gambiting (u/gambiting)

gambiting commented on Privately-Owned Rail Cars amtrak.com/privately-owne... · Posted by u/jasoncartwright

TylerE · 2 days ago

The people doing this at this point are mostly rich rail enthusiasts. No one is doing this to actually get around. The most popular routes are the more scenic ones, like through the mountains. They’re not hitching a car into the Acela to go from NYC to Boston.

gambiting · 2 days ago

And rail car enthusiast associations, which usually consist of passionate but not very rich people - they will pool money together to afford a trip like this every now and then, so usually they'll go "ok we got 20k in membership fees this quarter, where can we go with this money" - so yeah, it will absolutely matter to them.

gambiting commented on How well does the money laundering control system work? journals.uchicago.edu/doi... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

nine_k · 2 days ago

Yes. Sadly, 9/11 is the classic case of terrorists having won :(

gambiting · 2 days ago

Well, no, not really - Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit attrocity so great against the American people that they will have to look into who those people are and why they did it, at which point hopefully they will discover their own government's work in the middle east and rise up against the government in protest.

Obviously, that didn't happen - I don't think your average American had any interest in looking into any of it, they just went "Arab people bad, let's invade", and of course accepted even greater invigilation and intrusion into their daily life and travel than ever before, all in the name of "safety". So yeah, terrorists made our lives miserable - but they failed to achieve their goals.

gambiting commented on Privately-Owned Rail Cars amtrak.com/privately-owne... · Posted by u/jasoncartwright

wodenokoto · 2 days ago

That's what makes this interesting to me. Because I feel like, if you own an operatable train car that can be hooked up to AmTrak, then you not only don't have to ask for the pricing, but do you even have to google to see if you can hook it up?

gambiting · 2 days ago

Well, you personally don't, but someone who works for you will have to find those details and work this out.

gambiting commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

marcus_holmes · 3 days ago

How does this work, though?

We can't just have "send me a picture of your ID" because that is pointlessly easy to spoof - just copy someone else's ID.

So there must be some verification that you, the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies. The UK is rapidly finding out that that is extremely difficult to do reliably. Video doesn't really work reliably on all cases, and still images are too easily spoofed. It's not really surprising, though, because identifying humans reliably is hard even for humans.

If we do it at the network level - like assigning a government-issued network connection to a specific individual, so the system knows that any traffic from a given IP address belongs to that specific individual. There are obvious problems with this model, not least that IP addresses were never designed for this, and spoofing an IP becomes identity theft.

We also do need bot access for things, so there must be some method of granting access to bots.

I think that to make this work, we'd need to re-architect the internet from the ground up. To get there, I don't think we can start from here.

gambiting · 3 days ago

UK is stupidly far behind on this though. On one hand the digitization of government services is really well done(thanks to the fantastic team behind .gov websites), but on the other it's like being in the dark ages of tech. My native country has physical ID cards that contain my personal certificate that I can use to sign things or to - gasp! - prove that I am who I say I am. There is a government app that you can use to scan your ID card using the NFC chip in your phone, after providing it with a password that you set when you got the card it produces a token that can then be used to verify your identy or sign documents digitally - and those signatures legally have the same weight as real paper signatures.

UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough. But my general point is that UK could just look over at how other countries are doing it and copy good solutions to this problem, instead of whatever nonsense is being done right now with the age verification process being entirely outsourced to private companies.

gambiting commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

d0gsg0w00f · 3 days ago

I'm right there with you. I work in tech, but I don't want to fuss with tech when I'm off the clock. Like, it all annoys me and just feels like work.

When my router breaks I just buy a new one. When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.

I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered. Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket? I have a rule "no new chargers" when buying stuff. If it comes with some proprietary charger I make a half-assed attempt to keep up with it but I just throw it in the trash after about 6 months and buy something with a cord.

Maybe I'm an old man, but maybe that means I know now that life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.

gambiting · 3 days ago

>>I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered.

How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.

>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.

I mean I hope you recognize the incredible priviledge behind that statement - for a lot of people tinkering with their laptop isn't about being a hobby IT person, it's about the fact that a new laptop costs half their salary so it's quite literally not an option.

>> life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.

Sure but you make it sound like it's a chore - most people(I'd guess) set up HA because it provides value in their lives, that other, more simpler devices cannot provide. So at the cost of X number of hours once a year you get a device that consolidates all of your home automation and data. If you could buy a premade device that did it without fuss - I'm sure a lot of people would.

gambiting commented on Calling Their Bluff anguscheng.com/post/2025-... · Posted by u/4pkjai

henry2023 · 4 days ago

In principle yeah, it’s an abuse of charge back. In practice, Visa, MC, and Amex will just refund you without even asking any question.

gambiting · 4 days ago

I wonder if that's an American thing, every time I tried to do a chargeback here in the UK on a credit card my bank said they have to investigate first, give the seller an opportunity to respond, and only if that fails they will refund me after 60 days. While everything I see online suggests that Americans can pretty much do an at-will chargeback for any reason with instantaneous effect?

gambiting commented on Calling Their Bluff anguscheng.com/post/2025-... · Posted by u/4pkjai

danieldk · 4 days ago

efficiency

Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues.

The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)?

Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them.

Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.

gambiting · 4 days ago

My favourite anecdote regarding German EV chargers - I was trying to charge at a motorway stop couple years back, and the stupid charger needs an app, ok, got the app. And it's even in English, success! But.....when I try to add a payment card it says the billing address has to be in Germany. Ok, I'm determined so I ring their helpline.....only to be told it's open Monday to Saturday 9am till 4pm(it was Sunday).

Honestly never seen this issue in any other EU country.

gambiting commented on Calling Their Bluff anguscheng.com/post/2025-... · Posted by u/4pkjai

AnthonyMouse · 4 days ago

> I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.

The thing I don't understand is why people keep expecting them to. Who even wants Google to be the police? To actually act as a deterrent you need the ability to impose penalties, and for that you need the actual police.

All Google can do is close their account, and then there are no real penalties so they just make new ones until they figure out how to beat the fraud detection system.

And if you try to impose penalties on third parties for not being able to solve a problem they're structurally unable to solve, all they can do is crank up the false positive rate and mess things up for innocent people.

Stop even asking for this. It's a dystopia. Put the actual scammers in prison instead.

gambiting · 4 days ago

I don't want them to be the police. I want them to give me the thing that I'm searching for first, not whoever outspent everyone else on SEO this year. If I'm searching for "Canadian visa application" then the first result must be the official government website for this. No policing involved - just good old accurate search, like Google used to be known for.

gambiting commented on How much do electric car batteries degrade? sustainabilitybynumbers.c... · Posted by u/xnx

brewdad · 5 days ago

How do those compare to Leafs driven in the EU? Leafs in the US market certainly experienced large degradation. None of those other vehicles have been available in the US market.

Wondering if the driving pattern of US vs EU drivers or the more extreme temps (high and low) in the US are the real culprit in the degradation of air-cooled batteries.

gambiting · 5 days ago

EU leafs have also massively degraded, the first gen leafs go very very cheap because you can do like 40-50 miles on the battery at most.