MassPikeMike

I see a lot of arguing over principles here in the comments, but few specifics. What kinds of items have actually disappeared from eBay since this went through? Baofengs? Meshtastic equipment? 10 meter "freeband" radios?

Everyone says this, but here's a sample of size 1: some years ago I was at a Sonoma winery during harvest season, reached my hand through a fence, grabbed a bunch of grapes and ate them. They were delicious.

Did I just get lucky? Anyone else do this?

I hate to be the one to throw stones at an outfit that is trying to do something good, protecting people's privacy.

But the claim in Obscura's FAQ that paying with Bitcoin or Monero offers more privacy than paying with a credit card is sadly misguided. No-KYC cryptocurrency is largely a thing of the past, and outfits like Chainanalysis can associate a Lightning or Monero address to a human with near-perfect accuracy. The fact that Obscura's FAQ doesn't acknowledge this makes me feel like its author was either pretending this is not the case, or is unaware of it. Either of those is pretty bad.

Mullvad lets customers sign up for an account and pay in cash, which is a good, privacy-preserving choice. In the US, payment by postal money order or by gift card, either of which can be purchased with cash, would also be good choices. Users, and Obscura, should not be fooled by some vague association of cryptocurrency and privacy. In the age of ubiquitous KYC that ship has sailed with the possible exception of ZCash. And I wouldn't bet my life on ZCash, either.

The article discussed "CYP2D6 inhibitors like Wellbutrin and DXM" and I can offer one data point. An officemate came in with a bad cough one day. I had over-the-counter cough medicine with DXM handy and he took some. He had never taken DXM before; it is apparently not common in his country of origin.

He felt "shaky" and generally terrible after taking the DXM, and almost went to the hospital. I had never encountered anyone having that reaction before.

That particular colleague was also, it turns out, on a pretty hefty dose of Wellbutrin. I never knew there was a possible connection between the two until now.

The claim that BuyVM is scammy contradicts my experience. I have had excellent customer service from them. Yes, like (say) airline tickets, the demand for their lowest-priced offerings exceeds the supply available at that price point, and if you're not willing to wait, you will pay more. But new supply seems to come online about twice a month when billing cycles expire, and there is a Discord channel ("BuyVMStock") that can alert you when this happens. Me, I'm hanging on to my underutilized server there just because it's so cheap to keep at the ready, and I suppose this is why they have so little availability. But if they were actually scammy there would be much more churn.

If you scroll down to "Prime Performers" on the page I linked, it lists a Massachusetts company and a USC lab that turns out to have a branch office in Massachusetts.

Perhaps remarkably, the US intelligence community is funding work on this problem in the open, as part of IARPA HIATUS [1].

The program's initial phase is winding down now, so some of the performers' papers ought to be hitting the ArXiV before too many more months.

[1] https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs/hiatus

These days when people see consecutive pithy sentences with parallel structure, they immediately holler "AI generated."

For years I've wanted to improve my writing and reduce my tendency to string together long floppy clauses, and now I'm like, well good thing I never did that...!

Judging by ads for cell phone service, most people pay more than that per month to be monitored by the Feds.

Similarly, in 1790s America, farmers west of the Appalachians were growing plenty of corn, but because of bad roads the only feasible way to transport it to the much larger markets east of the mountains was as whiskey. When Alexander Hamilton imposed a tax on distilled spirits, the result was a "Whiskey Rebellion" in which George Washington himself rode out at the head of an army against other American citizens.

Ever since the invention of the printing press, every new communication technology has reduced the effort needed to widely disseminate information-- and misinformation! So you could say this is nothing new. On the other hand, this is remarkably little effort.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." -Blaise Pascal

This collection of "Rabinisms" [1] (thanks to the Internet Archive for keeping it from being lost) can give you some of the flavor of the delightful experience that it was to take one of his classes. RIP.

[If P = NP,] then all of modern cryptography collapses. On this happy thought... (1998-11-24)

I'm one of those people who is just never wrong. I mean, not one of those people. I'm like everybody else. Nobody is ever wrong. (1998-12-08)

After all I said, put here the word "obvious". (1998-12-15)

I am going to show that in one round the probability of not reaching agreement is less or equal to 2. ... Yeah, we're establishing new ground in probability theory. (1998-12-17)

It's more than 10 years old. It's either classical or incorrect. (Fall 1998)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210509160248/http://www.eecs.h...

The article "FTFY Buddhist Ethics" [1] comes to a similar conclusion about the development of West Coast Buddhism but isn't on board with it. IMHO an interesting contrarian take.

[1] https://vividness.live/ftfy-buddhist-ethics

I have this problem despite adjusting my monitor height properly.

I consulted a practitioner (in Taiwan, so I'm not exactly sure how to describe her.) She directed me to do the following: stand on tiptoe closely against a flat wall where the ceiling is higher than I can reach on tiptoe. Keep forehead against the wall. Reach upwards, keeping the part of forearms nearest the wrist against the wall. Inhale and exhale, relaxing muscles and stretching to reach further and further upwards with fingertips. Do this for at least 30-45 seconds, relax, repeat a few times daily.

I am not good at sticking to the program but it does seem to be helping

See also the very comprehensive presentation at https://codepoints.net . For example https://codepoints.net/U+2248?lang=en

OP wrote:

"My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7... A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working. I decided it was time to look for a replacement."

Isn't that like deciding to replace your bike because some of the cables are rusted? Like a new set of cables, a new keyboard is a small expense compared to a whole new laptop.

Like replacing bike cables, swapping in a new Carbon X7 keyboard might be slightly challenging for an amateur. iFixit calls the keyboard replacement "moderate" in difficulty [1] taking about an hour with a new keyboard running about a hundred bucks. But it would be a simple job for a repair shop. So it seems hard to justify the expense of a whole new one rather than just the new part.

Of course, sometimes you just want a new laptop, because the bike analogy breaks down a little: unlike bikes, newer ones are inherently faster.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Lenovo+ThinkPad+X1+Carbon+7th+G...

This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

I am usually working with historical documents, where both Otsu and adaptive thresholding are frustratingly almost but not quite good enough. My go-to approach lately is "DeepOtsu" [1]. I like that it combines the best of both the traditional and deep learning worlds: a deep neural net enhances the image such that Otsu thresholding is likely to work well.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.06081

Bikes can work great for travelers aged from, say, 13 to 70 without much luggage. Not so great for travelers outside that age range, with more luggage, or with physical disabilities. I wonder what fraction of travelers falls into the latter category.

I agree that in our current system, consumer choice generally determines which product wins.

But does the best product really always win? As a fan of BeOS, it doesn't seem that way to me.