user1980

I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. If I want to find a family doctor, there is a list of 3 clinics with doctors taking patients, in a metro area of 325,000. Older people have "the good doctors" and those doctors aren't taking on new patients.

Waiting lists for specialists are ridiculous, unless it's something extremely urgent. It quickly becomes about "who you know" and queues can be jumped if you have the inside track.

I've never been encouraged or "nudged" to get a physical or even blood work done. Quite frankly, the system is under so much strain that getting everyone a physical would push it over the brink. So they mandate them for commercial drivers and other high-risk occupations, and everyone else just goes to medi-clinics and sees a walk-in doctor. Zero continuity of care.

Canada is great at treating the dying, terrible at treating the healthy.

I'm self-employed. Dental, prescription drugs, glasses, mental health: this is all out of pocket.

My impression is that if you have a reasonably good job in the United States, you have access to reasonable health care. Is that a fair assessment?

To execute what amounted to a no-op on the EVM global computer, this individual deployed this [1] smart contract, and then ran it [2].

The compute cost involved, measured in so-called gas fees, were 0.496 ETH for the contract deployment, and 0.197 ETH for the execution, around $3,000 USD total.

Transaction fees are through the roof. To buy 0.025 ETH (~$110 USD) worth of SHIB tokens, the memecoin de jour, I'd have to pay an equal amount in gas fees. Yes, 100% transaction fee. Buying $20 worth is completely out of the question.

[1] https://etherscan.io/address/0x9b5a5c5800c91af9c965b3bf06ad2...

[2] https://etherscan.io/tx/0x92488a00dfa0746c300c66a716e6cc11ba...

The problem is interruptions, not my ability to focus.

The problem is Product demanding estimates, not my ability to estimate in the midst of uncertainty and ask questions to reduce it.

The problem is Java, C, or whatever "legacy" technology is being used. Despite the fact that the whole world runs on it.

"New focus on economics": It was bad enough seeing terrible clickbait in the "Recommended by Pocket" section displayed on every new tab. Now I have to go into settings to opt-out of Sponsored Stories so I don't have to see ads for Honey.

All to fund the so-called "internet activist movement"?

I just want a web browser, not an ideology.

Tedious to set up, tedious to maintain.

January 31 of this year I got an email telling me that my LE client used the older ACMEv1 protocol, not the newer ACMEv2 protocol. They gave me 4 months notice to update my LE client to something compliant. I burnt the time and did the work.

On March 3 myself and many others[0] got an email demanding that we manually re-issue our certificates because of a vulnerability discovered in the LE service. They gave us one day to comply, after that they would revoke the certificates and our users would receive security errors. I begrudgingly went through all my servers and issued the command to forcibly renew certificates. Not a huge burden for me, but likely a bigger burden for larger operations.

As the feature set grows (new challenge types, wildcard support, etc.) and the service gets even more popular, it's going to be an even bigger target and the effects of a monoculture will really be felt. I'm starting to see the value in paying for certificates, and more specifically, using providers that don't provide a public certificate issuance API (or at least stick it behind a paywall.)

How many times would LE have to accidentally issue gstatic.com or fbcdn.net before they get the Symantec treatment[1]? Too big to fail: It's not just for investment banks. And that should give anyone seeking a decentralized internet pause.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/lets-encrypt-to-revoke-3-milli...

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-warns-it-plans-to-dist...

End-to-end TLS is dead.

It started with PCI compliance. Next up was Corporate IT making sure idiots weren't signing up for Dropbox with their LAN password. Schools: Well, they always used proxies with no expectation of privacy whatsoever so traffic inspection was nothing new.

In 5 years TLS-recryption -- whether through software or a hardware middlebox -- will be as ubiquitous as a NAT firewall is now. The only question is if the keys will be in the hands of the consumer or in escrow with Big Gov.

The idea that anyone in their right mind would allow uninspectable traffic to egress their network is beyond ridiculous. I'm glad that DoH is making people realize that.

Too big to fail: It's not just for banks any more.

If LE is compromised a few times and some fraudulent facebook.com or google.com certs leak out, how long before Firefox/Chrome/Edge blacklist their root cert like they did with Symantec[1], and end up breaking half the internet?

I understand that ACME is an open standard, but can someone point me to an alternative ACME provider that isn't "please call us for a quote" enterprise-grade?

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/03/12/distrust-symant...

They absolutely do, but batteries have physical limitations that result in lower power output over time.

The same can be said of SSD media. It's well-known that flash memory is under-provisioned to allow for inevitable degradation: Defective sectors are flagged and re-mapped. This so that your 500GB SSD still has 500GB in 5 years.

This can be applied to battery tech as well. However, that would require either thicker, heavier phones, or less run-time between charges.

I would say Apple's "crime" is producing hardware where one particular component has a well-known failure mode that makes the entire device virtually useless after 3 years of moderate to heavy use.

I agree. I'm instantly skeptical of any "X has never occurred" claim: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Let's see some Taleb-esque "skin in the game": Not just the author's toothless footnote, but a cash bounty.

Opening up the Network Inspector when loading a single issue in the "new" UI shows a dumpster fire of 128 requests, 5 MB transferred. It's like the paradox of the heap: No one request is abnormally slow (although a 1.1MB slug of unminified JS from jiraplugin.zendesk.com sure isn't helping things) but the whole thing combines to give JIRA a reputation it surely deserves.

Would that be similar to how you've "stolen" and re-licensed code from Instagram-API-python[1]? I don't see the MIT licence with Lev Pasha's copyright notice in your repo anywhere.

Your code[2].

Their code[3].

[1] https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python

[2] https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/blob/132adf6b166c22...

[3] https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python/blob/cf0fe1...

Don't worry, if you purchase a domain with a .biz (or 300 other junk-tier tLDs) extension from Amazon Route 53, Gandi still gets paid[1].

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/re...

I see what you're getting at. A story like this one:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ex-marines-isis-inspired-...

You would ask the question "How far would he have gotten if an FBI agent hadn't got involved?" There seems to be a pattern of "idiot makes vague threats on Twitter" => "FBI agent encourages him" => "FBI waits and eventually arrests, plot thwarted." in a lot of these stories, which seems to be the basis for your categorical assertion that

every terrorism prosecution that involved a foiled plot in the past ten years or so has involved the FBI convincing some helpless, directionless loser to do a bad thing and then arresting said loser and claiming victory against Al-Qaeda

So I can see why you would think Jameson fits the pattern.

How about this guy?

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/10/us/9-11-memorial-bomb-plo...

Australi Witness urged the FBI source to put nails, glass and metal into the bomb, according to the FBI-authored complaint. He instructed the FBI source "to dip the screws and other shrapnel in rat poison in order to inflict more casualties," the complaint states.

Doesn't sound too helpless to me.

How about the 2009 New York City Subway plot[1]? I suppose it's possible that Zazi was a patsy, but if you take the Wikipedia page at face value it seems pretty damning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_New_York_City_Subway_and_...

I'd hazard a guess that 0.1% of Java developers are aware that on some operating systems Object.wait() can awaken spuriously. Heck, it wasn't even in the Javadoc until 1.5. And don't even get me started on how you should handle an InterruptedException.

Most Java developers I know consider rolling your own multi-threading scheme about as wise as rolling your own cryptography, and just pretend notify/notifyAll/wait don't even exist.