anotherevan

Honestly, I think when you're facing any sort of potentially serious health issue you need a wingman coming to the appointments with you. Someone who can hopefully be a little more emotionally removed. Who can ask the questions you didn't think of to make sure you've covered everything. Who you can debrief with afterwards to make sure you've taken in all the important information you were just scrambling to wrap your head around while you were in the room. And sometimes to argue on your behalf.

Done this with my kidult for most of their life, obviously. Did it with my dad's oncologist visits for prostate cancer. Had it myself with cancer and other times. You just need someone you trust in your corner when you're vulnerable.

> FYI I’m not American.

Whoops. Guess that was an assumption on my part. Here I am, doing human things…

Yes, the implication of animus is the chief reason for my dislike of the term. The main failing of most alternatives is they don't roll off the tongue as easily or succinctly.

> this hasn’t been the case in clinical research for the past 15 years or so which in aggregate leans a bit more female than male if anything.

Oh yes, I didn't mean to imply the situation isn't improving (and an overcorrection in research at this point in time is probably a good thing, IMO (if it is in fact happening, which I struggle to believe (but that's my issue))).

The body of knowledge in medical science is a lot older than 15 years though, so I would think it will take a lot of time and effort to equalise.

Thanks for your response. I found it constructive and informative to my own thinking.

Oof. That one resonates so much for me - even living in a country with far better healthcare.

There's a term I dislike but is apt: medical misogyny. Basically it's, "systemic, conscious, or unconscious gender biases [which] affect how a patient is treated by the healthcare system."[1]

Systemic in particular is that basically the vast amount of knowledge amassed in the medical sciences has come from studying men. Comparatively little for those not assigned male at birth.

One of my kids has complicated health issues, pretty much from the time they hit puberty. If they hadn't had me (someone born with a penis) advocating for them and attending most medical appointments throughout their teenage years I'm pretty sure they would be dead now.

My most appalling memory is a gastroenterologist who patronisingly told my kid with a diagnosed anxiety disorder which exacerbated awful gut pain from irritable bowel syndrome that, "If you weren't anxious all the time you wouldn't be in so much pain." We both had a good cry in the car park after that appointment. It certainly set treatment of their IBS back a couple of years at least.

(Fortunately after a string of bad ones, we found a GE that treated them with compassion, and not as a gastrointestinal tract with an annoying human around it.)

Whew, yeah, touched a nerve there. So, medical misogyny. It's a thing.

[1] https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/medical-misogyny-in...

Bless your heart.

Sigh.

I’m sure the viewpoint from being in mergers and acquisitions is quite different (and to me, often comes across as quite callow). I’ve been a software developer for 35 years (closer to 45 if you include my pre-professional life, aka adolescence) and have deliberately stayed “on the tools” in my career with working in codebases and product development as I’ve found that is where I am happiest and can make the best contribution, rather than move up the managerial ladder to my level of incompetence, to quote Peter.

To create a successful product in IT, or any industry really, it takes a lot of different skills, facets and (often competing) priorities. And those priorities do change over time. I’m sure by the time a product or service crosses your desk, the codebase quality is not as big of a priority. Earlier in the life cycle a shit codebase makes for a shit product that is a lot harder to grow and maintain — so much so that most of them have probably folded before they reached the stage of looking to be merged or acquired. I’ve dabbled in sound mixing for live performance and when training others I’ve mentioned the fact that it very hard to make a bad singer or musician sound good, but very easy to make a good singer or musician sound bad. Same goes for trying to make what would otherwise have been a good product or service with a bad codebase. That’s really hard and creates a hell of a lot more work for every part of the business.

I’ve had sales people tell me to my face that they are the most important part of the business and the actual product or services is not that important. And in my more callow stages of life experience I’m pretty sure I’ve reciprocated with words like useless and parasitic, and that I could replace them with a small bash script. But in reality what we all do is important to the complex endeavour of developing and maintaining a successful product or service. The existential threat of AI is moving up the ladder of incompetence and changing the face of what we do. It may even jump a few rungs in the process. But it’s not there just yet. Keep making good sales, keep making good mergers, good products, good acquisitions, good services, and good codebases.

— No tokens were harmed in the production of this comment. —

Here's a link to the verse in many translations: https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Timothy%206:10

I have a friend who for no apparent reason developed strong allergies in their sixties. Particularly to goats milk.

So much so that they will not go to a restaurant that has goat milk products (e.g.: halloumi cheese) in their kitchen due to one too many visits to the hospital emergency ward.

Even better, if your subtitle is labelled "English SDH" instead of just "English", when you enable subtitles it helpfully picks the first foreign language subtitle track instead — so you get the bonus feature of having the pause the show and manually changing it before continuing!

https://www.qownnotes.org/

(Note: The NextCloud integration is entirely optional, I've never used it. The front page makes it sound like a requirement.)

The raging, “I don’t like this, so it must have been written by an LLM!” comments on HN have gotten so tiresome that I find when I see them I just down-vote them and move to the next thread. (Most of the time. You’re witches comment captured my attention and prompted a response. Well done — the comment must have been written by a human.)

— No tokens were harmed in the production of this comment. —

But in reality, I doubt they would release either of those things.

E.g.: {argon2}…

¹ See what I did there?

Sure, I get that. I was just disappointed that none of the project management stuff seemed terribly integrated in any way from my brief review. It seemed like opportunities there that were not taken.

I grew up on CVS and then Subversion. Played with Bazaar a little, mainly because it could use an SFTP location as the back-end.

And I still avoid Git if I can help it. I would/do figure it out when I have to, but it never feels comfortable. Such is my avoidance that I'm dabbling with Jujutsu although I'll still need to really sit down and read through it some more to grok the way it works.

I was expecting when I make a commit, I would have the facility to specify what issues it addressed and it would close them for me automatically. It seemed there is so much opportunity there to "close the loop" when the issue tracker, etc and integrated in your VCS, but it wasn't taken.

I worry about the longevity of some of these. Are they going to be free with little further development and just languish?

If I was a graphics shop, I don't think I'd be jumping off Creative Cloud and re-gearing staff to Cavalry and Affinity in too much of a hurry.

I ended up installing Big Launcher[1] as an alternative android launcher and configured it so it has buttons to ring three people. That's it. Even then, then confirmation yes/no dialogue when she presses "End Call" gave her a lot of anxiety initially.

I recently had to setup access to a local streaming service on my step-dad's TV recently. The amount of hoops necessary, including installing their stupid app on a phone, and entering passwords for several different accounts, several times, was absolutely ridiculous. Being technologically adept I found it an absolute PITA. It was a complete non-starter for him.

My point is that your, "If he can afford a season pass, he can afford a smartphone," comment comes across almost as callow as the attitude of the Dodger Stadium management towards the very real issues of getting old in a world that is moving faster and faster technologically.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.kunes.and...

It can be surprisingly difficult with a lot of SaaS products (including Google).

[1] https://www.cubebackup.com/

More recently they've figured out how to operate drinking fountains.[2][3]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/cockatoos-lear...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-06-04/sydney-sulphu...

[3] https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2025...