dimal

This is pretty much what modern medicine does 80% of the time. I think that evidence based medicine, however useful the idea was originally, has become a major vector for this. Here’s how it works: choose a symptom of a disorder you want to treat. Find a drug target that you think will reduce the symptom. Apply the drug. Does it reduce the symptom by a statistically significant amount? If so, great! You have “evidence” that the drug “treats” the disorder. Does it cure anything? No, but that’s not the question you asked.

Large shareholders are very different than grandma owning a few shares or even a few hundred shares. If criminal risk was priced into the stock, our society would look very different.

I've seen some video comparisons between American cars and Toyotas, and Toyota seemed to have figured out how to make cars a lot easier to maintain than the American companies. I saw one case where changing a simple fuse required several hours of disassembly in the American car but only 30s in the Toyota. It's about priorities. It's about ethics. American companies don't give a fuck, and it shows. And American companies don't give a fuck, because Americans largely don't give a fuck.

Whenever a VC backed company is acquired, the press release says "nothing will change, except for all these wonderful new things that the parent company will let us now do". A year later, things start to change. Two years later, the situation is unrecognizable. Qualcomm has no immediate financial incentive to support the education/OSS portion, and so they'll let it die. That's how these things always go.

Arduino is over. In reality, as soon as they took VC funding, it was over.

Yet?

My point is, Starlink is doing this now, but they are continuing to scale up. Other companies are going to follow. Is there a point that this does become something to worry about because the scale has increased?

I had the same problem but in reverse. I’d want to play a song on the HomePod but my iPad sitting on the coffee table would start playing it on its tinny little speaker. The solution was to set Siri on the devices to not respond to “Siri”. To use Siri on the handheld devices I press and hold the side button until I get the ugly gradient border. It’s pretty bad that Apple released this feature in such a uselessly broken state.

Interesting. We’re not dealing with actual overcrowding now, but with the constant din of social media and news, society feels overcrowded. You used to be able to live in blissful ignorance of what was happening in other areas, but now you can only do that if you avoid news and social media completely.

I lived in Oakland and Berkeley for about eight years and left a few years ago. As someone originally from New York, I’m baffled at this idea that there’s no place left to build in the Bay Area. The East Bay still has large swaths of land with nothing on it. SF has plenty of options for building upward. There’s open land to the south. The political gridlock in Bay Area politics is the problem. I’ve never seen more dysfunctional government in my life.

That’s a sad way to see things. Aren’t you paid to solve problems? To create value somehow?

And apparently there are people who find these environments energizing. It seems like those people are the ones who make these cruel policies. But 20-30% of all humans are highly sensitive and they generally find situations like this draining. Most autistic people are highly sensitive. My guess is that many of us would be on the high end of the HSP spectrum. When I take HSP assessments I max out every measure. I often feel like a bundle of exposed nerve endings.

And I need to point out that this is not inherently disabling. When I’m out in nature or experiencing great art or music, it’s clear that I’m having a better, more intense experience than most other people. Music moves me to tears often, sometimes several times a week. It’s wonderful to experience the world this way. But the only way for me to tolerate an open office would be to drug myself. This, to me, is dystopian.

This high sensitivity is why I’m able to solve problems that many others can’t. If I can focus that high sensitivity on the problem space, and I’m given a few days to process all the information, then I’m often able to untangle messes and solve problems that many others find intractable.

But corporations expect that we all conform to some standard of what’s expected of a “normal” human. By doing this, we’re not getting the best out of the human race. We’re actively disabling people that could be doing valuable work. It’s absurd.

While everyone deals with some version of these issues, what you’re missing is the scale and quantity of these issues for autistic people. Would you want to work in an office that smelled like rotting garbage, loud distracting music was constantly playing, and strobe lights randomly flashed in your eyes? This might get you close to what it’s like for me to work in an open office.

I can often smell the people around me. Generally, they don’t smell good. I can often hear conversations that are on the other side of the office. (Have you ever tried to add up numbers while someone else says other random numbers at you? It’s like that.) When people walk past my field of vision, I can’t focus on my screen. When I try to tune out all of these distractions, it consumes a lot of energy. Doing it hour after hour, day after day would leave me depleted, exhausted, unable to focus. I’d be unable to do the work that I was hired to do. How is that reasonable?

I develop A and B by working with people and paying close attention to them. I learn what they’re good at and what they’re not, how they like to communicate, how they like to work, what they don’t like to work on. I do this by paying attention during work. For me, the work is the social bit. I don’t need to play “escape from a room” with someone to do that.

Now, if other people do need corporate staged social games in order to build that up for themselves, then that’s ok for them, but why is that considered the norm? Why are they required? Why is it up to the neurodivergent person to exhaust themselves for them? Why is it considered normal for someone in a “People team” to ignore the needs of some of the people? I don’t see why other people’s needs are inherently more important than mine.

This is the answer. I’m autistic and I don’t want anything for myself that I don’t also want for everyone else. All I want is to be treated like the individual human being that I am. I have specific things I’m good at and other things that are difficult or impossible for me. Other people have different abilities and challenges. Stop acting like there’s some “normal” that we all need to aspire to. No individual is normal.

They could just ask a designer to do a few bespoke illustrations, then generate synthetic data from that, right? Have an image model generate a set of variations, then convert them to SVG.

But looking at these images, Google clearly hasn’t done that yet.

It’s pretty clear that’s the end goal — that there is never a Democratic president ever again and we have a Putin-style authoritarian system. They may get there.

A lot of things that seemed impossible a few years ago are now old hat. The Democrats wouldn’t be so hamfisted, but never say never.

And my point wasn’t that the Democrats would. It’s that the Democrats could and may even be forced to, in order to win an election. If JD Vance is selling a department for $500M, from a game theoretical perspective, the Democrats may have no choice.

The whole problem is that all the norms that allowed the republic to function are being stripped away, and this is one of the biggest violations of our norms to date, yet no one has even mentioned this aspect.

I still feel like people are missing the deeper problem with DOGE. Yes, they’re dismantling the government, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s stupid, reckless and cruel. But most Americans want the government reduced, and so we end up arguing over “effectiveness”. Notice how half the comments here follow that track.

The deeper problem is that the richest man in the world bought his own department of the federal government of The United States and was allowed unchecked power within it. Nothing like this has ever occurred before in American history. The only thing that got him out was that Washington isn’t big enough for two egos as big as Musk and Trump, and one had to go. And since Musk’s people are still embedded in there, I would bet that he still has plenty of influence.

For those in the red tribe that support this, would you support George Soros or Bill Gates buying their own department and using it to rearrange the government to fit their will? Well, shit like that is now on the table. Good job.

Don’t forget that the AMA has a monopoly on billing codes. Medicare defines the billing value of every procedure as Relative Value Units (RVUs). Then Medicare defers to AMA’s guidance on what these values should be. Insurers default to RVUs x multiplier. So the AMA has the ability to set prices.

Oh, and patient value isn’t considered for these units. They are explicitly defined as input driven, so a procedure that is less costly to perform but has higher value to the patient will be billed at a lower value. Hospitals are incentivized to choose procedures that they can bill at a higher rate, and so because of these perverse incentives, they necessarily will ignore cheaper more effective treatments and choose the more expensive ones.

I’m a lefty, but the older I get the less I believe in the old New Deal style leftism I’ve been sold my whole life. As systems get more complex, they simply become a way to obfuscate oligarchic control.

Looks very cool, especially passing functions back and forth. But then I wonder, what would I actually use that for?

You mention that it’s schemaless as if that’s a good thing. Having a well defined schema is one of the things I like about tRPC and zod. Is there some way that you get the benefits of a schema with less work?

Great, I love to debate. Does that mean that you have faith in our political institutions then? If so, how do you justify that faith?

From my perspective, it’s self evident that our political institutions are hopelessly corrupt, so I can’t imagine what it’s like to have faith in them. And since I’ve lost faith in our institutions, I see criticism as positive, not negative.

I don’t see how pointing out flaws is self fulfilling. It’s the only way to improve anything. My guess is that an internet comment has less effect than the wishes of billionaires who are able to control our political institutions using their economic power.

If you admit that our political institutions are in a bad state, how do you propose we begin to fix them without voicing negativity about them?

> When writing code you have the motto "don't make me think" in mind

I disagree with this phrasing. We’re engineering after all. The entire job is thinking. If someone doesn’t want to think, then they shouldn’t be a programmer.

Readability matters, though. I try to have a narrative structure in my code, so it leads the reader along. Formatting matters. And documentation helps. If you want to introduce an unfamiliar idiom that might be more functional, good, but document it. Share it with the team and talk about it. I know that writing and reading documentation is usually seen as a waste of time unless you’re doing it for AI, but I’ve seen it work well in multiple teams. In my experience, the teams with poor docs have the worst code.

Eh, since the founders were explicitly inspired by the Roman Republic, it’s always been fun to wonder “where are we on the Roman timeline”. But it was about 150 years from when the Gracchi brothers were murdered until Augustus seized power. These things happen over time, not all at once.

I don’t see any way to view today’s politics as normal. There is nothing but naked greed and hunger for power at play now. It wasn’t like this even 15 years ago. We’ve been a frog in a pot of water and it’s just starting to boil.

Dangerous? What??? How on earth is that dangerous? Of all the insane rhetoric being spouted nowadays, making a historical comparison is dangerous?

Can we all please stop calling ideas “harmful” or “dangerous” and just have plain, open debate? That’s what a republic depends on.

> reminiscent of the end of the Roman Empire

Are you sure he didn’t mean the end of the Roman Republic, which was the beginning of the Principate? The Western Empire would last about another 400 years.

We definitely are tracking the end of the Roman Republic. At that point, all constitutional norms had been violated so many times that they were mere suggestions, and political infighting by oligarchs was tearing the republic apart, to the point that people were relieved when Augustus took power. They still had a senate. They still had all the old offices and structures. But everyone knew who was in power.

Much like today in the US. We don’t have one Princeps, but we all know that the oligarchs and corporations own the entire political and economic process. They write the rules to suit themselves.

And they have common people fighting each other over cultural issues instead of fighting them for the stuff that matters — economic and political power. It’s a fantastic divide and conquer strategy. Unless common people start waking up to who their real enemies are, the American Republic is effectively over.

Autocomplete on iOS is a shit show. It regularly autocompletes non-grammatical text, which is unforgivable in 2025 when we have AI that can write coherent sonnets and code. Dictation is still at the same level it was at 10 years ago - complete shit. Carplay sometimes randomly starts playing music when I get in the car, other times it doesn't. My Apple Watch regularly can't find my heart rate, for long time periods. The HomePod app and Watch display incorrect information about what's playing on HomePods about 50% of the time. There's no way to filter text spam. The Messages app on MacOS doesn't let you filter by known senders. If you delete a text thread on iOS, it doesn't delete it on MacOS, so my desktop messages are cluttered with fucking donation requests from PACs. Try to do anything with Siri, even simple things like playing a song. It still makes bizarre mistakes. It can't answer basic questions about my calendar.

The list is endless, really. Everything looks "delightful" as fuck. Mac and iOS fonts, colors and text padding are immaculate, so it gives the impression of solidity and competence that isn't really there. A lot of things "mostly work" but aren't reliable, so I can't rely on them. They can list them as "features" but if I can't rely on them, I can't use them, because I don't want to deal with constant frustration. They act like all their systems are this one integrated whole that works well together, but it doesn't.

I don't think that everything will "just work" on Linux, but at least I won't be paying a premium for the privilege of having my needs as a disabled person ignored. I'll be able to customize my experience to meet my basic accessibility needs without fighting against a company that seems to hate me.

I’ve been on Mac for about 30 years. I’m planning my switch to Linux (probably KDE) and GrapheneOS. I can’t keep giving so much money to a company that clearly doesn’t have my interests in mind.

So much of the ecosystem doesn’t “just work” anymore and now instead of fixing those issues, they are actively working to make my computing experience worse. I’ve hade enough.

The more I investigate the current state of Linux desktops, the more excited I get. It seems like Linux is actually good for general use now, and I’ll have so many more options to make my technology fit me instead of the other way around.

I don’t read Nagel as rejecting the idea of reductionism as strongly as you suggest. He’s simply calling out its limitations with regard to subjective experience. Why does it imply that “everything is on the same level”?

Well damn, this looks fantastic!

You think that running a candidate with dementia, then giving the nomination to the next default person in line was a good strategy? Even with those fuckups, Harris didn’t get completely trounced. If they had put up any reasonable candidate who got the nomination fair and square, they probably would have won.

All the Democrats needed to do was get 5% in the middle, not the core MAGA voters. There’s no way they could reach those people. Putting up Biden and then lying about his mental health destroyed their credibility. Even with that, Harris was within striking distance.

Personally, I use Obsidian. But I can’t imagine using it with a team. There’s too much friction sorting out what extensions to use, making sure everyone knows how to use said extensions. I don’t see how Obsidian is feasible for teams. If anyone has experience making it work well for their team, I’d love to hear about it.