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This is a regular fellowship. Nothing wrong with those, they can be government (assuming people are OK with this way to spend their taxes) or private. Those are pretty common. I was funded by a private fellowship for a year of my PhD; don't remember the details.

But as others have said, this has nothing to do with the UBI, as this is not universal. The main thing that makes this fellowship unusual, and not in a good way, is the fact that the selection criteria are shrouded in mystery.

That seldom works. Simple repeaters transmit the strongest signal they get and can be easily hijacked by a rogue ground transmitter. This is the main reason simple repeaters on orbit went out of fashion in the 1980s.

Fair, but there are so many things pushing the Bitcoin price up and down: approvals and rejections of various ETFs, tax law changes around the world, corporate adoption and lack thereof, successes and failures of L2 networks, etc. And each of those can cause comparable long-term movement in the BTC than tether's or altcoin's adoption or collapse.

As a long-term BTC holder my primary reason is protection against debasement. It is a volatile asset, historically with 50-80% drawdowns from time to time. But as long as I think it still serves as a hedge against debasement I am happy to hold a portion of my net worth it in.

Growing up, I have seen fiat go worthless twice in my life: once the government zeroed out previous money overnight, once it hyperinflated fiat by over 1000x in two years. An 80% temporary drop is peanuts compared to that.

> Reminder, if you're invested in crypto long term, you'd better say a prayer every night that Tether is actually backed by ~$180B of liquidity.

As a long-term holder of Bitcoin I do not see why I should lose any sleep due to Tether risks. Why should I care even if it de-pegs?

On the liquidation itself: leveraged bets gone wrong will get liquidated, whether the bets were on stocks, currencies, Treasuries, crypto or grain futures. BoJ, for example, regularly makes rapid large buys to shake out leveraged yen speculators. I do not see anything concerning or unusual with this week's crypto shakeout. My 2c.

> Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not.

I am not sure. Different people want different things. I ran a Hetzner cloud instance where I toss a simple webpage with locally hosted travel photos for friends and family. And a Jupiter server (with a very weak password) on the same instance for myself and any friend when we want something more powerful than a calculator.

And this messy, improperly organized, breaking all design patterns way works just fine for me. So I'm fine with a shack for personal communication and as a personal space. My 2c.

And later put it in an interstellar space, no less!

I bet that is correct. And not just for academics, it should be OK for an AWS employee to call AI investments a bubble or worse. As long as he clearly states that it is only his personal opinion.

I am not sure there is a strong societal pressure to be thin. Last several years, probably. But older generations, nor so much (see deities in any buddist temple). And there was enough time after food became abundant for the older generations health to tank if that diet was very bad for them. My 2c.

I am not sure there is a strong societal pressure to be thin. Last several years, sure. But older generations, nor so much (see deities in any buddist temple). And there was enough time after food became abundant for the older generations health to tank if that diet was very bad for them. My 2c.

I have read somewhere (on HN?) a hypothesis that such traditional diets pretty quickly wipe out genetic lines predisposed to diabetes, etc. And that the effect is not diet, it is genetics+diet.

Not sure if there is any truth in that.

AMD has great hardware, but its software still leaves a lot to be desired for AMD to be a major AI hardware player. It takes years of unwavering leadership focus and hundreds of millions (probably billions) of dollars to get the software that works well for AI users.

The role the software played to get NVIDIA from a run-of-the-mill video card manufacturer to the top dog in AI hardware with 4T market cap is often underappreciated. My 2c.

> After speaking with Russians living in there, day to day life hasn't been affected that much

Did you speak with folks from Moscow or St Petersburg or from different regions? Life in the top 2 cities is kept as normal as possible at all costs; that is part of the Putin's approach to handling the elites (you can keep living your comfortable lives as long as you stay out of politics).

But elsewhere the quality of life took a big hit. Even in second tier cities. At least that is what I am hearing. My 2c.

Using another pretext to target someone for their views is definitely a thing. This is not new (e.g., the Assange case) but its frequency is increasing.

I am going to offend both sides with what comes next (and curious how many downvotes it will attract), but I put only a small fraction of the blame for the increase in the above on the government which always wants to do this unless they feel a strong, popular pushback.

The real blame goes to the population that is happy to tolerate the government abuse of the laws as long as they think the blows are landing on their opponents. Silencing covid restriction protesters and BLM riots critics? Well, we are not defending antivaxxers and racists. Throwing out any idea of a due process in ICE raids? Well, we need to do something about the crime. And so on... Whereas 50 years ago, at least in the US, any jury would have thrown an attempt to break laws for a good cause out of court so the government would not even try to prosecute any of it.

In order to roll back government overreach we need to fight government overreach, even in cases where we strongly dislike the current target of that overreach. My 2c.

Freedom of speech is doing not great, but still OK in the US. The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.

What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push back against that. From de-monopolization to government mediators and arbitrage binding for companies (but not for the individuals so they can still sue), etc.

Walking through an unlocked door that has a sign "private property, do not enter", searching for sensitive information, finding it and exposing it surely could.

Or not, depending on how the party who owns what's inside that door feels. But if it feels he should be prosecuted, then hell yes, the state should do that. My 2c.

IMO it is better to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible for prototyping. Letting domain experts build what they have in mind themselves, on a shoestring, is a powerful ability.

Most such prototypes get tossed because of a flaw in the idea, not because they lacked professional software help. If something clicks the prototype can get rebuilt properly. Raising the barriers to entry means significantly fewer things get tried. My 2c.

I see belt and road as orthogonal to the above. This is an initiative focused on a mix of PR and economy. While there are likely many layers of the intent behind it, I think the main one is to establish resource access as well as access to the markets for China exports and enable the stable growth of the Chinese economy.

The success of the initiative still remains to be seen: it is definitely not a failure, but many things can derail it, both inside and outside of China. In either case I see very little desire from the China to throw its non-economic might around outside of what they consider to be part of the Greater China territorial area (Taiwan, South China and Philippine seas). My 2c.

China has many internal problems and is not looking for the world dominance, at least not in the medium term. It wants to continue building up its economy, not get involved in conflicts on the other side of the world. Rapid expansions lead to societal changes at home and is something China is really keen to avoid today. My 2c.

As a US citizen I wish Canada well. US needs serious competition and IMO the ideas of economic world group hugs, globalization benefiting everyone, etc. are no longer working. They may have been net positive initially, but are not anymore.

Unfortunately starting the rebalancing often requires a crisis. I hope the next one will lead to a world with several stronger, independent and competing clusters, not a weaker, beaten up version of the current setup.

He is saying that miles you get for cc purchases allow you to buy free airfare and hotels.

Although you can find cards that give you 1.5-2% back that you can use on travel or anything, as you please.

Undefined behaviors -- yes. But being able to trigger undefined behavior is not a huge foot gun by itself. Starting with good code examples means you are much less likely to trigger it.

Having a good, logical description of supported features, with a warning that if you do unsupported stuff things may break, is much more important than trying to define every possible action in a predictable way.

The latter approach often leads to explosion of spec volume and gives way more opportunities for writing bad code: predictable in execution, but instead with problems in design and logic which are harder to understand, maintain and fix. My 2c.

Are you willing to name the company? Shame them here. This sounds wrong.

I do not know what the details of the situation were, for example was the offer contingent on additional background checks that you failed or on something else, but if it was related to a US security clearance I would seriously consider filing a request for information -- they are required to tell you their findings.

It would probably be an interesting reading (unless one has a very thin skin) and I would do it just for fun, regardless of the pulled offer. My 2c.

It is not black and white. There is a continuum of difference between my whole life being discoverable by a targeted effort of a major state (for which there were always very few defenses) and "we have no privacy" world where my whole life is being easily seen by anyone: employers, coworkers, neighbors, potential dates, etc.

I think sliding down towards "I have no privacy" end of the spectrum is bad for both the citizens and the society. Stopping the this slide is a worthwhile goal. My 2c.

That would be a rare case where I would reach back for more information. Rescinding an offer is, in my book, a huge black mark against the company and I would consider shaming them in a blog post as well.

Was this your first polygraph? I never had one, but I heard that passing the first one for a high level ticket virtually always takes several tries.

Did they tell you that you passed the poly?

For a different perspective: the world today is not perfect, but when I compare the current state of the world with how our ancestors lived from the Roman empire to the last century I think my kids have a high chances to do much better than that average.

My direct ancestors lived through some harrowing times without losing their will to live and if they were alive today they would likely feel this is a great time to be alive. My 2c.

Agreed on both the definition of the optimal assessment and on the fact that the humans are bad at it. I actually think this (humans being bad at it) is good for the civilization as it helps people try things they would be too scared to do if they properly assessed all the potential outcomes with their probabilities.

In this definition I think virtually no one assesses the risk correctly. It is a human nature to overreact (post-factum) to an unlikely event to the extent that most languages have a dedicated saying ("having burned yourself on hot milk, one now blows on water" is the non-English version I heard as a kid).

No offense intended, but I also yours is not a good definition of "correctly assessing the risk". If it were followed, an extremely unlikely possibility of a horrible outcome would stop people from doing most optional things. For example, a risk of a horrible disease while on travel will lead to no travel.

Personalities differ and there are daredevils and scaredy cats that differ in pre-event risk assessments, but post (unlikely and traumatic) event assessment change is pretty universal. My 2c.

Not necessarily. Having a painful accident often leads people to a position of "even if I know a mishap is very unlikely I am not doing this again".

But truly realtime translation is rarely (never?) critical. For streamed media there is usually enough of a buffer to handle word order swaps without delay (although one can make contrived counter-examoles), and for human interactions that delay is likely less than normal human processing time.

One local pub may have a face scanner, the other may not and I am free to choose which one I go to without fear of reprisals. Refusing to follow a government mandate can land me in jail.