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anonunivgradon Twitch bans words “simp” and “virgin”

A huge percent of Twitch revenue is from desperate young men obsessing over (and throwing money at) scantily dressed female streamers, so literally from simps. It makes sense that Twitch would ban people for mocking this pitiful behavior. Mocking is a good method of social norm enforcement, and every simp set straight is less money for Twitch.

anonunivgradon Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

First impressions and names matter. As much as we don't like it, human beings are irrational and emotionally driven. There's nothing wrong with discussing a name.

anonunivgradon Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

I literally spat my coffee out. Thanks for the laugh.

anonunivgradon CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

A fair trial is those people trying to take your freedom. Not you getting a service from them.

anonunivgradon CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

I have another reply to you that engages with all of your points. Feel free to respond to that. As of now, you haven't given any principled reason for which services should be provided free by the government and which should not.

anonunivgradon CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

Toll roads exist.

anonunivgradon CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

You have to pay for food. That doesn’t mean that eating isn’t important or that a society wants people to go hungry. By your logic, the private market would just be the domain of luxuries and useless trinkets. The government here provides health insurance for the very poor and subsidizes private insurance for the somewhat poor.

Police and fire are public services because they would not work as market systems. Fires spread from house to house, for example, regardless of who pays or doesn’t, so private fire brigades would have to protect non-payers in order to also protect payers. That’s a classic market failure that can be solved by public services. (Potentially, that problem could have been solved by requiring fire coverage, but then there's the further problem of a row of houses, each with different fire services, some better than others, with the better ones still needing to protect the houses insured by the worse ones to protect their own customers. Not to mention that a single house fire can lead to a whole city burning down. It's just not a service that the market can effectively provide in most places.)

And no, of course people don’t completely waste care in other systems either. That’s because it’s rationed by the government. Elective procedures have long wait lists, access to specialists is specially guarded, etc. Limited resources always have to be rationed by some mechanism.

Our system in the US is far from perfect: we let the doctor’s guild limit the supply of doctors, we are too uncomfortable with ending care for the very old and terminally ill, and the whole hospital and medical device industries could use an antitrust shakeup.

anonunivgradon CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

You’re very unlikely to spend that much. If you have multiple serious medical emergencies in the span of one year, $7000 is nothing for having your life saved and getting treatment. Also, the cap is usually much lower than $7000. Also, remember, they’re still covering ~90% of every individual expense. By the time you’ve spent $7000, the insurance company has put down many times that.

Our medical providers are competing private businesses. There are really good doctors, really bad doctors, and everything in between. Everyone wants to go to the better doctor, but there’s just not enough of them. Price differentiation is important.

There are $0 deductible and $0 copay plans and $0 coinsurance plans. They are also exorbitantly expensive because of the absurd moral hazard they create.

It’s a strange mindset to think that something should just be free. We pay for our cars, our housing, our food. Medicine is not free to provide. The America system is broken in many ways, but not because people have to pay for medical care. The problem is that it’s too expensive because of artificial constraints on the supply of doctors and other medical resources.

anonunivgradon CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

There is typically some out of pocket component to prevent moral hazard. A good plan will still be covering something like 90% of your costs until you hit the max out of pocket, then it becomes 100%. It’s so you are at least a little conscientious in choosing doctors and pharmacies and such.

anonunivgradon Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

A protester holds a camera and he becomes a “journalist”. He gets arrested for smashing windows, and he’s “an arrested journalist”.

anonunivgradon CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

Any decent software employer in the US will have good insurance that basically guarantees your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars. That doesn’t really account for the difference.

anonunivgradon I assume I’m below average (2010)

It hits people at different points. Could be college, could be grad school, could be work in general, could be a promotion. But it will ultimately catch up to you.

anonunivgradon I assume I’m below average (2010)

>run into a wall when they get to a level where their giftedness is no longer enough for them to get through every situation without also putting in hard work

I have hit this wall and have sometimes wished I was less intelligent but more diligent. I would be healthier and wealthier for sure.

To any intelligent but lazy young man reading this, don’t delay improving your diligence. Seek counseling and coaching if you can. Don’t let your good grades, impressed teachers and peers, and fancy college acceptances convince you otherwise.

But avoid ADHD drugs. They will wreck your body, make you numb, and sap your enthusiasm for life.

anonunivgradon What Did the Past Smell Like?

Go hiking for a week without showering. You can smell the soap and shampoo on the day hikers from many yards away. You acclimate to just about anything.

anonunivgradon A Defer Mechanism for C

You would just follow the C variable scope rules I think. But I see now how this creates an issue if you want to put the defer, but not the acquisition of the resource it releases, within a control statement.

anonunivgradon A Defer Mechanism for C

The best way to think about defer is that all the deferred statements are put in a goto label at the end of the block. When you break/return/whatever, it just jumps to that label first. This just makes slightly more convenient what the standard approach to error handling in C systems programming already is.

Looking at the article, this specific implementation doesn’t quite go all the way, requiring a special guard {} block instead of working anywhere. A better implementation, working in any context, would be easy but has to be baked into the compiler.

Edit: just saw the proposal for inclusion into the C standard. It is unfortunate that they are considering 1) requiring a guard block and 2) deferring clean up to the end of the function instead of end of the scope. #1 is needless syntax and #2 would make the feature useless within loops by causing explosions and contractions in memory usage.

anonunivgradon The US Dollar Could Outlast the American Empire

The Spanish dollar is a silver coin that became the original basis for the US dollar. The US dollar is no longer based on any precious metal and has no connection to other currency (except insofar as other countries peg their currencies to the dollar).

anonunivgradon The US Dollar Could Outlast the American Empire

If we’re talking about dollars in a post-American-collapse world, only the little green pieces of paper and coins have any hope left. Your digital balance would be worthless.

anonunivgradon The US Dollar Could Outlast the American Empire

You're being pedantic. You can melt down that coin and sell the silver or use it for a myriad of industrial purposes. The value of the coin is based on the market value for the silver contained inside of it. The metal in American coins, the fibers in American dollars, are worthless (relative to the face value). The value of the American dollar derives from the the US government's guarantees of payment on its debt, its status as legal tender within the US, and the requirement to pay US taxes with it.

The value of the dollar derives from the might of the American government and the productivity of its economy. A silver coin is worth its weight in silver even if the government and economy that issued it long stopped existing. The dollar is worthless without the American government and American economy backing it.

anonunivgradon The US Dollar Could Outlast the American Empire

The coin is made of silver. That's totally different than American currency, which has no intrinsic value.

anonunivgradon The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

This reflexive “YouTube can ban whatever they want” is just a way for people to stop thinking about the issue to avoid cognitive dissonance. Aside from a few hard-headed libertarians, no one who says that believes it in any other context aside from censoring conservatives.

anonunivgradon More Americans are shoplifting food

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/phillys-new-top-...

And since then, many other cities have followed suit.

Contrary to popular belief, almost no one is actually in jail for small time drug possession, so reducing “mass incarceration” means reducing or eliminating penalties for real crime.

anonunivgradon More Americans are shoplifting food

More and more cities and even states are adopting laws that essentially decriminalize shoplifting below $500 or $1000 worth of merchandise. Open air shoplifted-products markets now exist in major American cities. This is purely a political decision, not some pressing economic need. This is the result of the agenda of these DAs elected on aggressively progressive platforms.

anonunivgradon Games people play with cash flow

Yes, I've thought about this too. But almost all successful businesses eventually go under[1]. Whoever was holding the potato last gets an egg on their face. That doesn't mean that the business was a "failure" though. It succeeded wildly during its heyday, making livelihoods and sometimes fortunes for many people, employees and shareholders alike.

I'd love to read something more about this line of thinking from someone more knowledgeable in the area.

[1] I think, but maybe not! It would be interesting to trace the "capital lineage" (made-up term) of various successful businesses from the late 1800s through today, for example.

anonunivgradon Centos.rip

You dismiss, elsewhere in this thread, the need to be on the same OS and package versions for years. That’s what people want sometimes. They don’t want to tinker with the system. They don’t need any new functionality, not this year, not next year, not in five years. They built a service, it works, and they can deploy to RHEL and (mostly) forget about it for a long time. As the end of the LTS period approaches, they can do the work to migrate and then forget about it again for a decade. Note that “they” is not just the organization running the system, but also the vendors of bespoke or otherwise niche software used by the organization. Any problem might mean getting billed big bucks per hour of engineering work.

anonunivgradon Centos.rip

I’m not sure you’re appreciating the kind of operation that RHEL is and why these kinds of businesses use it. They don’t want new features. They want a platform that works, that is approved by government regulators, that doesn’t need engineers to come fix update-caused problems regularly, which will happen with any Linux system that receives major package updates. You’re thinking like a software engineer who will be there to handle these issues. They’re thinking like a hospital that can’t risk downtime and is not a software company, even if they hire a few engineers here and there.

anonunivgradon Centos.rip

Two totally different markets. RHEL (and its free clone, CentOS, rip) are for regulated industries or anyone who values extreme stability over any newness. You can turn updates on and feel as safe as you can be against known exploits while at the same time feeling as confident as you can that your stuff won’t break. Once or twice a decade, you port to a new version and then go back to not thinking about it too much.

anonunivgradon CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

Is this just a ploy to get RHEL licensing $$$ while another project emerges to provide what CentOS used to? The whole point of CentOS was to be a carbon copy of RHEL. Then RedHat bought them and now this...

If you successfully fill that void, maybe you too can be acquired by IBM/RH in a few years as they repeat the cycle.

anonunivgradon How the CCP Does Job Promotions

[I am mistaken]

anonunivgradon Show HN: Tiny 1k Rust binary on Windows

If you're willing to rely on undocumented behavior, you can always skip kernel32 and use ntdll.dll directly. Or you could go even further and direct invoke the right syscalls. But either way, you'd be relying on behavior that Microsoft can change without notice.