My Pixel can take more than one eSIM. I was not aware that this is not standard by now.
I am still with Google Fi since I was traveling a lot abroad. But now I am back in the US and see that there are much cheaper plans. Is google fi still worth it?
It seems very expensive compared to going with something like Visible or US Mobile (both get prioritized Verizon data these days) and adding eSIMs as required abroad.
Is it? I always thought the uttermost definition of "Free speech" is that you have the right to have a stupid, ugly or wrong opinion? And as long as you don't violate any ToS (e.g. Hackernews, as a private enterprise or organization) or laws (kill XYZ type of people) you are within the rights of "free speech".
Musk's version of "free speech" should be in quotations. Twitter was banning accounts, even Paul Graham's, for saying "This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.”
You can only have a stupid, ugly or wrong opinion so long as Musk shares it. Luckily Musk is uniquely dumb, so that covers most awful takes you can have, perhaps giving the perception of free speech.
"Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?"
I don't know, but has anyone tried using Tinder in the US recently? Just scammers, crazies, wackos and strange people - if you can get a match. Tinder has gotten totally useless, in fact, it has become a marketplace for lemons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Your chance of finding a decent date would be bigger on a Hire a dog walker app or hire a cleaner app. Some years ago, I was told that Couch Surfing is a dating app. Kind of.
I think the most straight forward dating app would be the one for "one night stands" because both people know exactly what they want but then again you would need to demand STD checks for all users perhaps on a monthly basis. This is just my humorous thought experiment idea.
At a time I was thinking with a buddy (and someone from HN) to make an up where you (speak women) can only date me and my friends. For men it would be invitation only.
I remember a blog post of an MD or psychologist about Russian/Soviet psychotropic drugs that are not used or unknown in the west and used as an analogy that if Russia had found new elements in the periodic table, and we would not use them.
It might be worth considering that until very recently, Russia's military was definitely supremely capable and on-par with NATO.
Russia lies. About everything. And culturally Russians have been immersed in a narrative that they're the absolute best in the world at everything, that all good ideas were originally Russian ideas (see how the narrative of LK-99 started getting modified before anything was verified).
So do they have processes or techniques not used in the West? Sure it's possible: but it's also far more likely that the reason we don't use them is that the actual investigation of their effectiveness can't reproduce the results.
Because no one looks up the clinical studies: they just repeat the fun narrative about big mysterious super-technology from behind the Iron Curtain. Which itself was essentially an invention of interest groups looking for funding in the West (i.e. there's was never a "missile gap" the US was going to lose).
Like as noted here: you remember the story, but not any actual specific drugs or processes? Why?
> but it's also far more likely that the reason we don't use them is that the actual investigation of their effectiveness can't reproduce the results.
Or, passing a novel approach through FDA, who are previously not familiar with it, is so prohibitively expensive that nobody wants to invest in it. And since it already has prior art, it's probably also not patentable so you can't even get back the money after you get the approval. Unless such drug can make billions as generic - which is quite rare - there's no point in investing in it, even if it works.
"It might be worth considering that until very recently, Russia's military was definitely supremely capable and on-par with NATO."
I think Russia was not on-par with NATO after it collapse, at least not in conventional warfare. They missed the electronic revolution in warfare (See US-IRAQ Gulf War I). But they are now back on par, possibly better. Their jamming, air defense and rockets are top-notch, possible better than NATOs. They can disrupt our GPS System, we can't disrupt theirs since it is much younger, speak better.
As a comparison: Germany had 3000 tanks during the cold war. Now they have 300, 200 operational. Russia looses so many tanks every month, and actually builds 100-200 new ones every month. Germany had ammunition for two days of warfare. After they gave some to Ukraine, they have ammunition for one day left.
Russia has been underestimated. They are back and their future looks pretty good, even with a dubious leader. They won their war:
They have energy, they are not overpopulated, they have fewer problems with immigration. In fact, they're even looking for immigrants: https://movingtorussia.ru/ru
In Germany too. Without Russian Energy their manufacturing heavy country will deindustrialize.
At the same time, Russia is actively trying to replace the US Dollar as the world reserve currency, together with BRICS+. If successful, this will have a tremendous impact on the US.
I am not a Putin troll, and I hope that I am wrong. But the future has the nasty habit of taking unexpected turns.
> As a comparison: Germany had 3000 tanks during the cold war. Now they have 300, 200 operational. Russia looses so many tanks every month, and actually builds 100-200 new ones every month.
New production is 10 tanks a month at best, which is indeed how many Ukraine destroys sometimes in a day. The rest are refurbishments of rapidly declining USSR's stock without anything to replace it. I think it would be appropriate to call it Soviet Union's last stand.
> But they are now back on par, possibly better. Their jamming, air defense and rockets are top-notch, possible better than NATOs.
That is a wild stretch considering that Russian navy has run away from Crimea at the risk of getting sunk in entirety, Russian air force cannot come even within a hundred kilometers of Crimea without getting shot down, and ground forces are regularly hammered by drone and missile strikes, all while Ukraine has less of everything and is under severe restrictions what it can do with military aid provided to them. I cannot imagine any major NATO country in such a poor position that they cannot fly airplanes over the territory they hold. Claiming victory in such position - as you do - would be downright ridiculous.
Russia doesn't produce any new tanks, not since the dozen or so T-14s. Remanufactured T-90s are probably close to 10/month while refurbishing t55 and t62 are at 100-200/month.
They have not "won the war". Not by any stretch. That's just a pundit's plainly ideology-driven projection.
The fact that this author chose to call their book The Defeat of the West, and that its main thesis is that this defeat is due to the “vaporisation of Protestantism" should give one serious pause.
Perhaps not the best source to turn to for a serious, impartial military analysis.
"Perhaps not the best source to turn to for a serious, impartial military analysis."
Fair point. But it is from Emmanuel Todd. Who the f. is Emmanuel Todd?
"Todd attracted attention in 1976 when, at age 25, he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, based on indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates: La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere)."
It doesn't matter who he is, or what he said when he was 25.
His perspective this time around is plainly warped, and his analysis is just as plainly flawed, given the current reality of what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. You can tell that all by yourself, without having to take some supposed visionary's word for it.
That's what happens when people get lucky early in their careers. Sadly, it tends to go to their head.
What’s currently going on in Ukraine is they are slowly losing a war of attrition that eventually their allies will lose interest in funding.
We don’t have to like that outcome to see that it’s inevitable and has been from the very start.
One entirely possible outcome I haven’t seen discussed much is Poland turning on the Ukrainian rump state once Russia finishes annexing the ethnic Russian east.
The current situation can only be regarded as a stalemate. In the service to which Russia is devoting 10 percent of its GDP, while Western countries are spending 1 percent.
We don’t have to like that outcome to see that it’s inevitable and has been from the very start.
It's not at all inevitable. Russia has lost many of its optional wars of aggression and foreign intervention, in the past.
Putin will also be dead or starting to lose his marbles in a few years, and Russia's overall prospects for stability (even if there were no war at all) do not look particularly good after that.
> At the same time, Russia is actively trying to replace the US Dollar as the world reserve currency, together with BRICS+. If successful, this will have a tremendous impact on the US.
Weird analogy. The USSR/Russia did discover new elements, and while there was a certain amount of arguing over names (as it wasn't always clear who discovered them first), there was no "not using" them because they were Russian. That isn't how science works.
That’s the point of the analogy. Even though scientists in the USSR discovered certain elements, the US did not refuse to “use” them. But for pharmaceutical compounds like bromantane, this isn’t the case. An anxiolytic stimulant discovered and approved in Russia, it cannot be prescribed in the US.
"In 1996, it was encountered as a doping agent in the 1996 Summer Olympics when several Russian athletes tested positive for it, and was subsequently placed on the World Anti-Doping Agency banned list in 1997 as a stimulant and masking agent.[10][42]"
who cares what a blog post of an MD or psychologist says? If a new element had use, of course we would use it. Are you seriously telling me that if they discovered copper, we won't use copper?
Maybe a small batch that was never meant to be used by scammers. For exhibition at trade fairs of for photographs? Then one dude might have thought, why not try to sell them, make a quick buck.
A lawyer told me, this is how you scam people. Mainly Medical Doctors. Pitch an investment to them. They don't bite. Then mention, that they will save taxes with this investment, and they will say: Where do I have to sign?
Yep - This really is just a random number problem.. it is only interesting in the sense that Pi is something that has been captivating in public math perception. Any random number would have the same characteristics..
It is however something fun to do in a homelab outside of the normal learning and playing around, and that has merit for me. Hobbies are hobbies in part because of the interest, joy and appreciation they drive.
In one sense you're right. The set of normal numbers has measure 1 so if you choose a real number randomly it will be normal and have the same properties.
In another sense you're very wrong. The set of uncomputable numbers also has measure 1. So while there are lots of normal numbers Pi belongs to a pretty exclusive club of numbers we can actually look at.
It's not a particularly deep result but the fact that the set of computable numbers is countable will never not make me existential. Every number that we can actually express, that we will ever know, is no bigger than the whole numbers.
Generate a random Cauchy sequence. One trivial way to do this is to output a random string of digits. It's not perfect, but it works. Approximately 0% of random Cauchy sequences will be computable, so long as your random number generator doesn't have self-correlations.
Would this not require generating an infinite number of random numbers which you can not do? Or can you actually generate a random Cauchy sequence from a finite set of random numbers?
"which you can not do" is an interesting assertion. In some sense it's trivially true, of course. Generating infinite random numbers would take infinite time. In fact, I'm quite happy to say that approximately 0% of real numbers can exist, for that reason.
But in contrast to that, I'm also happy to grant the existence of constructions with countably infinite length when discussing theories outside of computability. So in that context, is it possible to generate an infinite string of random numbers? Well, it is so long as you believe you can generate any amount random numbers at all. Just repeat the process, whatever it is.
Is that a reasonable thing to believe? That's probably a philosophical question at this point. I'm certainly not equipped to answer it. But assuming it is possible allows for some interesting math, which I support for its own sake.
This is all sort of reminiscent of a mathematician friend's stance on the axiom of choice. If you were to tell them a vehicle is only guaranteed to not explode by the axiom of choice, they wouldn't use it. On the other hand, assuming the axiom of choice is true leads to some useful math, even if it's sort of sketchy ontologically. It's a lot like programming. Sometimes you can't fix the bugs in the underlying system and you just code around them to get your stuff working.
We were talking about somewhat different things, you meant doing it mathematically, sure, no problem, pick an infinite random sequence, I understood the question to mean how to do it in practice.
Actually I had something even stronger in mind, being able to pass the generated number around. For pi I can have a program that I can pass around and that will give everyone access to all the digits of pi, in base 16 we can even have random access to all the digits.
For generating a random Cauchy sequence things are not that easy. Locally I can just use a true random number generator - in case such a thing exists - and generate all the digits I am interested in on demand, storing them in case I have to look at a previously generated digit again. But I can not easily pass that number around, only the digits I have already generated. We would need a shared database where everyone can share all the generated digits.
Or I could try to replace the true random number generator with a pseudo random number generator, then I could just pass the seed around. Everyone would have to either agree how the sequence of random numbers is mapped to the sequence of digits or we would have to use a seekable random number generator. But this raises the question whether using a [specific] pseudo random number generator would still yield a normal number.
Let's say we knew we had a normal number, say we could prove pi is normal. Then the set of sequences defined by the decimal expansion of pi starting at the nth place for all n in the natural numbers would be uniformly random over all decimal expansions. I'm going this route because it in theory allows us to define each sequence by virtue of a single number rather than an infinite sequence of randint(0, 9). This I think would be our best case if it were possible. But you would have to select a number uniformly in the range [0, inf) which... you can't.
We actual know some normal numbers [1] but they seem to all be synthetic. I would guess they have a lot of local correlation because of the way they are constructed and the comment I responded to explicitly mentioned no self-correlations - not sure what exactly that means - but it probably indicates that being a normal number is not a strong enough condition for using its digits as a sequence of random digits.
Yeah, it looks really normal. If "it looks about right" is convincing then I guess there a bunch of professions you need to avoid, and mathematics is one of them.
We do not have, and perhaps will never get, proof that Pi is normal.
I am still with Google Fi since I was traveling a lot abroad. But now I am back in the US and see that there are much cheaper plans. Is google fi still worth it?
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