Putin has exactly one strategy: to remain in power. The revival of the empire has absolutely nothing to do with this. The annexation of Crimea was needed not to revive the empire, but to discredit the idea of revolution in Ukraine that happend in 2014. The war in Ukraine - is the price for the revolution that Putin forced Ukraine to pay, because if the revolution does not have a price, the revolution will happen in Russia
And instead of buying more powerful hardware you can try to get the always free oracle VPS (4vcpu ARM, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage), do your compute stuff there, and keep the RPI as pi-hole/home assistant only. It will save you on electricity bill as well.
Just because you haven't been bitten yet, does not in any way mean you won't be, and crucially: it doesn't preclude others following your advice being bitten.
At least in my case I was not presented an obviously free option and the shapes given matched the always free tier, despite not being included in it.
I'm a reasonably smart individual, I did not click through blindly and made a concerted effort to discover the free option and was taken aback by the fact that I couldn't find an option that was branded as being free and was assured by a friend (working for Apiary in Oracle) that it was fine to pick the shape I picked.
Look, Regardless of how it came to pass: I should have been permitted to cancel. I continually paid what I considered to be the final bill (3 times in fact) until ultimately I was charged for an amount that it was not possible for me to actually pay (imagine trying to pay 0.1 US Cents or $0.001).
I know we like to think that we're smarter than other posters and that "maybe they were holding it wrong", but I can't put into words how sincerely you'd be mistaken in thinking that in this case. You are very likely thinking while reading this: "Yeah, but that wouldn't happen to me, it hasn't happened, I feel safe enough in my decisions I could get out of it" -- you'd be wrong.
Living in central Europe, when Air Canada gave me check (compensation for the rescheduled flight) I went through a lot of effort to cash it. Once in a lifetime experience!
> I'd be interested in why you had to go through alot of effort to cash your check.
I’m not the commenter you are asking from I also used to live in central europe. There as far as I can tell the concept of a “check” simply doesn’t exist. So much so that I don’t even know what is the equivalent word in the local language. If I would get one I would need to go to my bank in person and ask them if they can do anything with. I would already count that as a hassle, but I just looked it up online and it seems my bank doesn’t handle checks. There are rummours online that some other banks do cash checks, but it seems some of those have changed their policy since and they are no longer accepting checks either.
All in all it works as well as being paid with a rai stone or a cowry sea shell, while lacking the aesthetic benefits of those.
For me, in Ireland, cashing a US check through my bank teller costs 150ish eur (that's one hundred and fifty, not a buck fifty) and takes 6 weeks. They basically have to hand process it and send it to their US correspondent bank.
At one point, I got tax refund and stimulus checks from the Treasury, and it turned out to just be easier to endorse them to my remaining US account and mail them to the branch that has my account.
In theory I could use the bank's remote deposit capture service, but: 1) The checks were too big, there's a ~$2500 limit on RDC, and 2) The bank has complained in the past that I'm not supposed to use it when I'm overseas. There's some regulation that they're worried about.
I've seen a couple of checks in Ireland that haven't been from the US, mainly tax refunds IIRC, but they're super rare and no ATMs will take them. They'll take Euros for deposits, but not checks. So it's a trip into see the Cash desk at the bank.
Only one bank in Poland handles them, I had to open a separate account just to cash it. As far as I remember the cashing in process took some time (about a week maybe?) and the fees were about 25% of the check value (operations + currency exchange).
There's no option in doing it from the app/ATM afaik.
I don't want to dox you but I have to ask, what bank in Poland do you use that wouldn't take a check?
I've got a friend there and he says he has no problem cashing checks at his bank and has never heard of a bank not taking a check and there were no fees for cashing checks.
The exchange rate sucks but that has nothing todo with a check
EDIT he did say it can take a week for the money to clear, so that is a big downside.
Well, my bank did not handle them - the cashier told me that there is only one bank that handles them (Pekao SA) so I didn't waste time searching for others.
Maybe your friend has a company/businesses account? The services may be different than for a personal one.
I wish we'd stop trying to make broken languages work. This feels like hill-climbing into the strangest local optimum possible. JS is not the best example of an interpreted language. Wouldn't it be better to put Python in the browser than to put JS on the server? Can't wait for WASM to be a first-rate citizen on the web so we don't have to deal with this anymore.
I don't think the comparison is entirely fair since one of the main attractions of TS is that it runs in the browser. Python can unfortunately not fill the same role right now. So I'd keep that in mind while looking at that ranking. But yes, I see many people like it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it's still too JavaScript-y for me.
> Wouldn't it be better to put Python in the browser than to put JS on the server?
I think that's a categorical "no", because Python isn't an objectively better language than JavaScript. I'm saying this as a Python developer since v1.5 (>20 years).
Yes Node.js ships with what is effectively a very thin standard library for some low level things like interacting with the file system, the process model, some security features like TLS.
I find it hilarious that "short squeeze" is a concept that is supposedly well-defined and inevitable if certain market conditions are met, but at the same time so ill-defined that we cannot tell whether it has happened.
For whatever it's worth, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze says it definitely happened, but at the same time it offers zero sources for its claim that "the rush to buy shares to cover those positions as the price rose caused it to rise even further".
It was never going to happen. Look at the volume of shares that have been trading. There has been ample opportunity to cover any shorts. The conditions to force a squeeze never existed.
Furthermore, has anyone actually demonstrated Melvin actually shorted the stock? It would seem like they owned a few puts. Puts don't get squeezed, they just expire out of the money.
short positions do not have to be reported to SEC, so you just can't know. there's ample evidence that melvin's short positions have been closed at about the time GME rose to $150 the first time - a lot of other stocks enjoyed the same general upwards movement indicating somebody closing a diverse lot of shorts.
It's desperate people trying to tell themselves that they're going to be rich soon against all evidence. It's why the date for the supposed squeeze keeps moving.
Signal requires phone number in order not to store your contact list on their servers. Instead of id's/email addresses/nicknames they are using your phone contact list. IMHO that's better for privacy.
That depends on what you want with privacy. If you'd want to chat anonymously, having to use your real phone number is a bummer. At least in my country, it's getting harder and harder to get a SIM-card that is not tied to your name.
The alternative is getting a burner SIM-card. Though, that will become harder once more prepaid providers require your ID.
Signal appear to have been making efforts to switch unique identifier to an arbitrary ID, I believe this is a move towards removing the phone number requirement. I can't say for sure.
I know their infra codebase pretty well as I've worked on it for projects unrelated to Signal/Open Whisper Systems. Unfortunately their public Github is usually ~3 months behind their running infra and often released much later than the equivalent functionality in the clients hits the public.
> Signal appear to have been making efforts to switch unique identifier to an arbitrary ID, I believe this is a move towards removing the phone number requirement. I can't say for sure.
> Our goal with PINs is to enable non-phone # based addressing. Since that will mean your Signal contacts can't live in your address book anymore, they're Signal's responsibility. Every other messenger does this by storing them in plaintext, but that's not private, so we built SVR.
Thanks for that. I had a quick look through their blog but couldn't find anything to reference.
It's been a few months since I worked with their codebase but at the time it relied on Intel SGX for the contact storage Enclave, which is now considered compromised[0]. Additionally, if you wanted to run your own, the requirements to get licensed to use the Enclave are non-trivial.
Opinions are my own, I represent no one, etc, etc.
Yeah I think that's still true. That said, as I understand it, the enclave is used as "proof" that they're running the server-side code they say they do (which should be protecting the data), not the data itself. I could definitely be wrong there though.
> Signal requires phone number in order not to store your contact list on their servers.
That does not make sense. There is no relation between 'using phone number as id' and 'storing contact list on servers'. E-mail and same other communication protocols also do not use phone numbers and do not store contact list on servers.
Yes but do they offer the same experience? Signal figured out that you probably have a list of contacts that you want to talk to. If they use mobile numbers as identifiers then they don't have to keep the contact list - it's already there on your phone. IMHO it's a good compromise.
I'm not an advocate for Signal, but I totally get this approach.
That's very reasonable then. It's not a deal breaking issue especially so moving from or compared to less trustworthy entities already having your phone number (e.g. WhatsApp), but it had left me wondering, I thought it was used in the most part for authentication.
https://visitukraine.today/blog/3375/navalny-is-dead-what-wa...