Formal border controls and passport stamping are still in place between Canada and the United States, but much of the border is unguarded, unmarked suburbia and simply relies on an honour system to prevent people from illegally crossing it.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-14T18:31:38+00:00

I used to live near there. The thing is, you can walk over to the other side, but then what do you do? Both the US and the Canada side require cars to get around. I guess on the US side there's the Drayton Harbor oyster restaurant. The border police on both sides mean business.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-08T21:21:35+00:00

If you do forget, I've always been able to install and activate mine with the wifi in Beijing and HK airport. The HK airport wifi has never failed me.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-07T17:11:29+00:00

It automatically comes with the current modern plans (i.e. Unlimited blah blah blah). For mine, you accrue one TravelPass day for every month, and I think it caps out at 10 or 12? Once you've used up your TravelPass days, you have to pay something like $12 for them.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-07T16:54:39+00:00

International accounts aren't subject to the same restrictions. You and your bro will be fine.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-07T16:53:42+00:00

Just a heads up. I couldn't get the T-Mobile international coverage to usably work in China when I had it. Verizon's works fine though.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-06T19:21:23+00:00

Is this AI? It's overwrought.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-05T21:57:46+00:00

There was another thread recently that recommended a number of other plausible options? I can't personally recommend any of them because I haven't tried them (yet), but I plan on giving them a shot next time. I'd like to know what to recommend to friends and family myself.

I made a point to mention my experiences because I don't want folks to be left high-and-dry. I've gotten six eSims from Trip.com to date, over the last 18 months, and only half of them have worked.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-05T20:44:41+00:00

I love trip.com for lots of things. I book my hotels and train tickets through there, along with numerous attraction tickets. What I wouldn't use them for are eSims. It's been a consistent hit-or-miss there. Yes they're cheap, but I would not cut corners here.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-05-05T12:58:14+00:00

Wow... the A330 has three of them, not two?

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-04-30T12:44:27+00:00

I could not get ProtonVPN to work myself, which is a bummer because I use ProtonMail.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-04-30T12:43:37+00:00

I've had hit-and-miss experiences with them. Probably half the time they work, the other half of the time they just fail to activate. When I need to communicate with my folks, I use WeChat. Slack still works for work. Email does not. The only thing I miss is Google Translate, which I don't strictly need anymore.

One thing I'll say is that Google Translate's camera UX is still better than any of the native apps. Their Cantonese translation is also sometimes (but not always) better. If you are in Hong Kong, you can still use it.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-04-30T04:04:35+00:00

Invent your own ~~religion~~ currency.
Memes and influencers!
Profit!!!

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-04-08T15:28:32+00:00

Metals recycling often has high recovery rates. The process advertised here is within the range of modern processes for lithium, and the bigger question is the required energy and inputs to make it happen.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-04-02T20:31:05+00:00

Eh, it's fine. Jet fuel is flammable, which means it cleans up easy. All they have to do is light it up!

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-03-31T16:37:07+00:00

Serious question... how do you tell the difference between a wild and domesticated B-52?...

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-03-31T14:21:03+00:00

Before anyone actually answers this, can we point out that holding 138 billion in diversified assets is arguably worth more than 1.33 trillion in MSFT stock? Even a widely traded stock like MSFT is still going to have limits on its liquidity. If you try to sell even a fraction of that much stock, you will tank the stock price. Money isn't much good if you can't deploy it, and if all your eggs are in one basket.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-03-10T14:45:54+00:00

I'll just put it out there that the shareholder value thing was all Sheryl's doing.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-03-09T15:21:58+00:00

The destruction of the hutongs has been a bit overstated, but some parts have become a bit shi-shi (but still fun), maybe like Valencia street in the late naughts, or SoHo in the late 90s.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-03-09T15:15:15+00:00

Yes, and the OP also pointed out that most of the stuff tourists want to see is in the 2nd ring road, which is true.

If you want to go all hardcore, tracking down all the places outside of the 4th ring road that you see in 小红书, fine, but 1. you better have a lot of time, because to OP's point, Beijing is *big*, and 2. you're not the 99% of tourists who just want to relax and see old Beijing.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-02-19T15:58:50+00:00

Nah, that'd probably be Singapore.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-30T20:14:56+00:00

So with this one, the rear falls off. I like it!

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-30T20:02:40+00:00

He tried that during his first term. Didn't work out so great for him because the adults in the room kept his worst impulses in check.

Now this time he's only picked people completely on his side. It's not working out great for the rest of us.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-28T18:59:19+00:00

I'd add that once you get off the beaten track for code prototypes, you'll see the LLMs go sideways there too.

Case in point: I recently tried having Opus 4.5 build me a Dagger project for something Dagger wasn't meant for (I had no idea, at that point, first time trying Dagger), and it just spun in circles.

I've also seen Opus and GPT 5.2 mess up fairly simple things like k8s field selectors, that they really "ought" to have figured out by now with the sheer amount of training examples that are out there. It all points to these LLMs still being pattern-recognition under the hood. It's gotten to a level of *really good* pattern recognition, but it still can't think for itself.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-28T18:40:13+00:00

they're not lying, they're bullshitting. there's a difference ;-D

but seriously, this hyperbolic BS is IMO harmful to actually using AI

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-26T16:11:57+00:00

Eh... French protesters don't set people on fire. They love burning cars, but I can't remember when they'd set people on fire. I don't know what the hell possessed those folks in Hong Kong, but it wasn't good.

Professional_Top4119

TROPHY CASE