Why would a bank require someone to go to a branch to change their phone number? I can change my contact info on the website for all the financial institutions I use.
The branch is the last place where a real person meets another real person. Even that person looks up everything on their terminal, and the whole thing is probably security theater, but I think having at least one physical backstop is a good idea.
My banks require physical presence for stuff like changing phone numbers and nominees. We get OTPs on our phones, so that makes perfect sense.
My mom works at a credit union and the staff are constantly saving people from scams just because the customer came in and the staff had a chance to notice something fishy happening.
I can too, but the difference is that I'm also not the Pope. Someone supplanting the identity of some rando is a negligible risk for the bank compared to supplanting the Pope.
Also in adjacent countries like Vietnam etc., where even ragtag street food vendors have a QR code sticker on their stall/cart.
It's so common that people pay without even talking or confirming; I've seen customers just take their phone out, point at the QR, and walk away, and the shopkeeper says nothing. I'm assuming the shopkeeper gets a notification on their phone and trusts regular customers,
but how easy would it be to secretly place your own bank account's QR code on top of a shop's QR? People who wait for a confirmation notification will catch it immediately, but by then the customer has already paid the attacker and the transaction can't be just reversed. Repeat it in several places, and a thief to snatch quite a few payments before the parasite stickers are all taken down.
I think partly because Google and Apple controlled the contactless bits of the phones for many years, the non-OS-makers like WeChat and AliPay made use of the open technology of QR codes. I think theoretically you could build equivalent things as they have with NFC today on those platforms but on the other hand being able to set up a “POS” with nothing more than a printer does have an appeal to it, even if writable nfc stickers cost 5 cents you still have to go buy some.
I think there is also something about how easy it is for a business to adopt a QR code by just needing to print one out instead of having to go out and buy a whole payment terminal.
QR payments in china was already prevasive before contactless payments became prevasive in the west. And as others say: not all phones supported nfc at the time. Remember iBeacons on iP5? Wechat and Alipay was already everywhere by then
Having been there recently, it's about as annoying as taking out your phone to pay for something. Some systems also support NFC now, though the most common is still QR. Also helps that their QR scanning tech/transaction processing is really fast, many transactions were as fast or even faster than me scanning with a card from my experience.
(Also if you want to talk annoying payments don't get me started on how insane it is that the US still requires me to hand over a physical card at most restaurants to take over to their register... sorry I just can't help but get annoyed by this lol)
That is an incredibly long bow to draw from someone that obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is willing to make massive jumps to conclusions. Do you know how ecommerce works? I agree that it is a bit absurd, but not nearly as absurd as your claim of “the only reason”.
A few millennia too late for that: the “mark of the beast” is just money — “so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark”. How does one buy or sell without money? Otherwise we would call it bartering.
For better or worse there's no such thing as "Europe" despite the wish of many on HN.
Such a system exists in, for example, Switzerland. Actually there are two such systems that aren't compatible. There are QR code invoices for domestic payments, where the code includes the target bank account details, amount to pay, transaction details etc. That's scanned by your bank app, direct p2p payment. And there is Twint, which is a domestic consumer payments app. The QR codes often contain short one time use codes that are looked up server side.
Why do people use them: because it's easy and the fees are low. Banks give you QR code invoices even for small businesses for free. Twint is a bit like Venmo, you can send to numbers in your address book for free, and for businesses they can do website integrations easily and even print out static QR codes to stick on market stalls etc.
Twint isn't as fast, convenient or reliable as NFC card payments so the card/tech companies still have an advantage. But it's been getting better. Maybe at some point the NFC elements in the card tech will become flexible enough to allow arbitrary mobile apps to be as good as tap-to-pay.
QR codes are used in direct account-to-account transactions. They encode all the data like the IBAN-based account number, bank code, requested sum etc. that you may find on invoices in a way that’s much more convenient than typing over by hand.
Apple Pay meanwhile uses your credit/debit card to perform the transaction, the other party needs a terminal or payment gateway and is required to pay fees to Visa or MasterCard.
It is far from being universal. And the more annoying part of that is that there are at least 4 incompatible "standards" as to the format of the QRcode.
Or if you want to play a bit, have a browser with some extension that breaks websites and show them "it doesn't work on my phone". Pranks apart, in my experience, I always got a paper menu when I asked for it.
Your comment's parent might know very little about ADHD, but your critique shows an antiquated view as well. It's not only the ADHD person that needs to change by any means available so that they fit the expectation of the system. The system, too, is in need of change, so that we accommodate more diverse people. Improving the environment that you operate in goes a very long way and might enable exactly the kind of change that makes children and adults with ADHD thrive. Medication is just one option. CBT and more flexible environments are as important, probably even more so.
It's not an either/or thing. At least for my kid, it's been a combination of the 3 that have helped, but if you dropped a component (including the medication), she wouldn't be doing nearly as well.
I agree with the label being a huge problem. It's basically compressing a multitude of individual characters with huge differences on multiple dimensions of behavior into a binary label, which people confronted with someone bearing that label then decompress based on their personal view on the topic, which is like an algorithm trained on caricatures of what society portraits as ADHD. Your comment sounds like you're doing the same mistake: you take your favorite solution for a complex problem, which (I agree here!) might actually be sufficient for some, a relief for many, any at least good or not harmful for everyone else, but you try to market it as the only necessary solution while invalidating everyone's needs that go beyond this solution. It creates the reactions that you can see in already a handful comments that basically call for the individual to accommodate to the system at all cost...
That little man has eroded any respect that he might have been a priori granted with his publicly documented descent into a vibecoding mania. I'm still in disbelief that the very silly photographer guy is the CEO of ycombinator. Ah well, it was a good era.
isnt it the same sort of reason you guys have actors for presidents? its about how well you can sell the message, not how good you are behind the scenes, thats what normies are for.
Thats a big part of it. Customers go into a flock demo with motivated reasoning. "Im scared. Im not sure i should be this scared."
Seeing a vulnerable set of kids happily playing and hearing a confident voice say "A shooter could end all this. We can prevent it" validates that and closes the sale.
If a cautious pragmatist goes to the demo thinking "i know crime stats have declined for decades and im concerned about misuse of technology." Then a performatively confident person says "this is a component of a massive surveillance state ripe for misuse. It will give us footage of crimes and only stop a small percentage of them," how well do you think it would sell?
That strategy didn't work out well for Makerbot. Tech companies actually need competent leadership with a tech background. You can't pretend they are interchangeable with some run of the mill commodities producer and adopt the same leadership practices.
To the best of my knowledge Linus Torvalds isn't posting walls of text to Github breathlessly announcing he's 810x-ed [1] his "logical lines of code/day" compared to what he was doing in 2013.
And, lest you think generating "600,000 lines of production code in 60 days" [2] is potentially problematic, has also fully solved the primary failure modes of AI coding identified by Andrej Karpathy, once and for all: "Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered." [1]
As someone who has experienced mania, including with a programming bent specifically, it's hard not to raise an eyebrow at the idiosyncratic human-y bits of his thinking floating up from the sea of em-dashes and it's not X it's Y in his manifestos.
Plus volunteering this [3] in an interview:
“I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (Tan’s assistant confirmed to us that he was joking. ...)
It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I remember, you know, sort of being on modafinil...
(Not who you responded to.) You clearly don't know anyone who lives with a condition that would cause manic episodes.
They're terrible. Imagine being super focused and productive and excited by how much you're accomplishing as you're banging out innovative code and solving complicated problems with brilliant elegant solutions. Next thing you know you've been awake for two days and your mind no longer works but you're still super motivated and trying to make sense of what you're working on but it no longer tracks and you literally can't keep a line of code in your head long enough to combine it with the one that comes after it. And then you give up and try to watch streaming content for the next two days while your body begins to hurt terribly and you're dehydrated because you kept forgetting to drink water and you can't follow any plot-lines and your mind is mush and then when you finally fall asleep you wake up feeling like you got hit by a truck because you're so undernourished because you had no appetite for much of the episode and your body is literally failing / on the way to starvation.
For bonus points, you might even experience disordered thinking with hallucinations and paranoia and think someone has hacked into your computer and is trying to frame you for crimes and then destroy all your devices and drives, which I did once late at night before things got much worse and I came to in an ER and had to be restrained. It's super cool.
Calling out signs that someone might be experiencing this type of disorder is not being critical of their passion. It's putting notice out that they might not be operating in the same reality that you and I currently occupy.
Just commenting to say, from a place of empathy, that you're right and that it's hard for people to understand what mania looks like in someone if you haven't experienced it first-or-second-hand. You see it a few times and it becomes obvious. In the moment it can be disorienting and cause you to question your own reality because theirs seems so influential and motivated. I hope you're doing well these days.
> My mother has bipolar disorder, but please, tell me more about my life experiences.
I told you about mine, not yours. And her bipolar experience also isn't yours. You didn't go through that, but I did and she did. You experienced it by proxy.
It's it anything like the comments I see on here defending Flock, it'll just be a bunch of attempting to scare people with the idea of crime, and disparaging anyone in favor of privacy as being pro-crime.
I've looked at doing this a few times. I don't have references handy but there are cheaper atomic oscillators available now, under $1000. Still to expensive for me to justify it but one of these years I'll find one cheap.
I have an NTP clock that uses GPS PPS and has a local TXDO. For any reasonable amount of time that you'd be out of GPS (barring nuclear war) a TXDO should be plenty sufficient for any sane time-related needs at a tiny fraction of the cost. Serving as a frequency reference for radio or precision counters or other semi-exotic (for at home) is the only reason I can see to actually have CSAC other than cool factor. Which, fair.
That 'local TXDO' is most likely being governed by some kind of phase lock on the PPS or some other divisor and may well lead to terrible clock jitter in the short term while giving you insane precision over the longer term. Allan deviation plots made by a device clocked by a standard that is better than the one that you are checking is the only way to be sure how good (or bad) things really are.
I have a couple of GPSDOs here and it is fun to play them against each other, the differences in the short term can be substantial, but over anything more than a few days they are extremely accurate.
Also how much short-term inaccuracy there is depends on the type of oscillator used. An OCXO will (usually) have less short-term jitter and better stability with ambient temperature changes than a chip-scale atomic clock module, but will drift more than the atomic clock long-term. The really expensive setups combine various clocks to maximize stability over all the durations of interest & minimize influence from various external factors (temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, external magnetic fields, other EMI, gravitational bias, etc.).
Gravitational bias is a really fun one since you can easily demonstrate it & its' not immediately obvious. Take a quartz oscillator, and a reference oscillator. Measure the frequency of both. Turn the quartz oscillator on its side. The phase (and usually also frequency) will change: the physical quartz has inertia & gravitational mass, so changing its orientation changes how it oscillates. In one orientation the movement of the quartz atoms is perpendicular to the force of gravity, so both directions of oscillation are biased the same amount. In another orientation one the movement of the quartz atoms is parallel to the force of gravity, so the part of the crystal moving down accelerates a bit more than the part of the crystal moving up.
> An OCXO will (usually) have less short-term jitter and better stability with ambient temperature changes than a chip-scale atomic clock module, but will drift more than the atomic clock long-term.
Indeed! And that short term stability of a (good) OCXO is most impressive, you can fairly easily outperform a GPSDO and with a little work and a lot of attention to supply voltage and other external influences you can even (short term) outperform an atomic clock. But aging is a thing, you'll need to re-calibrate almost every week if you care about that kind of precision. I have a bunch of different standards to compare with each other and the first time I got lucky with a very good OCXO I was wondering if I had made some kind of mistake, it was that stable.
That gravitational bias thing sounds very interesting, I knew it existed but did not realize you could trivially demonstrate it like that, I'll have to try this.
I'm aware, and yeah GPS is disciplining the TXCO, but I'm saying it's stable enough for non specialty uses outside of stuff like serving as a frequency reference. If you just want a clock source for NTP without the internet then all of this is already overkill.
You're also not likely to be out of GPS for particularly long stretches of time.
You can, or used to be able to, buy 5680 rubidium references recycled from cellular base stations for around USD 100, and then get a third-party interface board to deal with the weird voltage and comms requirements. Not sure if they're still available at that price.
Don't think that's true. The drivers are bad (not sure terrible is fair, they have improved a lot) esp for older directx etc games. But Vulkan support is pretty good and that's all you need for LLMs really.
That is just Linux and politics. Linux wants to force vendors to open source theirs, Intel plays along, Nvidia as the market lead does not, so you have to use their proprietary one, which most distros do not ship by default.
That is compatible with what the comment you are replying: you don't need much to beat nVidia open drivers for linux. Intel linux drivers might be behind their Windows drivers, still ahead of nVidia's.
nVidia has zero incentives to play open for linux, they release the binary blobs, next to zero docs and support, and you deal with it. The last nVidia card I bought was 20 years ago, and it was so bad for linux (low perf and freezes for the open drivers, manual re-install hell and pray on each kernel update for the binaries) that I switched to ATI. Since then, ATI or Intel always were decent with zero headaches.
reply