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_ofdw

6,342 karma · joined July 31, 2012

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_ofdw··on Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices
>Frequently they need to close emergency services in major (& minor) cities at night due to staff shortages. The wait times for basic diagnostics is on the order of months (not days or weeks).

Part of this is COVID burnout. It wasn't this bad in 2019. Wife works in healthcare and sees the difference every day. Nurses crying etc.

_ofdw··on Clasp: A Common Lisp implementation using LLVM for compilation to native code
Clasp is actually a word, and CLISP is part of GNU now so they should probably rename it something childish and cringe inducing like LURP, which is a recursive acronym for LERP: Universal REPL Programming or something.
_ofdw··on From Common Lisp to Julia
My experience with SBCL disagrees with this. It's not as fast as, say, C++ for some use cases, but it's pretty quick.

Significantly faster than something like Python.

_ofdw··on FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop
>The BSDs are much cleaner than Linux distros.

I see this opinion a lot, but what tangible benefits does that result in?

_ofdw··on Princess Mononoke: The masterpiece that flummoxed the US
Wasabi?
_ofdw··on Princess Mononoke: The masterpiece that flummoxed the US
Perhaps not everything needs to "scale".
_ofdw··on New Lisp-Stat Release
I've been using lisp-stat in production as part of an algorithmic trading application I wrote. It's been very solid, and though the plotting is (perhaps was, in light of this new release) kinda unwieldy, I really enjoyed using it. Excited to check out the newest release.
_ofdw··on The Dhall Configuration Language
Apparently I'm in the minority that feels config languages should be little more than namespaces and key-value storage and should not be programmable.

I would not want to use a bash script as a config file, for example.

_ofdw··on PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
>But it's not Poettering, it's the Gnome folks in general.

It might also be the Gnome folks but it's definitely also Poettering. Let's not pretend he's some blameless martyr. The guy's a jerk.

_ofdw··on PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
>How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

Because he and his orbiters were extraordinarily arrogant and condescending about their software. And let's not forget that while it's pretty good now, in the early days systemd was not very good at all. Because things like GNOME 3 decided to make systemd a hard dependency, pretty soon it became nearly impossible to avoid using the entire systemd stack even though it was nominally modular.

It's not just that he wrote $thing that someone didn't like. It's that $thing got shoved down everyone's throats at a time when $thing didn't work very well, and then when people rightfully objected, they were belittled by Poettering and his fan base.

_ofdw··on How I would sell OpenBSD as a salesperson
We'll have to agree to disagree on the UX part. I find the UX to be very poor compared to Fedora, for example. There's nothing OpenBSD does better than its competitors by enough of a degree to make up for its warts; it's not significantly more stable or reliable than FreeBSD or Debian.

The documentation does tend to be pretty good, but... honestly? I just don't find that to be a compelling reason to choose an operating system.

_ofdw··on How I would sell OpenBSD as a salesperson
Re: relevance, I'm referring specifically to OpenBSD the OS. It has no real use case. It's a research OS at best. The performance is abysmal and "code correctness" or "cohesion" is worth its weight in gold from a practical standpoint, which is to say very little.

OpenBSD fans like to make a lot of hay about its vaunted security posture but in real-world use cases I have no doubt that properly configured and up to date FreeBSD, Linux or even Windows Server is just as secure as OpenBSD.

There are just vanishingly few reasons to use OpenBSD today.

_ofdw··on Top-500 NPM package maintainers now require 2FA
The npm ecosystem has been shown over and over again to be a dysfunctional tire fire.

I feel like at this point continuing to publish on npm is kind of a "that's what you get" situation.

_ofdw··on Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
>You are at new place, you going to work like 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours.

Literally nobody is productive for 9 hours straight. You end up doing low-value make-work projects because in a culture that values "time in seat" the work expands to fill the available time.

_ofdw··on Home lab beginners guide (2021)
Yeah the best part of the home lab hobby is gatekeeping because you spent more than someone else and you need to belittle them to justify how much you spent on your Juniper or whatever.
_ofdw··on 7-Zip up to 21.07 on Windows allows privilege escalation and command execution
For me it was installing a local account with admin privileges via Kali Linux.
_ofdw··on Fennel: A Practical Lisp
Agreed, stability is a big plus. I recently decided to take the plunge and start learning Common Lisp, and now it's my favorite language despite some warts.

Being an ANSI standard with multiple cooperative implementations, it's unlikely to change any time soon.

_ofdw··on Psychological Operations
>Personally, in-group / out-group mentality is the easiest to manufacture and exploit, and serves as a fantastic emotional distraction from other areas.

My personal conspiracy theory is that the current shit storm of identity politics is the product of exactly this sort of psyop.

_ofdw··on Write plain text files
Markdown is actually awful. There's at least 3 different dialects that are all called Markdown, so if you want your text rendered it's a toss-up as to whether or not it'll look how you intend.

I think that Markdown's success is due to a lack of a widely-used, simple alternative that's well-specified.

Org is easily and objectively the best markup but of course it's only very very recently that there was a non-emacs implement worth a damn.

_ofdw··on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act
I'm under the impression that rate-limiting is manually applied by the moderators on a per-user basis.

*edit: Ironically I've been rate limited and can't continue this conversation, lmao

_ofdw··on BCHS: OpenBSD, C, httpd and SQLite web stack
If we'd just rewrite all of the things in Rust we could solve computer bugs forever, and world hunger too.
_ofdw··on Folly: An open-source C++ library developed and used at Facebook
I haven't touched C++ since first year university and even I know what boost and std are.
_ofdw··on In 1930 the Indiana Bell building was rotated 90°
Depends.

I work in Aerospace and most of our regulations are written in blood, as they say.

I prefer to paraphrase A Few Good Men: "We follow rules, or people die".

_ofdw··on OpenBSD 7.0
>Scores are one thing, using it is another.

Indeed but I ran it on my Thinkpad and it was a sluggish mess.

_ofdw··on OpenBSD 7.0
Openbsd has consistently scored towards the bottom in all performance benchmarks that I've seen in the last few years, when compared to FreeBSD and various linuxen.

I would personally never use it for a laptop.

_ofdw··on Hello IPv6: a minimal tutorial for IPv4 users
>So the old small business setup model where a DHCP server is setup, some static IPs configured then reservations in DHCP made, then everything works great no matter what happens in DNS or other servers etc is gone, which feeds mgmt dashboards so you can easily do a alerts or period end report - so and so used 5TB, is something wrong with their machine type stuff - get's harder.

It's obviously more complex, but could this not be solved by running an internal DNS resolver, assigning every machine a hostname, and having those machines use e.g. ddclient or similar to ensure their IPv6 address is current in the internal DNS table?

I mean I know it's easier to remember that e.g. 192.168.1.4 is your printer, and .5 is the CNC router, etc. but I feel like that's not how IPv4 was intended to be used.

_ofdw··on “looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar”
>Maybe there is a way to do ads well that isn't intrusive and that adds value to the UX.

There isn't.

_ofdw··on Ask HN: Where is the open source smart TV firmware?
>If the telemetry and whatever are your main concern you can just not connect the TV to the internet in the first place.

That's not a solution. How long until TVs refuse to work unless they can phone home? Or phone home via built-in cellular?

_ofdw··on RustPython: A Python interpreter written in Rust
Rust is specifically the name for iron oxide. Technically speaking, copper doesn't "rust". It oxidizes.
_ofdw··on What the Heck is a Data Mesh?
I've been on both sides of this coin. As the requestor it's usually because I'm fucking tired of bureaucratic controls and shitty Oracle databases from 1982 running on Windows XP that won't let me execute arbitrary queries "because security".

I just want to do my job more efficiently instead of transcribing aircraft serviceability data by hand into excel.

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