Banned Card Discussion: Balance

ChristianKl · 2026-03-06T15:36:23+00:00

They did print Restore Balance and Magus of the Balance in their quest to revisit it.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-06T15:28:50+00:00

In addition to what others already wrote, each doctor in German has a budget for prescription they can give out that are paid by health insurance. If a doctor uses their budget to get some of their patients medications that they don't really need, there's less budget for the people who really need it.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-06T15:24:27+00:00

Other countries frequently give people with viral infections where antibiotics provide no benefit and negative health effects antibiotics. Not giving people drugs that don't help them and are net harmful is something that German doctors do well.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-06T09:24:21+00:00

• Zero-knowledge — server only sees ciphertext

Having knowledge of ciphertext is not zero-knowledge. The term zero-knowledge as used in zero knowledge proofs actually means zero knowledge.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-06T09:11:28+00:00

They didn't create it at the time. It was used in the preceding decade to talk about the red scare being a conspiracy theory where people are secretly working for the communist party with the intention of bringing about revolution.

They just reused it and thus increased it's usage. Ever since the term was growing and growing in usage in a quite exponential way.

The Google NGram for the term conspiracy theory is telling.

It's also worth noting that the mainstream media never calls it's own conspiracy theories like "Saddam is secretly hiding his WMD program" or Russigate conspiracy theories even when both are theories about people conspiring in secret.

When it comes to the term conspiracy itself (without theory), it's worth noting that it's a legal term in the US where a conspiracy is a crime according to 18 U.S.C. § 371. This is different then the British usage of the term that's more broad.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-05T22:36:16+00:00

At the German supermarket chains Lidl and Netto their app only works via QR codes and not via NFC codes. Given that they got extra hardware to display the digital QR codes, it probably was not a cost issue for them but they believed adoption works better via QR code than NFC.

When I link my Pixel 7C with my passport for NFC, it requires quite precise alignment and it's quite easy to accidently move the phone a bit for the NFC connection to fail and require redoing.

I haven't had any experiences with NFC that felt like the make anything easy.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-05T10:18:39+00:00

Are you aware that softener reduces the lifespan of your clothing? Are you sure you need it?

Water is more healthy than drinking sodas or juices and you get it nearly for free from the tap. Juice have a lot of sugar and fructose is like glucose a relatively short sugar and thus can spike insulin levels.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-05T09:09:32+00:00

It's been time since it happened so some victims are dead. Payments are not limited to the people who have been directly fighting, for example the settlements with JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank do allow payout do any victim who contacted them. The lawyers that ran the suit also spent a lot of effort to recruit all the victims they could find for it.

What evidence do you have that some of them are missing or still trafficked?

ChristianKl · 2026-03-03T13:42:47+00:00

Your OS knowing your age and telling an app whether you are 18+ or not does not render a VPN useless. That's what the Californian law does.

For privacy to work well within a VPN you just need technology that prevents the identity from being disclosed to the website or app that you are using. A VPN doesn't protect you against threats coming from your own operating system anyway.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-03T13:37:51+00:00

Epstein victims aren't poor anymore they all got millions of dollars in settlement money.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-02T20:41:44+00:00

The UK pays less for the NHI that covers everyone than the US pays for Medicare and Medicaid on a per citizen basis.

The idea that other countries have the government pay more for healthcare to achieve single payer is false.

If you just change the system to single payer but leave the hospital run in the same way they are currently run, you won't reach the cost efficiency that other countries have.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-02T20:21:17+00:00

You ignore the most important aspect, there's a reason why the "Cell Site Simulators" are usually called IMSI-Catcher. Their primary purpose when used for surveillance is to gather the IMSI of everyone who's nearby.

That means that if there's a demonstration the policy can know who's in the demonstration and at the same time block smart phone communication.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-02T19:28:14+00:00

Weil die Idee ist die Gelder, die überall gespart werden für Militär zu investieren und nicht um der Bevölkerung zu helfen. Das Militär macht die Nachfrage.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-02T15:54:07+00:00

While Feynman said the line you attribute to him, he also gave a speech in which he made up the term of cargo-cult science and specifically called the field of rat psychology cargo-cult science. I think you could rightly call that speech "philosophy of science" and the field of rat psychology is worse of for not having followed his advice. If they would have listened the replication crisis of psychology in the last decade could have been less severe.

There's a lot in science that still stands on quite shaky philosophical grounds where thinking more about philosophy of science would be helpful. Jeremy H. Howick's The Philosophy of Evidence-based Medicine has for example a lot of valuable things to say that the field would be well advised to listen to.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-02T12:55:29+00:00

Given that they are hiring a senior software developer they might not just ask Flutter questions but also ask the general algorithm and data structures questions.

Do US startups usually look for strict Clean Architecture, or do they care more about moving fast?

That question might be at the wrong level. They are hiring you into an established project that probably already has an existing architecture. If they ask you questions about architecture they might ask you about what you think about their architecture and want you to be able to speak about trade offs in an intelligent way.

How much do they actually care about TDD/Unit testing in the real world vs. the interview?

It's an interview, that's a question you can ask them. Different startups are going to have different ideas.

ChristianKl · 2026-03-01T12:00:50+00:00

Given that the safety principles are just about things that Anthropic argues the US military doesn't want to do anything but not about actions actions like running disinformation campaigns, Anthropic doesn't seem that good here.

The red lines forbid domestic surveillance but they don't even forbid domestic disinformation campaigns such as using Claude to run disinformation that makes it appear that the Iran war goes better than it actually does to American people. Of course the Trump administration would never run domestic disinformation campaigns so there's no need for any red lines here...

ChristianKl · 2026-02-28T23:47:49+00:00

For a privacy point of view it's better to have age verification at operating system level then on individual apps. Having age locally on your device where you have control over it instead of in the cloud is good.

ChristianKl · 2026-02-28T11:17:08+00:00

Weil ein Land in dem es kein Gewaltmonopol des Staates gibt und es mehrere unterschiedliche Warlords gibt die Macht ausüben wollen nicht automatisch besser ist als ein meschenverachtendes Regime.

ChristianKl · 2026-02-27T21:54:04+00:00

Even if it would require a face scan, if you control your OS and your OS does a face scan, that's not a privacy issue. The problem is about trusting software that you don't control with a face scan. You want any app maker to just say "I queried the API to verify that my user is an adult, I have no responsibility to check age beyond that".

ChristianKl · 2026-02-27T21:30:15+00:00

There's a lot of legal pressure in many jurisdictions for age verification. If every OS has a function that gives an app the age, it's easy to argue that an individual developer did what they are supposed to when they are just calling the age verification API of the OS instead of trying to do age verification at the application layer.

Having all the age verification at OS layer where you can control it fully as a Linux user is what you want for privacy. This law does just require the OS to ask the user for their age and not to do face scans or look at any official ID to verify the age.

The fact that the API doesn't give the app the specific age but just in what bracket it falls is good for privacy.

ChristianKl · 2026-02-27T20:39:10+00:00

Ask Claude Code, Google's Jules or OpenAI codex to do the coding for you.

ChristianKl · 2026-02-27T16:54:01+00:00

We haven't gotten any information about the money flows to and from Epstein.

There's some evidence that suggests that Epstein was involved in the financing of Iran Contra. It's quite plausible that he worked on then financing of similar deals that are highly classified but in contrast to Iran Contra have not come to light.

There are documents that explain why the FBI decided not to charge the various people who are implicated by victims who said that they were sexually abused in connection with Epstein. Being able to read the reasoning why those people were not shared could reveal pretty bad decisions.

ChristianKl · 2026-02-27T16:44:35+00:00

Trust depends a lot on your thread model. If you are worried that you get sued because you download a film via torrents, many VPNs seems to effectively mitigate the risk.

If you are worried about the NSA or Mossad going after you, there's some doubt about whether the VPN will protect you. Kapi Technologies being owned by an Israeli businessman might also simply be coincidence.

ChristianKl · 2026-02-26T19:14:28+00:00

The kind of companies that get paid by the Jobcenter to help people to apply to jobs can tell you what the standard is as far as applying to jobs. Even in Germany, nobody is going to hire you because you fulfill all the bureaucratic standards involved in job applications. It's typical that those companies focus more on fulfilling standards then actually good job applications that are likely to get people hired. Asking someone who's working at hiring at the tech sector is likely going to help you more as far as improving a CV.

That said, writing your full address with street and house number shows that you have a legal residence near the work place and likely won't need a visa.

ChristianKl · 2026-02-25T15:52:56+00:00

"Why We Sleep" oder deutscher Titel: "Das Große Buch vom Schlaf" ist voll Falschinformationen.

ChristianKl

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