pabl8k

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

My doctor accidentally wrote a prescription for a three month supply of a medication for an acute illness that is generally not prescribed and certainly not filled for more than a month of quantity at a time, and generally not for more than 10 days.

When I placed my order, I thought the price was high, but figured it was because I hadn't hit my deductible and it was an expensive medicine. There was no obvious indication on the UI about the quantity of the prescription, just the price.

Amazon pharmacy accordingly sent me almost a small pharmacy-worth of this medicine. I called them and asked why the pharmacist didn't notice that this was a _highly_ unusual quantity of this medication (The quantity was *EIGHT* retail packages of the medicine) and raise a flag and check with the provider or me. The pharmacist I spoke to told me that they personally would have done so in this circumstance and told me they would refund the order and provide feedback to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. I later got an automated email that the refund request by the pharmacist was rejected by their finance department and could not be appealed.

I won't be using Amazon pharmacy again.

It takes time for a tick to transmit lyme disease, but you can also take a single dose of doxycycline as post-exposure prophylaxis if you think it was attached for a while and ask a doctor

And possibly even if you do understand it! It seems like it might be a fundamentally intractable problem with LLMs, even if it can be made more difficult to do, no?

I watched a cross-country trip review of a Volkswagen EV and one of the big takeaways was that despite funding Electrify America, the experience of using their chargers, even with a Volkswagen, was terrible at the time of review. Not only were the chargers often out of service or underpowered, you had to use some app on your phone where you type in the charger ID # to turn it on, instead of the car negotiating it.

Very interesting. The chorus has the lyrics: "a message from my heart" and then "listen to this message" before going into the section with the morse code message.

I noticed that the job posting locations and the headline locations don't match. Are these for Canadian candidates only or are all roles also open to US remote candidates?

Some of us will be deliverators for NvidiaBlackrockDominoes

The reason it's not the "best Signal" is that WhatsApp doesn't have reproducible builds or any guarantees that e2e isn't subverted on the client side or removed entirely. And it's run by a company with incentives that are misaligned to e2e encryption and a history of product updates that don't respect the privacy or preferences of the end user.

I went and looked at the application form for the first job linked and this is absolutely standard in the US at every company I've ever applied to. It's not just some Wikimedia thing. It's voluntary to fill it out and the company is not supposed to use it in deciding who to hire. The purpose is to have retrospective data a company can use to make sure they are not introducing bias into their hiring process.

OK this just feels like this topic is an excuse for you to trot out tired tropes about bi people while scare-quoting the word to delegitimize the orientation.

What you're doing is called bi erasure. It happens from straight and gay people. Bi doesn't necessarily mean attraction or experience is exactly equally split. For some people it is, for some people it isn't. Some people may change how they self describe. None of that means people aren't legitimately bi.

In the US, returning US citizens have the right to re-enter without a photo or a fingerprint. It's a right I'd like to preserve, and that's getting increasingly harder to exercise as everything in the airport nudges passengers to automated systems with no obvious way to opt out.

Obviously other countries have their own rules.

I'm a subscriber and I think you're missing the point. It's about the aggressive tactics to get people to subscribe. And even worse, they don't stop once you've subscribed. You pay them $15.99/month or whatever and then they still do full screen ads for additional product lifecycle steps (listening to music) or enroll family members. It's better on the web but the app experience is terrible. A side-effect I'm sure of the typical engagement/"experiment"-driven product management mindset, where what is not measured (consumer dissatisfaction) does not get managed.

I just wanted to thank you for the information and the ensuing thread. Very interesting.

I don't think this is true, do you have a source?

They store registered users phone numbers and allow discovery by making a request with a hashed version of the phone numbers on your contact list. They add an extra layer to allow attestation of the software doing this using Intel's secure enclave. They give many examples of responding to warrants with only whether the number has been registered and the timestamp of registration, which they explain is the only information they hold.

Private Contact Discovery: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

hi maybe do all that but also don't reject vaccines :)

before the vaccines plenty of young healthy people died.

I just learned that an acquaintance of mine flew on a plane knowing they had tested positive for covid. Or my partner's family just had a family get-together (she didn't go) while one her family members had covid.

In the former case, policy changes to reduce likelihood of people flying with covid (temp checks, affidavits, allowing removal of obviously ill passengers), and to increase ventilation and filtration on planes, and perhaps to even bring back masks or at the very least encourage or incentivize them in times of high transmission.

I don't know that we can do much about the latter case other than better public health education and perhaps PSAs.

"Lose weight, get in shape" is good advice that would lower all cause mortality if it reliably resulted in such a change. The advice that we ought be perfect to avoid mortality doesn't take into account reality.

I agree with your statement in the small (yes, get fit, try to motivate friends and family to do the same), but it's not useful to moralize about what-if on a population level in my opinion, and it is tantamount to blaming the victims of the pandemic for bad outcomes. Especially before the vaccines, many young and healthy people died or experienced very bad outcomes, and it still happens, though the vaccines have helped a ton in this regard.

A small bit of nuance that could explain why the range could be $3.5 to $22 on a given day would be that they could be referring to different token types. The native token of ethereum (Ether) costs a fixed, smaller number of units of computation to send, whereas custom tokens (erc-20) have to do some additional bootstrapping work during transactions and cost more to send.

So there's the units of computation used x "gas price".

But yes, the "gas price" that serves to price congestion on the network is wildly variable due to congestion and low throughput. And that limited throughput is currently a real practical problem as you've pointed out in that the fees are too high.

The answer will likely be in L2s as other people are pointing out. I think one interesting side effect of this ecosystem is it is actually driving new research and application for cryptography (including substantial funding): for example practical uses of zero knowledge proofs.

This isn't really true. You submit a transaction with a maximum gas price. All wallets that I know of will show a maximum transaction fee based on this before you submit the transaction, and you can manually lock in any arbitrary gas limit you would like. If gas prices suddenly go up right as you submit your transaction (read: other network users outbid you for use of the network), your transaction will stay pending and either eventually process at the gas price specified, or fail and you will pay either nothing or a partial fee based on your maximum gas price * computation steps used.

Gas is basically a means to ensure all computation on ethereum halts.

I'm not a fan of Yuga or "land" sales on blockchains, but this argument comes out every time there is something even tangentially related to proof of work blockchains. There is not a significant marginal expenditure of electricity per nft minted or transferred. The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.

What really happened here was that the company that launched this did it in a way that congested the ethereum network and an auction essentially occurred in "gas" to use the network for this purpose for a couple hours. Instead, the company should have pre-allocated guaranteed minting on a lottery basis so it didn't devolve into a "gas" auction or, increased supply to match demand, which they knew in advance (like you said, limits here are artificial).

Thanks for sharing your project as a counter example. To be clear I'm not damning Borges here, just suggesting that naming the company after that particular story gives some weight to the idea that we should consider the author's values and goals when evaluating it.

Worth noting that urbit is, as one poster on hacker news put it, "purposefully obfuscated"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852141

and its parent company was named after a short story by Borges where a fictional encyclopedia starts to affect reality in the world it is released in.

The founder, who left in 2019, is a super-far-right figure. Even though he has distanced himself from the project, I can't help but think about the intentional obfuscation and the choice in naming as perhaps related to trying to build the kind of world he wrote about (authoritarian, non-egalitarian, non-apologetically racist). It makes me not want to associate with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

How is this relevant to the parent poster? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

it's defense in depth.

if someone has HIV, they can be treated and if they are consistent with treatment they can have such a low (undetectable) viral load that it is not transmittable. (aka U=U)

additionally, high risk populations (transactional sex, msm, intravenous drug users) can take the same drugs and be protected from the virus. (aka PREP)

also people with known exposures or likely exposures can have post exposure prophylaxis with the same drugs (e.g. in the case of an accidental needle stick in a healthcare worker).

These defenses have already radically slowed the spread and increased the lifespan and quality of life of those who become HIV positive.

Now we will hopefully have a an additional defense that will be even easier (no daily dosing required for negative at-risk population) and probably much more broadly administered.

I love the progress we are making with vaccines.

I'm not involved in this personally.

Yes definitely it could be because of risk. There is also a risk that the GUSD isn't returned (with Gemini it's not actually defi, there is no smart contract mandating its return, there is counterparty risk). I'm not saying it's 8% risk free when the risk free rate is 0%. But the article indicates that there is an actual inefficiency here due to institutional restrictions on cryptocurrencies and an institutional demand for products that approximate them.

There are definitely ponzi schemes in defi, but I'm not sure celsius is one just because they pay what seem on face to be impossible rates. Gemini, which is regulated and based out of NYC, offers 8% on GUSD, their USD stablecoin. My understanding is returns on this come from a huge demand for crypto lending from institutions participating in the "basis trade", and a limited supply of USD lending available to them for it due to custodianship and regulator issues with cryptocurrencies. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-27/crypto-sh...

For coming up on 8 hours now. Not a customer but was looking at opening an account when I got blocked by this.

It's not horrible but I haven't found anything I like on it yet. One issue is that the UI kind of sucks (hover state button for more info on a company, vs clicking the name of the company, which is always redacted until you contact them). I would like more info on the companies before contacting. Another is that the microsaas category seems to be very micro on the traction/revenue and very macro on the multiple/pricing. Like if people are getting these prices good for them, but it's not attractive for me to wade through right now.

It feels like I'm more likely to find something vetted and legit at a reasonable price through a broker like FEI.