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orange-mentor

98 karma · joined July 12, 2022

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orange-mentor··on The American Healthcare Conundrum
The reason is because Medicare for All is viable both politically and implementation-wise. It's been studied for decades and the bills are already written. Just phase it in by stepping it down: 65+, 55+, 45+, everybody.

All providers already accept Medicare.

The only disruptions will be to private insurance, which is a backdoor white-collar, make-work jobs program for millions of Americans. But most jobs are bullshit anyways. That's a broader problem and we don't need to sacrifice lives to deal with it.

orange-mentor··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
My dude: Cocaptain 8.4 just dropped! You're living in the past. Don't get left behind!
orange-mentor··on Things are about to get worse for generative AI
> ...nobody's actually doing this?

I think you're right.

I am a programmer and I use GPT occasionally, and I even pay 20 bucks a month (for now), but even for my job it's not a not a world-shattering improvement.

> ... the entertainment value of typing things into the box and seeing what comes out ...

I would only add that in a consumer society like ours, entertainment is important. Changes to entertainment seem to have, like, weird ripple effects. Not the knock-down economic disruptions that AI is promising, but I kind of think LLMs are just going to make our culture weirder. I can't anticipate how, but having a bunch of little LLM-powered daemons buzzing around the internet is just gonna be freaky.

orange-mentor··on Spain confirms nuclear power phase-out, extends renewable projects deadlines
Sad news. Nuclear needs to be in the mix for an energy grid independent of fossil fuels.
orange-mentor··on Most companies using AI are 'lighting money on fire,' says Matthew Prince
Read Thomas Hobbes. Really read it and try to absorb it.
orange-mentor··on Adfree Cities
Real New Yorkers kind of loathe Times Square.
orange-mentor··on Fuzzy Finding with Emacs Instead of Fzf
As a newcomer to Emacs in the past couple of months (my second try), I think I agree with you that it's a lot of work.

But for the Emacs fans who've had success, that work pays them back because they can bend the editor to an extremely bespoke workflow.

I'm unsure if it will work out for me long term but I can sort of see the appeal. No other tool even attempts to be what Emacs has become.

So yeah, it's different from every other approach I've tried. But there's a chance it will work for me. Jury's out, though, and I am only now realizing that I'm going to have to put more effort into hacking my workflow than with other things I've used (Kakoune, Neovim, sublime, etc)

orange-mentor··on The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021)
View source on this one!

Wow... I never really knew when I was visiting a website transformed by XSLT

This is really cool

orange-mentor··on Return To Office is all about power
We already give so much of our lives to earning a wage for a (most-likely) useless job. Give us some time back, at least.

> It makes them feel useful and a productive member of society.

This is a lie for most jobs. Making internet ads more "clickable" is useless. We only work these jobs because the alternative is either starving or accepting a lower status in society by doing something more blue collar.

orange-mentor··on Spain tech job market is facing a hiring freeze
Yes, that's what I'm saying. The commuting and associated infrastructure are wasted on most office jobs, and they're not important enough to warrant it.
orange-mentor··on Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
Ew, yuck
orange-mentor··on Spain tech job market is facing a hiring freeze
Yea, but 99% of all jobs aren't important enough to demand it. The average tech startup is vastly less important than a hospital, grocery store, etc.
orange-mentor··on D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect
The government doing things is good, actually.
orange-mentor··on Insurance companies fill their networks with ‘ghost’ therapists
Innovation? Really? All meaningful advancements come from public funding of basic research.

As for "purpose"...wow. Ask the next GrubHub employee that comes to your door if it gives them purpose.

Working less should be a social goal, a targeted outcome of public policy.

orange-mentor··on Insurance companies fill their networks with ‘ghost’ therapists
Who said anything about rights? We just want health care to be free at the site of service and funded by taxes. Just like fire fighters, police, etc. Every other western country does it that way, and none of them are clamoring to build a system like the USA currently has.
orange-mentor··on Insurance companies fill their networks with ‘ghost’ therapists
Health _insurance_ would ideally become a market that simply ceases to exist. It's a uniquely pathological case of market failure.

I've got no love for drug company lobbyists, but drug companies do actually manufacture real things.

Health insurance companies are different.

Once it becomes a government benefit, there are no more lobbyists. There is no market actor to lobby on behalf of, because the market ceases to exist.

orange-mentor··on Insurance companies fill their networks with ‘ghost’ therapists
History teaches us things can change fast. Think USSR in 1984. At some point things are going to give.

We have the technical means to provide a decent life for everyone. And I mean everyone, including illegal immigrants sneaking across the border. And we could do all that while everyone struggles less.

So yea. Most jobs are fake and stupid and don't need to be done. The ones that need doing could be given more support, distributed more evenly.

This was a mainstream economic viewpoint less than a century ago. What happened?

orange-mentor··on Insurance companies fill their networks with ‘ghost’ therapists
How long will we Americans submit to these rent-seeking vampire insurance companies? Single-payer now, please.
orange-mentor··on Meta wants to charge EU users $14/month if they don't agree to personalized ads
$14 is pretty high, but if they actually follow through on this I think we'd see downward pressure on price.
orange-mentor··on Meta wants to charge EU users $14/month if they don't agree to personalized ads
Paying for stuff is the endgame. Not DRM, not endless ad blocker proxy wars.

This is all really positive, and proof that these regulations are working, imo.

orange-mentor··on root with a single command: sudo logrotate
One could write a very small custom binary in C/C++/Rust that runs the command, and then give that binary setuid permissions. That binary can simply run a subprocess, and nothing else.
orange-mentor··on Collecting and curating material is good and we should do it more
Very infrequently. They are definitely useful, though. Rigor and an editing process really helps.

They can be a slog, but the effort is worth it since the information is reliable.

I want to read the newer RFCs around JMAP next.

orange-mentor··on Airbnb CEO: NYC hotels will get more expensive after short-term rental crackdown
I kind of wish capitalists would just be honest for once. This is bad for their specific business. Just come out and say that instead of making stuff up.
orange-mentor··on Collecting and curating material is good and we should do it more
I wanted this too, very recently. After digging I found out the IANA maintains a list of links to relevant RFCs here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-authschemes/http-auths...
orange-mentor··on Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix
I 100% agree with this. I wanted to like Matrix, and I ran synapse for a while, but the operational aspects of it are an order of magnitude more complex than XMPP.

Perhaps the problem they're trying to solve warrants that complexity, but my particular use case doesn't. I just run XMPP now.

orange-mentor··on HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
Etcd + one of the etcd desktop clients. There are a few template+restart tools as well. confd was one such project, iirc.

You'll end up writing some glue code.

orange-mentor··on PackagingCon – A conference only for software package management
Not exactly. Most Docker containers rely on distro package managers. You're usually running apt or apk inside your Dockerfile. And the container system rootfs needs to be laid out. It's a non-trivial amount of work to do that and keep it up to date.

I am a fan of building a traditional native package in a multi-step Docker build, and the final container artifact can be a simple `RUN deb -i my-pkg.deb`

I find that targeting traditional system packages has benefits. 1) it's not really that hard, and 2) it forces you to lay things out consitently, or, at the very least, the distros conventions are helpful.

orange-mentor··on Incus, a community fork of LXD, now part of Linux Containers
Pleased about this. I'm a huge fan of LXD. It's a powerful and underrated piece of tech.

I don't think the story on container (and VM!) orchestration is settled, and I'll be interested to see how the devs evolve the tech. I'll be deploying it, for sure.

orange-mentor··on NASA announces astronauts who will fly by the moon next year
Space is extremely dope and we are nerds.
orange-mentor··on Rethinking Window Management
Hear, hear! I can't run GNOME because of this. I use MATE and/or IceWM.

Windows + Desktops, it's all just rectangles. There's a drawing surface, XY dimensions, focus, and input.

I don't want paradigm shifts, I want _utility_. I want keyboard shortcuts, and scripts.

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