Silent link esims are quite good for getting your phone to work on any country or network. I have one, not for privacy but more for better phone coverage and it works pretty well. No ID and you pay in crypto - btc/monero etc. (https://silent.link/)
For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.
Just want to call out that the head of the trust and safety/integrity division, Guy Rosen, is an Israeli citizen with a strong pro-Israel bias. He’s also a person of questionable morals. From Wikipedia:
“ Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger founded Onavo in 2010. In October 2013, Onavo was acquired by Facebook, which used Onavo's analytics platform to monitor competitors. This influenced Facebook to make various business decisions, including its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp.
Since the acquisition, Onavo was frequently classified as being spyware, as the VPN was used to monetize application usage data collected within an allegedly privacy-focused environment.”
That Meta considered his questionable ethics a feature not a bug, and repeatedly promoted him, is very problematic.
>Meta’s Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, Jordana Cutler, has also intervened to investigate pro-Palestine content. Cutler is a former senior Israeli government official and advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
German fascism didn't actually rise during the hyperinflation of 1922-1923. Hitler's first attempt at power (the Beer Hall Putsch) failed miserably in November 1923 just as hyperinflation was ending[9].
The Nazis only became a major political force years later during the DEFLATIONARY period of 1930-1933. Heinrich Brüning's government implemented brutal austerity in response to the Depression - slashing wages by 25%, quadrupling pension contributions, and cutting social spending by two-thirds[12]. This deflationary policy was economic malpractice that caused massive suffering.
Recent research confirms that "localities that experienced larger declines in spending and higher rises in taxes had higher vote shares for the Nazi Party in each and every German federal election between 1930 and 1933"[11]. Each standard deviation increase in austerity severity correlated with a 2-5 percentage point increase in Nazi votes[11].
The political establishment's obsession with balancing budgets through austerity crushed the working and middle classes, creating mass unemployment (reaching 6 million by 1932)[9] and pushing desperate voters toward radical solutions. As Hjalmar Schacht warned in 1930: "if the German people are going to starve, there are going to be many more Hitlers"[11].
This history matters today. When elites respond to economic crisis with deflation and austerity that protects creditors while immiserating workers, they create the perfect conditions for fascism. The CEPR's conclusion is chilling: "too much harsh austerity can trigger social unrest and unintended political consequences"[11].
You need to look around you. People are being disappeared off the streets and sent to hard labor concentration camps in El Salvador. American scholars of fascism are literally fleeing the US saying "this is it!". The federal gov't is being dismantled wholesale. America has destroyed its relationships with Canada and Europe, crippled NATO, and is openly planning to annex foreign territories and countries.
This is it, friend. You're in it. The visible damage hasn't accumulated too much yet, but all the things that fascist regimes do, are being done now. You might argue that Americans are fighting back, that lawfirms targetted by EO are refusing to comply, that the ACLU is fighting in court, that protestors are in the streets. This was all happening in Germany in the mid 30s too. It didn't stop what happened, and the passivity of the "it's not that bad" crowd was a big part of that.
This is so good. I've been using it with Claude Code with great success.
I just leave an instruction in CLAUDE.md to validate changes with Playwright. It automatically starts a dev server (wrote a little MCP server to do that), navigates to the page with the changes it just made, and validates that its changes worked. If there is anything unexpected, it self-corrects.
It's like working with a really great mid-level engineer.
Outside the EU, I have a travel kit which has a cheap Android phone and cheap Android tablet. Both have convincing stuff on it, but in reality, everything goes via my personal vpn/ssh vnc for which I carry the keys well hidden.
I have 'nothing to hide' but free speech is not what Elon thinks it means (in many countries), including now, the US. I don't want to be arrested for something I said 10 years ago which was now mined, or hallucinated, by Palantir AI scanning my phone.
Great progress, but unfortunately, for our use case (converting medical textbooks from PDF to MD), the results are not as good as those by MinerU/PDF-Extract-Kit [1].
Also the collab link in the article is broken, found a functional one [2] in the docs.
This guy [https://x.com/PrajwalTomar_] has been exploring workflows that involve using ChatGPT to assist in creating a Product Requirement Document (PRD), then using V0 by Vercel for mockups and bringing it all together using Cursor, maintaining continuity with markdown documents (.md) of the PRD and relevant database schemas etc inside the project to maintain continuity.
VS Code (and Cursor) has so nice Jupyter support that I find it much better to use it for my workflow, rather than using any dedicated solution for Jupiter Notebooks only.
Why is America so fixated on Israel? Groups like AIPAC and the Israeli lobby seem to be steering U.S. policies in ways that don't necessarily benefit the U.S., while potentially harming its interests. Here's what's at stake:
This alliance seems to be turning about two billion people and dozens of muslim-majority nations against America, driving them towards alliances with countries like China.
American taxpayer money is being heavily invested in Israel. We're talking about a staggering $260 billion given to Israel, seemingly without direct benefits to the U.S.
Ethically, the U.S. is on shaky ground. By consistently supporting Israel, even in cases involving civilian casualties, the U.S. appears to be undermining international law and the United Nations, often standing alone against global consensus.
Looking at the U.S. presidency, it seems like candidates from both major parties have to win the favor of the Israeli lobby to secure their nomination. Take Obama, for example. Despite his apparent disdain for Netanyahu – remember the leaked conversation with Sarkozy where they called Netanyahu a liar? – he still seemed unable to counter the lobby's influence. This focus on Israel is a massive distraction from more pressing issues, like the rise of China.
And let's be clear – Israel's loyalty as a Western ally is questionable. It's kept friendly ties with the Kremlin, hasn't joined in sanctioning Russia, and has turned down requests to send defensive weapons to Ukraine. It seems Israel would not hesitate to shift its allegiance to China if it suited its national interests.
The documentary "Boycott" explores the legislation passed in several U.S. states, including Arkansas, Arizona, and Texas, that requires individuals to pledge not to boycott Israel as a condition for receiving government funds. This legislation emerged in response to the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel. The film follows individuals who challenged these laws, including a publisher in Arkansas, an attorney in Arizona, and a speech pathologist in Texas, highlighting their legal battles and the implications for free speech
AIPAC itself is a result of the President Eisenhower and later Robert F Kennedy (DOJ) demanding the American Zionist Council (AZC) register as foreign agents. Because of this, the AZC rebranded to AIPAC with the same leadership and the issue seemed to have fell off the high priority political radar since.
Incidentally, the founder of AIPAC, Isaiah Kenen registered twice with the U.S. Department of Justice under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) as an agent for Israel. Prior to leading AIPAC, he was the leader of the American Zionist Council. He was also chief information officer for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
AIPAC's mission is pretty clear: to promote the interests of Israel. This is fine, and not unique, but that seems to me to be the textbook definition of a foreign agent, and it should be registered as such.
AIPAC has a very large budget and will be spending over $100M in 2024 to defeat any candidate for US Congress that did not align with their pro-Israel goals.
Hello there, a Palestinian from the west bank here speaking, let me tell you something, our resistance has nothing to do with Israel being a Jewish state, if my brother stole my house and killed my children i will fight him just the same, and you would too and everyone else (I assume). jewish, muslim, christian, vegan.. doesn't matter.
Now Hamas does play on the string of religion to get to people, and so does Israel (isn't it the promised land after all?).. but the main goal is to free the people from the oppressive occupation!
and when we chant "From the river to the sea" we don't mean to kill anyone! if we can be free and live together, but have dignity and human rights, so be it!
and like Bassem Youssef said, let's imagine a world where Hamas doesn't exist, and let's call it for example the west bank. how do you justify what's happening there and the settlements expansion?
> My current (tentative) resolution of the surprise is that language encoded way more information about reality than we thought it did.
I think you are close to the mark, but you have been subtly mislead: language is not the data we are working with. We are working with text.
Once you fix that particular failure of word choice, everything else becomes much more clear: text contains much more information than language.
We aren't dealing with just any text, either: that would be noise. We're training LLMs on written text.
Natural language is infamous for one specific feature: ambiguity. There are many possible ways to write something, but we can only write one. We must choose: in doing so, we record the choice itself, and all of the entropy that informed it.
That entropy is the secret sauce: the extra data that LLMs are sometimes able to model. We don't see it, because we read language, not text.
The big surprise is that LLMs aren't able to write language: they can only write text. They don't get tripped up reading ambiguity, but they can't avoid writing it, either. Who chooses what an LLM writes? Is it a mystery character who lives in a black box, or a continuation of the entropy that was encoded into the text that LLM was trained on?
Near my hometown in NL there’s a similar place, the Home Computer Museum and just like the one on Leicester they turn the computers on with games and BASIC and foxpro and protracker running and it’s just a delight. The collection is huge, I was pretty impressed. Went there with my kids the other day and it was just great. Worth a detour!
Ever since my partner and I discovered In Our Time a few years back, it’s been our go-to podcast to listen to together. Part of the allure is that the archive is so vast, but that makes it hard to browse.
She used Wikipedia to find and categorize each episode. I also really like that she indexed episodes by guest, too. Certain guests are REALLY good and have been on many episodes.
Super excited to see someone else make an archive; we’ll definitely be exploring yours!
You often lose performance in traditional imperative languages when aiming for persistence.
When you have immutability guarantees (like in many functional programming languages like ML or Haskell) you can avoid making copies by sharing the parts of the data structure that don't change.
If this kind of thing interests you, you should check out Chris Okasaki's book "Purely Functional Data Structures".
While this list looks solid, I think it's telling that none of the papers that immediately came to my mind were on this list.
I suspect that there are many more, and which papers are important to any one person is as varied as the disciplines we have within software engineering.
- Out of the Tar Pit 2005, a paper on Functional Reactive Programming that is an excellent read for anyone doing functional programming, UI programming, or a number of other things.
- Consistent Hashing and Random Trees: Distributed Caching Protocols for Relieving Hot Spots on the World Wide Web 1997, important read for anyone working in distributed systems or services with any sort of scale.
- Roy Fielding's dissertation 2000, to learn just how widely applicable REST principles are and how misunderstood it is as a design.
- The Part Time Parliament 1998, the original Paxos paper, important basis for anyone working with distributed systems.
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar 1997, an essay not a paper, but a good background to the open source world.
FYI: For more blockchain samples from scratch (in JavaScript) see the notes from last week's Vienna.js talk titled "Build Your Own Blockchain in 20 Lines of JavaScript - Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain! For Fun (and Profit)" - https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/blockchain.md Cheers.
Karabiner (and its predecessor) is invaluable for me every day use of my macbook. In general using a touchpad feels like trying to type with only one finger, but with the "multi-touch exension" (I think it's based on touchsense), allows me to redefine my keyboard depending on what's happening on my touchpad.
So, now my left hand is always on the home keys, and if I'm touching the touchpad with one finger, the home keys are my left, right, and middle mouse buttons. If I'm touching it with two fingers, the home keys and nearby keys remap to save, refresh, find, select all, copy, paste, cut, close, and others. If three fingers are touching, then my keys remap to my windows layout and other utility programs which I often call (such as the terminal).
There are many other general remappings which have made my life at a keyboard much faster and easier to use, but the multi-touch extensions are the ones that I would struggle to live without.
As a side note, if you use the product and find it helpful, you should really consider donating to it. It will make you feel like a better human, and encourage continued support.
Because if you read the function signature of a function like def fill_rectangle(color) you haven't got the slightest idea what valid values of "color" is. (Ignore the fact that python doesn't have types in the function signature to start with, say you're reading the documentation instead)
If you knew that color was of the enum-type my_gui_lib.standard_colors you know exactly which colors you can use and you can reuse them for fill_ellipse also because it most likely uses the same type. Instead of every function having to reiterate all valid integer values of color or referring to some table. Your editor will also provide you with auto complete of valid values unless you're coding in notepad.
In a type safe language you will even get compilation error if you provide a type/value out of range but since python is dynamic this would be hard. It's simply impossible to pass the function an invalid value, which is invaluable. So in python the value added isn't a strong as in a strong language but it's still there.
Oleg is a good guy, as in I'd love to be (and have been) his friend, but he really can't run a company. He's impossible to work for.
Investors put project management in place (more than once) which he systematically destroyed (firing, pushing so hard they quit, whatever). I'm not sure why he did this, I think he thought he was more effective in working with the team. The issue with this is that his measure of "effective" was seemingly hours spent in the office.
It was not uncommon to get a project (see: portfolios.500px.com, multiple versions of the IOS app) and have oleg set an impossible deadline. Because of his management style, just about every rails dev in Toronto has been through the company. They seem to go through waves of employees (40+ down to 15 and back again) every six months to a year.
It really sucks to see a founder be pushed out, but I think this can have a happy ending for 500px, and for Oleg, if he chooses to learn from this scenario.
For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.