I wear one of these chips on my wristwatch since the 125 kHz RFID lets me open doors and use the elevator in my building without needing to pull out my keys. It’s entirely passive so I’m guessing that the chip in question carries an ID that is read by a reader and points to an ID on some pet identification database. So she was “updating the chip” less and “keeping the database up to date” more.

Ubiquitous microchips are really quite amazing.

I think it's unavoidable to end up triggering these since we're not really that common once it lands up with the specifics. It's rarely "immigrants" as a class but more "people with ID A in country B". I'm an Indian national with permanent residence in the US who lived in the UK. I have bank accounts in all three countries and I really don't expect them to work cross nationally reliably. If anything would, it would have to be the US stuff but I wouldn't count on it.

I mean, I'd consider it important for it to work, but when it doesn't I wouldn't consider it a brutal faux pas so much as a moment of frustration at the kind of engineer who only happy-path builds.

Reading between the lines, the author of the blog post would have gone along with the verification with annoyance if the verification had worked. What seems to have prompted everything is the credit cards failing. The fact that they couldn't use Wallet and then tried manually with all five sort of illustrates that they would have gone along with it.

Edge cases like immigrants in a different land are typically unmet for these things. I remember once trying to re-activate my Google Fi SIM from my home in the UK before I returned to the US and getting a strange error message that didn't allude to the region. I got the rep on the line and they said "You're in the US, right?" and I had to bullshit something about "oh I had my VPN on" and then turned it on so I would like I was in the US and it worked then.

Anyway, there's clearly one cause and the rest is just kitchen sink argumentation.

My wife and I have a whole-genome sequenced embryo that we selected based on Orchid’s results. In our case, we were trying to avoid a specific kind of hearing loss caused by a mutation in GJB2.

People often try to bill these technologies as “trying to control everything” or “trying to make the perfect child” or all this business about “tech people think they deserve what they have due to their genetics” (paraphrasing Sasha Gusev) etc. but I don’t think that’s the driving impulse for most parents.

The reality is so much more complex than the headlines people chase. One couple who I spoke to who were considering this were afraid of the opposite of the intelligence chase. The mother was concerned that she’d pass on her Asperger’s Syndrome. Another friend of mine doesn’t want to have kids because her brothers (and other male relatives) have schizophrenia.

In my family’s case, we will not have boys (coincidence: all our female embryos are the ones unaffected) but that’s fine. Our baby girl is a beautiful happy child and even if she weren’t, she’d be mine and I’d love her as much. But being able to increase the chance she has the full sensory experience available to mankind brings me a bit of content.

I hope all of these people I have met who fear genetic disease will be able to mitigate the risks as well as we have. Ours is monogenic, but as polygenic prediction improves their chances will improve too.

People on the happy path don’t often realize what it’s like for those not on that path. In our family, a cousin had her child via her last embryo. That also happened to a friend. Imagine if the last one had a debilitating condition that could be edited out. Most parents would choose not to have that child and then they would simply be childless.

In some future world, those people could have the condition edited and they could have the child.

Finally, here are the notes I made throughout the process:

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF

And a view into my genome

https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/

And a link to my comment on an HN article on something similar: the potential for removing trisomy-21 (Down’s) from an embryo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44677834

I suspect most people will land on this where their predilections already lead them. To me, the effort to delay Mathematics education is sufficiently bad that I can dismiss the rest of that school of education without much concern. If they are right, they are right by accident and there's not much to learn there. I know there are others like me out there, and for them a quick reminder of who this person is will probably be sufficient for them to escape reading (what they will believe to be) a low-quality post. Time isn't infinite after all.

If you feel less convinced by this, it's simply that you're not in my audience. But I think it's probably worth sticking a tl;dr on the original. Let me do that.

The intellectual pedigree actually explains everything. Jo Boaler is the one responsible for charging $5k/hr to advise schools to end middle school algebra. In an amusing confluence of concepts, Garry Tan (CEO of YC - whose site we're on) describes her as "infamous and disgraced"[0].

I don't know about that, but when I discovered that San Francisco schools weren't teaching algebra I was at first impressed that American children were doing Group Theory in 8th grade (something we only learn in the 12th standard in Tamil Nadu in India where I'm from) and figured moving that to 9th isn't a big deal only to find that they meant the basic stuff (linear equations and the like, what we learn in the 7th grade).

Honestly, I can't take anyone seriously who would try so hard to set back children from learning what is fairly basic Mathematics at that age. Children are capable of learning this. Or at least a sufficiently large amount are that we should be teaching them to a high standard.

For Alpha School, I think the Slate Star Codex review is likely more informative than this clearly polemic article.

0: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1953654484997169443

tl;dr This is from the people who want to delay Mathematics education to later in a child's life (algebra to 9th grade onwards)