. Mine is pretty good by US standards, and it still has all sorts of restrictions on what's covered, and by which health care facility.

Even with my insurance, I would go bankrupt if I was at a US hospital every 2-4 weeks for years.

This describes me pretty well. With a team in place to clear the path and keep me working on the correct big problem, I can move mountains. Without that team I just find or invent big problems to solve.

With a good team, results are almost assured, but without, useful results can often just be a coincidence.

My brother and a cousin both worked at different rental car companies, and I can assure you - they are not well maintained. My cousin worked at Enterprise, and he said they'd buy fleets of cars, run them until they had any failure, then sell them at auction. He was a mechanic, and I remember being gobsmacked when he said "the only fluid I ever put in a vehicle was windshield wiper fluid."

My brother has told me similar stories, though I can't recall specifics at the moment. Most were similar to my cousin's stories, the theme being "as mechanics, we didn't do anything except make sure there was air in tires and wiper fluid."

I think the companies they worked for probably knew what they were doing too. Most cars made within the last 20 years can go a hell of a long way without an oil change and still function (which isn't me saying that "function" means the same thing as "work well long term"). Rental car companies know when to sell them before they stop functioning.

With the super charger network in the United States, renting a Tesla isn't all that bad of an idea. I've taken very long trips in my Model 3, with a lot of unplanned wandering, so I know it's possible. That's not to say it's the same as when you're doing that sort of thing in an ICE. More options for refueling means less stress when you're dealing with unknowns.

But road tripping isn't bad either - at least with a very minimal amount of planning. On my most recent one trip, we could still make room for spontaneity. It just changed when and where it happened. We'd start the drive by first finding a super charger that was about as far as we wanted to go that day, then explore the map for routes that seemed interesting and had chargers along the way, making sure to arrive with about 20-25% charge each time. Worked great, and we were able to explore and not feel "trapped" by the route or anything. The closest call we had was when we arrived with about 5% charge once, and that was due to a headwind and elevation gain we hadn't anticipated.

Come to think of it, I once ran out of gas on a road trip for not doing this exact same sort of exercise. I had assumed there'd be services along the leg we picked, and we actually ran out of gas about 10 miles away from the nearest gas station. I had to hitch hike in blasting cold wind for about 2 miles, then pay the gas station employee's brother to drive me back to my car. For 10 miles, all that guy could talk about was "women with fat butts." I haven't thought about that experience for 2 decades probably, so, thanks? I guess.

My household of 5 adults maxes out a gigabit connection routinely. Streaming video, cloud based gaming, video calls, downloading game updates, backing things up to cloud storage. It adds up. I anticipate some might argue "that's not right" or "that's not possible, your network is wrong" - all I can say is that it happens and that it'd be less likely to happen with a 10gbps connection.

UTOPIA frustrates me.

I live in a part of Utah where Xfinity is the only gigabit option. Despite a huge number of the UTOPIA providers claiming to serve my area, none of them actually do. My home is in a stupid weird bandwidth dead zone, with 10Gbps options available all around me. The house across the street from me has Google Fiber, yet Google Fiber won't install it at mine a mere 50ft away. I'd be a lot more upset if my Xfinity connection wasn't rock solid. It provides the exact advertised speeds, and in the 5 years I've had it, it's gone down maybe once. Still, I want 10Gbps. It's maddening.

Can you point to any evidence of these "under the table agreements" or is that speculation?

I'm not the GP, but I can tell you how I felt: WTF.

The Tesla Supercharger network is by the far the best thing about the car. There was a period of time when I was doing some very long trips in my Model 3 - dozens of cross country trips over the course of about 2 years. I never once encountered a Tesla charger that didn't just work. Never. We're talking hundreds of charging sessions.

The non-Tesla chargers? I learned real quick that they work only about 20% of the time. They're either broken, won't accept payment, require apps that are too old to work on modern phones, etc, etc. That's even if they're there. About a third of the time, the chargers that should be there aren't.

I honestly don't know how non-Tesla owners do it today. Does Rivian have a good charging network?

Kind of in the same boat. The car I own is rock solid, and the one mobile repair I needed was done within hours of me having put in the request.

The guy also repaired something else he spotted, which I appreciated, but it got me thinking about how the people who put my car together will never know about that there's something they might be able to fix before cars ever roll off the line. The guy said "I see these on every car I service, and just hit 'em. I don't bother with paperwork," when I asked if he'd add a line item for the secondary repair.

It's things like this where I think Tesla stumbles. The repair guys shrug didn't sell confidence - it shrank it for me. If they're brushing off the little stuff, what else don't they care about? It just felt sloppy.

To be fair though, it's about 5% that, and 95% Musk that turn me off of Tesla right now. I live in a very "red" state, and a stranger in the parking lot the other day barked out "how's it feel to be Musk's bitch." Words don't hurt, sure, but the guy might have had a point.

I bought a used Tesla before things got crazy during the pandemic, and for a while there was certain my next car would again be a Tesla.

Lately though, despite knowing it's not 100% rational, I simply can't. If Musk were out of the picture, maybe I'd be a customer again, but because he's involved, I won't even entertain it. Again, not 100% rational. Real, non-Musk people bust ass there and made a car I really enjoy owning and using daily.

But there's a non zero chance that Musk fully loses his marbles, takes Tesla private, and bricks everyone's Teslas overnight over some petty slight to his ego. Likely, I doubt it. Possible? Yes.

Who said it was a resignation of protest?

The GP did it for themselves.

United States. Every 6 months, mandatory courses exactly as GP described. If you refuse, you don't have a job. This is so absolutely normal for most tech and finance companies, and has been for years, that I'm utterly astonished that you believe the GP is making it up. Hell, even my fast food working niece has to do these courses!

Assuming the controls are the same as the Model 3, you can use the lever on the steering column to shift into neutral. It's not a mechanical solution, but it is doable without using the touchscreen.

Edit: just out of curiosity I went to look at photos of the Cybertruck interior. No levers on the steering column. WTF. That alone would be a deal breaker for me.

I have the original manuals describing how to rip using a radial arm saw. The blade is set at the level of your stomach and mere inches away from a spinning blade as you walk a sheet of plywood along it. There are so many ways for that situation to go wrong, and so few ways to make that situation safe. I have a beast of a radial arm saw, and I set it up to rip out of curiosity, and it would be insane to ever do it that way. It will cut your guts wide upon if you so much as slip.

And when that saw bites, and comes at you with enough force to be too much for you to react to. If parts of you are in the way, it'll rip right through them as it punches you in the jaw.

I wrote a programming book back when tech books were a thing you had to go physically buy from a physical store (more than 20 years ago now). The publisher sent advanced royalties, which was money that was mine, free and clear (it wasn't a small amount either - certainly enough to compete with a full time salary for similar time commitment and knowledge/skills needed). I wouldn't see any more royalties until I'd sold enough to equal what my advance was. If I never sold enough, then I wouldn't see any new money - the original advance was still mine.

I did end up seeing royalty checks, though not until the book was translated from English to Italian. For some reason, it sold comparatively well in Italian, pushing me over the threshold to earn royalities. The one actual royalty check I saw for my book was a grand total of $0.02. I never cashed the check and keep it in a desk drawer somewhere.

I lost my dad to cancer. I was very much furious with cancer while being well aware of the irrationality of feeling that way. Still am, and it's been a few years. It's easy to be furious at cancer, and the pure random destructive wastefulness of it.

And if the satellites were represented as panda bear emojis?

I wonder if a fine for not paying an entry fee counts as a debt...

Not all of us do, bro.

Do you happen to still have that email? I'd like to search my inbox for anything similar, and would love some snippets to search for.

Edit: I asked this before the parent commenter included the contents of the email. Thanks parent commenter!