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why-o-why

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create a new account every few weeks and don't forget to mix you you'er writin' style to fakeout stylometrics. its all against the rules but i disagree with HN terms. internet points don't mean crapola to me. but i like dropping in here every now and then to chit caht. i should have the right to be anonymous and non-deidentifiable here and speak freely. of IP address ---are--- tracked here and you can easily be shadowbanned. but i don't say anything awful, but i am naturally an asshat and i just can't seem to change my spots. 90% of the time i'm ok, but 10% i'm just a raving tool.

What didn't you understand? The point isn't whether I do specific thing A or specific thing B, the point is that when I can I do the best in the situation to improve the average. The specifics don't matter. It is the overall impact. OP is playing the "debate" game which is about winning, and not about the issue itself. It is because OP doesn't care to understand, they just want to score points, hence their desire to focus on specific instances.

Had OP said something like "How can you make an informed decision congruent with your ethics when so many ubiquitous companies violate human rights?" that would have been a genuine question. Instead OP said "Tell me why you don't do X" and behind that is "because I win." That's arguing from bad faith (a polite way to describe OP).

Right there with you. I've tried to leave quicken multiple times. Especially when they moved to annual subscriptions. I haven't tried to leave since 2019-ish, and all the alternatives were just clunky as hell, as if the devs completely ignored UI/UX. Also, I'm on the latest quicken for mac and it has an export feature, but I have never used it. Maybe when they start charging per transaction I'll finally leave. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford it annually, but it still stinks that there's no open source alt, even to do just the basics conveniently.

I'll see your decade old text file and raise you one more: my current quicken file goes back to 1992! Lemme tell you about gas and grocery prices back then... (hint $1.09/gallon in Oneida, NY and $15/bag at Price Chopper)

About 5 years ago I purged as many apps as I could. I still have some I need for my job, especially on my work-issued iPhone, but excluding those apps I have exactly 5 apps on my phone. Everything has a website.

I've heard that native apps are more secure than webapps, but in my experience Firefox is a more reliable steward of security, and App permissions are too obscure to really understand: it is harder to make a malicious webapp than it is to make a malicious native app. Is that a fair statement?

Excellent!

This discussion will proceed as follows: you will present a laundry list of examples, and if I answer NO to any of them, you win. It will play out as the illustration of the fallacy of all or nothing: if I am not 100% pure, then I am 100% wrong.

What you will fail to understand, is that in the real world "doing the best one can" still has an impact. So I might not answer 100% all of your questions, but it doesn't mean my decisions don't have any impact. The absurdity can be illustrated by rewording: "if we can't prevent all crime, we should stop enforcing it", or "if you can't feed all the hungry children, we shouldn't bother feeding any".

Unfortunately for you, I will not play your purity test game so that you can feel smug, but I will say that I do my best and I pay attention, and whenever feasible I vote with my wallet to buy from or invest in companies with stated goals that align with human rights, and I will feel disappointment over not making the "best possible choice" at every opportunity, but that will position me to do better next time. Because perfection is the enemy of progress.

Sure, but we are talking about generating a random number, not sampling noise: those are two different things, albeit the former can be derived from the latter but not directly and as simply as the parent post claimed. Just sampling analog noise does not generate a "true" random number that can satisfy a set of design parameters to configure the NIST 800-90b entropy assessment (well, one could pick shitty parameters for the probability tests, but let's assume experts at the helm). Hence the need for software whitening.

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

https://github.com/usnistgov/SP800-90B_EntropyAssessment

(^^^ this is a fun tool, I recommend playing with it to learn how challenging it is to generate "true" random numbers.)

An infinite precision ADC couldn't be subject to thermal attack because you could just sample more bits of precision. (Of course, then we'd be down to Planck level precision so obviously there are limits, but my point still stands, at least _I_ think it does. :))

I really don't believe you, but according to HN, I am supposed to trust in good faith you aren't lying.

Maybe you just don't have any assets or make very little money. I have equity and cannot just toss it to a collection agency and hope they forget. I also play by the rules, silly, I know, but I don't want to risk getting fucked some other way later in life.

Sample it with what? An infinite precision ADC?

This is how old temperature-noise based TRNGs can be attacked (modern ones use a different technique, usually a ring-oscillater with whitening... although i have heard noise-based is coming back but i've been out of the loop for a while)

> I don't think the hospital expects to actually ever get paid what they bill out

OH YES THEY ABSOLUTELY DO!

When I was in-between jobs I had a medical emergency and I was on the ACA around the first year it was offered. I was billed above medicare rates so I was on the hook for ~40k after out of pocket max. They told me this limit is what insurance has to cover but hospitals can still bill above it. First they told me they could work on the prices and asked for my last 5 years tax returns. When they saw that I had dividend payments they said they couldn't help me and I owed them the $40k. I think that was the problem because even though I wasn't working in their mind if I had investments then technically I was not in need so they set up four-year payment plan and paid every penny with no cost reduction.

I probably did something wrong but to this day I didn't know what I would have done differently. The only people I could talk to were the hospital and they only cared about the hospital.

Given the fact that Apple and Coke but rushed to produce AI slop, and the agreements with Disney, we are going to see a metric fuck-ton of AI-generated cinema in the next decade. The broader population's tastes are absolute harbage when it comes to cinema, so I don't see why you need convincing. 40+ superhero films should be enough.