Yeah I've had great success sharing numpy arrays this way. Explicit sharing is not a huge burden, especially when compared with the difficulty of debugging problems that occur when you accidentally share things between threads. People vastly overstate the benefit of threads over multiprocessing and I don't look forward to all the random segfaults I'm going to have to debug after people start routinely disabling the GIL in a library ecosystem that isn't ready.
I wonder why people never complained so much about JavaScript not having shared-everything threading. Maybe because JavaScript is so much faster that you don't have to reach for it as much. I wish more effort was put into baseline performance for Python.
> I wish more effort was put into baseline performance for Python.
There has been. That's why the bytecode is incompatible between minor versions. It was a major selling(?) point for 3.11 and 3.12 in particular.
But the "Faster CPython" team at Microsoft was apparently just laid off (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mdboom_its-been-a-tough-coupl...), and all of the optimization work has to my understanding been based around fairly traditional techniques. The C part of the codebase has decades of legacy to it, after all.
Alternative implementations like PyPy often post impressive results, and are worth checking out if you need to worry about native Python performance. Not to mention the benefits of shifting the work onto compiled code like NumPy, as you already do.
> I wonder why people never complained so much about JavaScript not having shared-everything threading. Maybe because JavaScript is so much faster that you don't have to reach for it as much. I wish more effort was put into baseline performance for Python.
This is a fair observation.
I think a part of the problem is that the things that make GIL less python hard are also the things that make faster baseline performance hard. I.e. an over reliance of the ecosystem on the shape of the CPython data structures.
What makes python different is that a large percentage of python code isn't python, but C code targeting the CPython api. This isn't true for a lot of other interpreted languages.
> I wonder why people never complained so much about JavaScript not having shared-everything threading. Maybe because JavaScript is so much faster that you don't have to reach for it as much. I wish more effort was put into baseline performance for Python.
Nobody sane tries to do math in JS. Backend JS is recommended for situations where processing is minimal and it is mostly lots of tiny IO requests that need to be shunted around.
I'm a huge JS/Node proponent and if someone says they need to write a backend service that crunches a lot of numbers, I'll recommend choosing a different technology!
For some reason Python peeps keep trying to do actual computations in Python...
"I wonder why people never complained so much about JavaScript not having shared-everything threading"
Mainly cause Python is often used for data pipelines in ways that JS isn't, causing situations where you do want to use multiple CPU cores with some shared memory. If you want to use multiple CPU cores in NodeJS, usually it's just a load-balancing webserver without IPC and you just use throng, or maybe you've got microservices.
Also, JS parallelism simply excelled from the start at waiting on tons of IO, there was no confusion about it. Python later got asyncio for this, and by now regular threads have too much momentum. Threads are the worst of both worlds in Py, cause you get the overhead of an OS thread and the possibility of race conditions without the full parallelism it's supposed to buy you. And all this stuff is confusing to users.
I have been receiving regular spear phishing calls from these guys, or someone who bought the leaked data, with classic tactics like claiming that I need to confirm a potentially fraudulent transaction. They speak perfect English with an American accent, sound very friendly, and have knowledge of your account balance. Thankfully on the first call I realized it was a scam right away, and Google's call screening feature takes good care of the rest. Wish I could forward them to Kitboga[1].
I guess they didn't have as much luck as they wanted scamming Coinbase's customers, and once they had their fun they decided to try extorting Coinbase themselves.
If you had any significant assets on Coinbase at any time prior to this breach, spear phishing is the least of your worries.
Coinbase not only leaked your full name and address, they also gave up your balances, your transaction history, and images of your government identification.
People with "significant" crypto balances are being assaulted on the street and in their own homes, and family members are being kidnapped for ransom.
"Significant" in this case can be $10k or less.
Until now, your best defense secrecy. Never talk about crypto in public in any way that could be traced to your real-world identity.
Thanks to Coinbase that defense is now gone.
The bad guys can see who has ever had a significant balance on Coinbase (even if they don't right now), whether that balance was sold for cash and how much, or if you've ever transferred tokens off the exchange to a self-custody wallet.
Now the bad guys know who's worth kidnapping for ransom and where you live. For most people, a Google search of your name and home address turns up the names of family members who would would also be lucrative targets for kidnapping and threats of violence.
Coinbase will never be forced to reimburse all the damage they've done because the true cost would bankrupt the company.
"They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto and Got Caught Within a Month. How luxury cars, $500,000 bar tabs and a mysterious kidnapping attempt helped investigators unravel the heist of a lifetime."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/magazine/crybercrime-cryp... (gift article)
The parent post was someone literally hosting a crpyto conference, and this one was someone who runs a crypto company. A sibling story describes the father of a 'cryptocurrency influencer.' Is there any evidence of real crime happening which was targeted at Coinbase leak data, or is this just vibes
If you're kidnapping a generic very rich person, how are you expecting them to pay the ransom, a big burlap sack of cash? There's a lot that can go wrong there. A bank transfer or other conventional financial instrument? Few criminals would be comfortable with that approach. (John Grisham novels, and 'Archer's beloved bearer bonds, aside, it's virtually impossible to make this untraceable). Magic internet money is presumably far less messy.
Also, a decent proportion of crypto-millionaires came by their riches in... not entirely above-board ways (in particular, securities fraud; all those pump and dump scamcoins are paying off for _someone_), and may be reluctant to involve the authorities. And the crypto industry as a whole is unusually comfortable with extortion; hacked crypto companies paying a kind of bounty to hackers to get the rest of the funds back is a common thing.
> They can use their bank account to buy crypto and then pay the ransom.
This is actually more difficult than it sounds. Most banks and crypto exchanges won't allow a person to make meaningfully large crypto transactions without some account history.
“Hey, cryptocurrency exchange, I, a random rich person, would like to, having never interacted with you before, buy a million dollars of bitcoin and transfer it out. Today, please.”
Eh, million dollars would not raise a single eyebrow from an exchange side. Your bank, maybe, will have some questions about the transaction, but the things they can do to prevent you spending your money are thankfully fairly limited.
How long do you think it takes to create an account, get your KYC documents verified, get your trading and withdrawal limits raised to a million or more, transfer funds from your brokerage account, buy tokens and then re-verify when you try to transfer the tokens out of the exchange?
You'd be lucky to complete this in less than a week.
My experience with banks in UK / EU is that they will bother you for much smaller amounts than 1M. I had banks bother me for 10k transfers and other banks completely ignore me for 100k transfers.
It happens with cash sometimes but people are limited to the amount they can get out of an ATM where with crypto you can force someone to hand over all their wealth with a few keystrokes.
But hey, at least by being forced to give crypto exchanges all our personal details we're all super protected from the four horsemen: money laundering, drugs, terrorism and pornography.
I think that the right lesson to learn here is not "I should store my money with a company I can't trust not to advertise where I live, but without telling them where I live ".
> People with "significant" crypto balances are being assaulted on the street and in their own homes, and family members are being kidnapped for ransom. "Significant" in this case can be $10k or less.
I wonder why, select a person completely at random and by median you'll get just as much from what they have sitting in their checking account. Select a nicer area for an order of magnitude more. That's not encouragement to go assault people in their homes or kidnap families... just confusion.
Yeah, but banks and the normie monetary system has a lot more safeguards in it when it comes to account transfers. Or at least, they appear to have them.
I tried to use Coinbase a few months ago to pay for something, and I couldn't even make a transaction because it was deemed suspicious, and my account got locked or something.
Someone with a lot of cryptocurrency in Coinbase is also quite likely (at least relative to the average person) to have lots of on-chain cryptocurrency, too, though.
The median person does not have $10k sitting in a checking account that they can easily withdraw. My gut feeling is that the threat of kidnapping is a lot more serious in some countries. The US maybe not so much.
> The median person does not have $10k sitting in a checking account that they can easily withdraw.
That's true, finding someone with 10k is not as easy as picking a person at random, but it is as easy as driving to the right parking lot and picking a person at random.
Pulling $10k out of the global banking system by physical coercion in a way that isn't reversible and won't get you caught is hard problem, you might as well attempt to rob the bank instead. That's why most of the "successful" criminals in that space use social engineering and scamming where the victim is a unwitting participant rather than kidnapping someone.
With crypto, no bank or other middleman involved, it's like stealing physical cash/gold/diamonds from someone, if you know they have it in their possession, so violence can be a lot more successful at coercing a change of possession.
Good point, perhaps the lower $ examples are about other countries where that may be a lot more than median transactional account holdings and maybe that concern is part of why folks were using crypto holdings.
Bank transactions are reversible, crypto transactions are not.
Also, people do point guns in people’s faces and force them to pay them via Venmo or Cashapp. Google ‘Venmo robbery’ or ‘cashapp robbery’ for plenty of examples. Pointing a gun in someone’s face for $4M in crypto is a lot more lucrative.
Maybe they wouldn't be able to cover other planned expenses with said loss or something but the median (I intentionally avoid referring to "average" for reasons also mentioned in this article) amount American have access to in their transactional bank accounts is $8,000 according to the Federal Reserve: https://www.fool.com/money/research/average-savings-account-...
Someone else made a great mention though: Coinbase didn't just serve the US. For the vast majority of countries these amounts are more than the yearly disposable income of a typical household. From that angle the numbers in the stories make a bit more sense.
I checked my email to see if I received anything and, interestingly, I received an email from Coinbase on April 14 that they're updating the User Agreement. The new terms only apply to disputes initiated by me or Coinbase after May 15, 2025. Timing seems suspect.
Companies should seriously consider implementing GDPR even in the US, it certainly made taking data dumps of customer data a lot harder and certainly private images like Government IDs were encrypted on disk. I’m surprised at the lack of security if I’m honest, at Yahoo! almost nobody had access to prod user data.
Essentially you cannot trust Coinbase IMO, might move the few hundred dollars of BTC out of there :-)
> How does Coinbase protect data in transit and data at rest?
> Coinbase employs a range of technical and organizational measures to defeat efforts to intercept, surveil, or otherwise access without authorization data in transit. For instance, Coinbase encrypts all confidential data transfers to prevent interception or tampering of that data by unauthorized third parties.
Coinbase does business in the EU and thus, already has to comply with the GDPR. Moreover, the US also requires safeguards for sensitive customer information by financial services companies.
Yeah this is really frustrating, especially the way the EU commission keep coming up with workarounds that the court will almost certainly strike down.
The comment said "should be" which you glibly interpret as "should be going to jail based on the law" but could very easily be "the law should be such that this kind of negligence results in jail time".
I assume they mean that someone from the company going to prison for this would be a just outcome, not that a path to such an outcome exists today (it likely does not).
Only because of US law. It didn't have to be this way; the US wanted to destroy Bitcoin as a currency because it threatened their surveillance state, and they effectively have.
Btc whales want to destroy the dollar because it benefits them.
Neither the dollar or crypto are anything but social illusions, neither have an inherent right to exist.
It’s just people manipulating people. Such an intellectually dishonest forum to sit here and discuss meaningless layers of obfuscation.
The most important thing to any individual is enough other humans around their own life isn’t so hard. Specific humans, like those on this forum, are not essential.
You all can bleat on as hard as you want about the existence of crypto but it’s not an evenly distributed belief. And your individual value is non existent to the majority on the planet. No reason to prop up your hallucinations
Why do you see this as the fault of Coinbase? Do other companies somehow have employees that are immune to bribes and blackmail?
This is due to US Government KYC laws that forced Coinbase to associate government identification with all accounts. No crypto company required ID until they were forced to.
The US Government didn't provide high-volume, bulk access to this extremely sensitive information to contractors in foreign countries with no controls over their ability to mass-exfiltrate the data.
Coinbase is the entity that set up this dangerous system.
Coinbase did it because it was cheap for them, not because they were being trustworthy custodians of information that put their customers at risk.
Sure, yes, obviously every company's employees and contractors are vulnerable to bribes and blackmail. That's why a trustworthy, competent custodian would establish systems and controls to prevent bribed and blackmailed insiders from mass-exfiltrating information that could get their customers killed.
The fact that other companies manage to be trustworthy, competent custodians while Coinbase doesn't is not the fault of KYC.
Fair enough, and it does sound like they had limits given that not all customer data was exfiltrated but those limits were probably far too high at tens of thousands affected.
There is no valid reason why Coinbase or any other financial services company should ever be excepted from AML/KYC laws. If anything the laws ought to be even tighter to slow down financial flows to criminals and sanctioned entities.
It’s my biggest gripe. They can pretty accurately flag a number as Spam or Telemarketing but in the “Silence Unknown Callers” setting I can only silence every single unknown caller. I can’t silence every single number that’s not in my contacts. When the plumber calls to confirm he’s in route, my phone needs to ring. Stuff like that.
In the realm of Caller ID, a phone number may be "PRIVATE" (or "WITHHELD") or "UNKNOWN". An "UNKNOWN" Caller ID cannot display any name nor any number, because... they are not known to the switch.
Therefore, an unknown number that can be blocked/ignored by your phone or the app is one that doesn't support Caller ID's name or number functions. It doesn't have anything to do with who's in your Contacts app, because of course those consist of known names and known numbers.
There is a defined type “Unknown” which I think you’re describing but it’s Not exactly how the iOS feature works. It says let’s through those in your contacts or who you’ve had recent conversations with and Siri suggestions. It’s basically a dumb proxy for letting through people you might actually want to talk with. Except sometimes you don’t know who/where/when those calls are coming from and I haven’t spoken to them before.
it is super fucking easy. it has been a decade since I answered an unknown number. if plumber calls (and I dont have her/his number stored) it goes to voicemail. I then call known company number. The communication is always one-way, I call you. I never answer. You follow this one very simple rule and you good :)
Theres plenty of situations where this doesn't work. If you're called from a business central line and you don't know their extension you just call back and get the normal call tree which can take you forever to get through. Or if you're on the "cancellation list" for an appointment if they can't get through to you, they don't wait for you to call back, they just go on to the next person to schedule in their open slot.
Taxi cab dispatchers will do this for sure. They do callbacks to “confirm” your ride, especially when busy, because if you don’t answer, they simply drop your request on the sticky office floor.
this is a loss of business for them, not my problem. it is 2025, if they do not have map where i can track where they are etc.. imma not going to be using that service...
Glad it works for you, I’m not allergic to the phone like seemingly everyone else so I strive to minimize phone tag BS and would rather answer the calls I get and filter out known spam, it’s not rocket science it’s probably only 2 lines of code in the phone app
If call is spam and ignore spam option enabled, send call to voicemail.
That’s it, a simple line of code. Just make the option selectable and it’s done.
iphone has been enshittified for several years now, it seems apple engineers are not using their own phones any more. I can understand it - when you're a millionaire just from your corporate job you won't be a stressed power user of your own iphones.
It’s not that it got worse, this feature has just never been great. It just feels half baked , which I agree a lot of Apple software has been trending towards. That said, what has increased is the volume of spam calls. So the importance of this feature has also increased.
It’s sad because this seems like such a low hanging fruit for a big improvement. At some point in the relatively recent past, they added the indicator of the caller being a spammer or telemarketer. Seems like that would have been a good time to also enhance this filter but it seems nobody ever connected the dots on that one. Or if I’m being even more cynical, some engineer actually decided he’d rather everyone see his work on every incoming spam call instead of his work quietly improving everyone’s experience
No sane person would flaunt Apple secrecy in such a fashion whilst employed there.
>instead of his work quietly improving everyone’s experiBence
Laughable that you feel that Apple engineers have the capacity for this kind of desire in 2025. If they did, Xcode would be way better to use. They cant even quietly improve their own experience.
Whatever man, I'm not trying to shit on them like you want me to. I think adding this simple feature that is likely little more than a line or two of code is a night an day comparison to overhauling something like Xcode to meet your definition of what "better" means
Oh man. They start at 7AM and end around 4-5ish PM. I was hoping the war between Pakistan and India would make these stop. Jk obv. Nobody likes wars. But other than Tmobile are there similar methods for different providers? It can get so annoying. I did restrict calls from known numbers only.
Yeup, I finally broke down went from Android -> IPhone 16 Pro. I like a lot about Apple's personal security policies for their consumers vs Google, but damn, I miss google's automatic call spam detection and management. All day long my Apple phone rings, and I just have to ignore the calls.
Verizon (and I assume many other US carriers) offer junk call identification which your iPhone can block if you have ”Silence Junk Callers” toggled in Settings > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification.
Unfortunately blocking all unknown calls is the only way to sanity. Otherwise we're talking 6-9 calls coming in ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.
The calls are coming from new numbers, across multiple area codes. A few months ago I would have advised using Begone (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/begone-spam-call-blocker/id159...) to block but that only worked since these calls were isolated to blocks of area codes that were pretty safe to block like 888-XXX-XXXX, but now ZERO of these calls are using a fixed area code that would be relative safe to block.
They could also just easily enhance the feature right? It’s an extra if statement in the code. I get enough calls that it’s not practical to constantly edit a setting that’s like this. There’s nothing else in the settings app I change regularly, it’s mostly set and forget.
It’s much better to just silence every spam call manually instead of having to go into voicemail, listen , decide if I need to respond, hope that I’m acting quickly enough that the other person answers when I ring them back, etc. i imagine this works for a lot of people. But if you get enough calls, or get urgent calls for any reason, it’s not ideal.
For those that can’t imagine the use cases. Consider you are primary contact for your elderly parent. If they fall in the middle of the night you might be getting a call from any random number. Do not disturb isn’t an option and sometimes the EMS guys will call you from their personal cell phone. Even some services like home security will call from random numbers. If ask a plumber to come over, some random technician will call from their device to talk. If a potential client gets my number somehow, I’d prefer to answer versus them get my voicemail.
You have to also factor in that a lot of people don’t even like leaving voicemail so they don’t leave one and I’m left guessing if it mattered that
I need calls from unknown numbers (doctors, vendors, etc.) Pixel would flag spam calls and not ring, all the unknown-but-valid callers got through without issue.
Sometimes you need to answer calls from unknown numbers.
Google's call screening feature picks up the phone before it rings and asks the caller why they're calling. If they actually give a good reason, then it shows you the reason as text and you can decide whether to hang up on them or answer. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387
iPhone user here. I put on airplane mode unless I'm making or expecting a call. Otherwise, I make it clear that email is my primary form of communication.
Oh yeah I get the Microsoft account emails, and Instagram ones, randomly (I have an account but never use it). I'm pretty sure SMS 2FA is turned off on my Coinbase account, which is highly recommended.
> I have been receiving regular spear phishing calls from these guys, or someone who bought the leaked data, with classic tactics like claiming that I need to confirm a potentially fraudulent transaction.
And how long has this been at an increased level? Because i'm not buying the coinbase narrative that they thought this was a systemic issue until they were contacted by the 'cybercriminals'.
It started around the beginning of April, at the same time as I got an initial email from them about my account information being accessed. Which I'm thinking is probably the same breach as they're talking about here.
Scams have gotten better since AI. Most of the common spelling mistakes are gone.
I was looking through some phishing e-mails the other day out of curiosity and found a weird unicode character mistranslated. Immediately knew it was an artifact of bad translation. So they're not perfect, but they're damn good.
Because people who read the message and think it's professionally written despite the spelling errors have a large overlap with people who will fall for the scam, at least far enough that money is transferred.
Where was the number from? I received an impressive number of phonecalls attempt but thankfully I never answer to unknown numbers. With google call screen they hung up everytime so I assume its a scam.
Not sure what to say about that, I had an account with them, but I couldn't verify it, had email, phone and could be some sort of ID scanned - don't remember. Haven't used the account ever since and had nothing there, since January I have been getting regularly calls about my account being "compromised". This leak probably happened way earlier, because there was no way someone knew I had an account there and knew exactly the email I had with them.
I don't believe they did, and I also believe they have known about this issue for a long time, and they should have been required to disclose their mandatory 8k a lot earlier.
The "Important Notice" I got says "This included information related to your account". Also I got an email earlier on April 1 about a breach that sounds very similar if it's not the same one.
I see "We wanted to let you know that we detected activity suggesting that information related to your account may have been accessed in a way that did not align with our internal policies." in the email i got this morning
IMO RL can only solve "easy" problems. The reason RL works now is that unsupervised learning is a general recipe for transforming hard problems into easy ones. But it can't go all the way to solutions, you need RL on top for that. Yann LeCun's "cherry on top" analogy was right.
Interesting that this wasn't tested on ARC-AGI. Francois has always said he believed program search of this type was the key to solving it. It seems like potentially this approach could do very well.
Homeless people get free smartphones and free service in the US. Living in very rural areas is in fact a lifestyle choice. Not all choices need to be subsidized.
This kind of performative "empathy" people talk about in online forums is not true empathy. It's frequently the case that prioritizing this fake "empathy" results in bad outcomes. It saddens me when people use "empathy" to justify policy with strongly negative overall consequences. It's how you end up with, for example, the disaster zone that large chunks of San Francisco were before Lurie started cleaning up a few months ago. Or the deplorable state of our healthcare system.
You're bringing in all sorts of unrelated things here. The simple reality is that expecting a 70-year old to leave their entire life behind and move to the city just because of a relatively simple issue like this, is deeply and profoundly unemphatic. As is the general principle of not accepting that some people may want to choose a slightly different life from what you might choose for yourself. No one is asking the world here. These are small accommodations at best.
Nobody's asking them to leave their life behind! Talk about bringing in unrelated things! I'm saying we should recognize that lifestyle choices have consequences and that's OK. Not every consequence needs mitigation by third parties. Having to use a TOTP app and/or make a 20 minute trip into town to use some web services is not an unacceptable price to pay for the lifestyle choice of living in a remote area, and we shouldn't be vilifying people or branding them "devoid of empathy" for not prioritizing support for that use case over other, higher impact things they could do to improve their products.
People choosing to live in rural areas aren't freeloaders. Until they demand the rest of us subsidize them. The demand for subsidies is what makes a freeloader, not the lifestyle choice.
My original message was simply here to remind people that technical decisions we make have consequences on who can use our services.
You were the one introducing this vocabulary (as well as claiming everyone living there does it by choice). Now you try to move the debate again with people "demanding" stuff. None of this vocabulary or framing exists in the original article, or in mine.
Let me clarify the question: why do you insist on framing this debate in a way that makes a moral claim about people's character?
> Homeless people get free smartphones and free service in the US
Recently former homeless person here. The Republicans in Congress refused to renew the Lifeline program in 2023 and the replacement is objectively worse in every single way.
> Not all choices need to be subsidized.
Ah yes, being homeless, a choice. I hope it never happens to you.
Food doesn't come from remote mountainous areas. Farm fields may not have cell service but living way out there isn't required even for farmers. I grew up on a farm so it's funny when people on the internet try to educate me about farms as if I've never heard of them.
I must be imagining the farms that I pass in the mountains in the middle of nowhere when I go backpacking. Surely your argument isn't, "My farm was here, so it's impossible for other farms to be in different locales"?
The large trucks being loaded with crops for delivery elsewhere should suggest that it contributes to the greater food supply, yes. Further...
>I once...
My phrasing did not suggest "one time" (the phrase was "I pass", suggesting regularity), and it's not just one single farm, it's a few, and I've passed them many times. I have to agree with someone else[1] about your using vocabulary that others haven't introduced - I question whether or not a good faith discussion can be had because of that. Have a good one!
We should still be supportive of people who want to live in the mountains. I'd like to think that we as a society enable people to live how they want to live. Given that technology has allowed us to deploy broadband internet access pretty much anywhere, there is no good reason to deny them of e.g. web-based banking just because of some stupid SMS confirmation. Hardware 2FA keys are cryptographically superior AND usable by people in the mountains.
Google Fi can receive all SMS 2 factor messages on Wi-Fi including short codes. It doesn't even require that your phone is on, you can get them in any web browser on any device even if your phone is destroyed. One of my favorite features.
You can get service starting at $20 per month. Fi used to have good service in some mountain areas too, with US Cellular. Not sure what's going on with US Cellular right now though. Some kind of half acquisition by T-Mobile.
I have been living outside the United States for twelve years.
I always had problems with SMS until I got Google Fi. And that's a problem because, as the article here says, many banks insist on SMS these days. There are various services that give you a virtual number. But they always suffer from one of two problems: (1) VOIP numbers are 'blacklisted' by some banks for security reasons: they want a real cell phone number (2) I simply don't get SMSs in some cases some technical reason
Google Fi works everywhere. Even when there is no cell phone service: it will tunnel over WiFi.
Google shuts off the data on Fi after you've been outside the USA for a month. No problem, I'm happy to pay $25 a month for a 'dataless' connection that gives me SMS and voice.
>Google shuts off the data on Fi after you've been outside the USA for a month. No problem, I'm happy to pay $25 a month for a 'dataless' connection that gives me SMS and voice.
To be somewhat more specific: while I travel extensively and am in the US often, I am often outside of it for more than a month at a time, and it appears that Google will shut off data outside the US if you use data outside the US for too long. If you are using a different SIM for the primary data connection, it appears that they won't even if you have it enabled as a backup.
My comparison here is actually that I've never had it shut off. I'm not quite sure what the criteria are. I do have a friend who had it cut off after a few months of using it for all his data in the EU.
compared to prices for the rest of the world, you wouldn't want to use Fi for data anyway... just get a local or even "travel" esim and run with dual sims.
I’ve found that it’s easy to data-only eSIM package through an app store app such as Saily, but it’s harder to find a service that gives you a “real” phone number when traveling internationally. Any recommendations?
I don’t have direct experience, but I’ve heard about or seen the following online (there may be many other MVNOs). All of them are activated with an eSIM and they have WiFi calling, which means it’s a real US phone number as any other and you can make/receive calls and send/receive SMS as long as you’re connected to the internet via WiFi or through a data connection on your second SIM on the phone. If you wish, you can buy real roaming too, but that tends to be expensive.
* Tello
* Red Pocket
* Good to Go Mobile
If you’re looking for a real local phone number in the location you’re traveling to, then eSIM providers like Airalo can handle that (Airalo has “global plans” that support voice and SMS). Getting such a connection for voice and SMS, as compared to a data SIM alone, would be expensive. So you could get a data eSIM that works locally and use that for “WiFi” calling/SMS with the providers mentioned above.
The last time I checked if you wanted "cellphone is off" texting/voice (basically the old hangouts), you had to enable "fi syncing" which disabled rcs features. Is that still true? What url do you goto to do texts/voice? (i see hangouts.google.com redirects to google chat).
Yeah no it still disables RCS which is super lame now that iPhones finally support it. I hope Google gets around to fixing it someday. I'm not holding my breath. I'm just happy they didn't kill the feature when hangouts died. The URL changed, it's now https://messages.google.com/web/
Security-wise: True; but Android is a gigantic yet well-oiled ecosystem at this point, from silicon designers to manufacturers to vendors to developers, running on handhelds to TVs to wearables to gaming devices (including AR/VR consoles).
> shame that Chrome OS was subsumed by Android
ChromeOS had a decade but Google is wise focus on just one desktop platform. I don't think it should surprise anybody that a platform with 3bn users & 2mn odd apps won out.
Using android on a laptop with a keyboard and mousepad was always an awkward experience. It's kind of like trying to use an iPad as your main computing device. Similarly bad experience.
Similar with a keyboard and mouse with Android TV - I thought it would be useful for YouTube searches etc, the UI is so ill adapted to keyboard I gave up.
It's always funny charging my phone off the USB C for my monitor, nudging my mouse and seeing a pointer appear on the screen though.
Differently-shaped buttons and more swoopy animations are not what Wear OS needs. Wear OS needs better information density and more attention to detail in interaction design and implementation rather than appearance. The whole thing feels like it was designed in After Effects and implemented to spec with no user feedback in the process at all.
I continue to strongly prefer the Pebble UI after all these years. It just does a much better job with the basics like notifications and alarms. it's not even close.
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