A little late on this, but this is essentially true. Technically you can buy a plan on the marketplace, but they… kinda suck. The cheapest plan I could get from my state marketplace as a single person household is about $315 a month with a $9000 deductible, and God only knows how many places actually accept it. The available plans and reductions are also very dependent on where you live. The ones available through office jobs are generally cheaper with better coverage and lower deductibles, but anything other than a white collar job will give you absolutely bare bones options if anything at all.

Most places I’ve worked have two plans based on how much you want to pay, but they are offered by the same company so no competition there. The last big contender is Medicaid, which can give pretty good coverage without having to pay a deductible or copay (most of the time). However, there’s monthly income requirements based on which state you live in. Some go as high as $3000/month, some as low as $235 a month.

So that’s pretty much it as far a options go. There’s a whole mess of other vouchers and programs and individual practice discounts that you may or may not have available, but that’s even more dependent on what’s available in your area.

Having worked in Healthcare insurance, I can tell you it’s an absolute mess and no one really knows what’s going on. The whole thing is a rats nest of ever changing policies and algorithms arguing with each other while the humans try to keep up. It’s basically impossible to “call around” as some suggest to figure out how much any given procedure will cost at any given practice with any given insurance, because there’s a high chance that nobody knows until you actually run it.

Also, while looking stuff up for this, I found out that anyone living in a Medicaid funded nursing home is required to give almost all their income to the state to pay for it. Of the roughly $3000 limit, you are allowed to keep at most $200 a month, with most states limiting it to something under $100. So that’s fun.

God, it’s like teachers trying to copy a link from their file browser. Well, bless them for trying.

They seem so directionless lately, and by god is AI the wrong horse to bet on for their users.

I should check out LibreWolf…

OpenOffice was a really solid Microsoft Office rival, and FOSS to boot. Made by Sun Microsystems, of course, and then ruined by Oracle (of course).

Thankfully LibreOffice was forked from it and is still going strong as a very capable suite of document tools. And OpenOffice is basically dead, womp womp.

Jellyfin ftw

Funnily enough, Libre Office is another great example of this, being forked from Open Office (and also way better).

I mean, we’ve seen already that AI companies are forced to be reactive when people exploit loopholes in their models or some unexpected behavior occurs. Not that they aren’t smart people, but these things are very hard to predict, and hard to fix once they go wrong.

Also, what do you mean by synthetic data? If it’s made by AI, that’s how collapse happens.

The problem with curated data is that you have to, well, curate it, and that’s hard to do at scale. No longer do we have a few decades’ worth of unpoisoned data to work with; the only way to guarantee training data isn’t from its own model is to make it yourself

Wow, it’s amazing that just 3.3% of the training set coming from the same model can already start to mess it up.

I’ve read some snippets of AI written books and it really does feel like my brain is short circuiting

At least in this case, we can be pretty confident that there’s no higher function going on. It’s true that AI models are a bit of a black box that can’t really be examined to understand why exactly they produce the results they do, but they are still just a finite amount of data. The black box doesn’t “think” any more than a river decides its course, though the eventual state of both is hard to predict or control. In the case of model collapse, we know exactly what’s going on: the AI is repeating and amplifying the little mistakes it’s made with each new generation. There’s no mystery about that part, it’s just that we lack the ability to directly tune those mistakes out of the model.

I’ve had very few issues with whitespace in my decade or so of using python, especially since git and IDEs do a lot to standardize it. I’m a Python simp, tho

Honestly, I’ve been using type hints very heavily since they became a thing. I just use IDE completion too much to do without them.

Paradox seemed like the ones to do it, what with publishing Cities Skylines, but unfortunately their life sim was canceled.

Paralives is still going strong in development, though, with a pretty constant stream of updates. Really hoping that one sees the light of day. They’ve already got a pretty impressive building system working, but they’ve got some big ambitions, particularly when it comes to adaptive interactions with character heights.

We’re committed to not only our existing slate of games but also expanding our presence in the interactive space as we continue to look for opportunities to take a more integrated approach to linear and interactive storytelling across film and TV, gaming, and theatre.

Annapurna’s no slouch when it comes to TV/Film publishing, but if I had to speculate, I’d say there was probably some friction between the film and game sides of things as far as goals and culture go. It’s possible that the film side management was being a little too controlling of Interactive with all the Alan Wake and Control IP plans, leading to the request to split.

Annapurna Interactive has published some real bangers, especially when it comes to truly small team indie devs. If they do reform as a new company, hopefully they can pick up that legacy and bring more stuff to market.

Anyway, that’s all to say… go play Outer Wilds.

Weird, I hear the anthems of nearly every other developed country in the world.

Maybe because the choices are pay for insurance or live in agony/die? Maybe both, if you’re lucky.

The problem is greatly unequal access to healthcare. I’m glad your insurance is doing well for you, but there are many out there who are struggling to pay for expensive family insurance with high deductibles that still leave them in medical debt.

I’m also currently in a situation where I’d like to find a new job, but I have some expensive medication ($750 a month for one of them) and I am worried about losing my insurance/not being able to afford the premium while I wait for benefits to kick in at a new job. I also have absolutely no way of knowing if another employer’s plan will cover my medication or if my current group of providers will be in network. All this added stress, and yet I’m lucky to work in a field where almost every employer offers health insurance.

Ideally, there would be universal safety nets to provide the services you’re benefiting from to all Americans. It’s not even like we’re saving money by relying on private insurance, as the US spends way more per capita on Healthcare for average results, at best.

So I’m glad that your insurance is taking care of you, truly I am. But spare a thought for the thousands of Americans out there who are struggling to survive under the same system.

Okay, but even if that’s the case, what do we do about the very real consequences for trans people?

I guess the question is, what happens to the kernel when all the people who learned on C are gone? The majority of even the brightest new devs aren’t going to cut their teeth on C, and will feel the same resistance to learning a new language when they think that there are diminishing returns to be had compared to what’s new and modern and, most importantly, familiar.

I honestly get the hostility, the fast pace of technology has left a lot of older devs being seen as undesirable because the don’t know the new stuff, even if their fundamental understanding of low level languages could be a huge asset. Their knowledge of C is vast and valuable, and they’re working on a project that thrives because of it. To have new people come to the project and say “Yeah, we could do this without having to worry about all that stuff” feels like throwing away a lot of the skill they’ve built. I’m not sure what the solution is, I really don’t think there are enough new C developers in the world to keep the project going strong into the future though. Maybe a fork is just the way to go; time will tell which is more sustainable.

Permissive licenses mean faster and more widespread adoption, it’s up to project maintainers if the tradeoff is worth it. Ideally a company would realize that an open source part of their project probably isn’t radically going to affect their revenue stream, but you don’t just have to convince devs, you have to convince the suits and lawyers, and they will tell you to just build your own rather than give up any precious IP.