buffington

I was pointing out to the GP that the IRS cannot know the final amount due because of the potential for some very common types of deductions.

I wasn't disagreeing with the idea of pre-filling tax return data.

Do they know how much you'll spend on sales tax for a given tax year? How much you'll pay out of pocket for health expenses? Do you?

These are not "interesting", but nearly everyone has 'em, and the IRS cannot know, without bending space time, how much you'll owe because of those deductions (assuming an itemized deduction, though they're still in play either way because they can help tip the balance between taking a standard or itemized deductions).

The rational side of me totally agrees with everything you've said.

But the part of me that witnessed glioblastoma - I think when someone is facing that, it should be a VIP pass straight to the "whatever has even a remote chance of actually working" lobby. Which is basically what the article describes, so I'm optimistic for the doctor and his team.

Of course, not everyone is as risk tolerant as I am. My dad wanted to believe he'd be one of the rare "survivors" (I don't think it happens) using traditional radiation and chemo, and was still weighing pros and cons of other potential treatments. But I have the benefit of hindsight, and a lot more education now, and I think it's unethical to not immediately consider trial programs. The most common way to treat glioblastoma today (targeted radiation and chemo) one that only promises to give you more months of life, not years, is also the only treatment option covered by Medicare, the health insurance provider for most retirees in the United States. The uber-aggressive glioblastoma that my dad developed is what most people over retirement age get when they develop glioblastoma as well. Average lifespan from diagnosis to death: 6 months. That's if you surgically remove the tumors, a procedure not without its own risks. Risks that are usually worth it, since without surgically removing the tumors, lifespan drops to weeks.

What I'm saying is there's no path to trial programs for most of the people who'd benefit from those trials the most. It's not even on the map for them.

Tesla's can "see" humans, cyclists, cars, etc, independent of the headlights.

It's possible that this awareness is what's used as input for the matrix headlights. Either entirely, or in coordination with detecting oncoming headlights.

I'm confused about your mention of technical solutions. What would a non-technical solution look like?

One problem with GBM is how fast it progresses. I was my dad's caretaker when he had it, and the amount of waiting and paperwork required for most of the programs we looked at were beyond what his life expectancy was. Those that might have been possible were shut down - it was during the peak of covid. The exhaustion from the daily visits to the cancer center for radiation treatment required full head to toe PPE for both of us. Cancer itself is exhausting, but the paperwork and phone calls and pharmacies - it's too much.

I'm grateful for the work of the doctors in the article, and very hopeful that the treatment works. A close friend of mine was on a trial vaccine for his cancer, which looked promising for a while, but suddenly stopped working - the cancer was ultimately fatal.

I think trials should be offered as potential first steps, especially for aggressive cancers. Patients know the risks. They're either 100% going to die within 6 months to cancer, or, worst case, die trying to fight it, or best case, be cured.

That's how it works. There are incentives to voluntarily issuing a recall. The most important: no one can sue you for not having been up to the correct standard.

It's not a "blow" to a company when they issue a recall, it's a legal shield that, though they'd rather never have needed to put up in the first place, are very happy to have when need arises.

Recall is a legal process that protects companies like Tesla.

It has nothing to do with how the product is put together, how it functions, how it's used, whether it's software or hardware.

Whether a company voluntarily issues a recall, or a recall is issued through a regulatory body, it's a process that ultimately attempts to fix safety problems with products sold to consumers, but does so in a way that protects the company from being sued for the problem.

A recall protects a company like Tesla from lawsuits.

In this case, someone could have determined that the reason their car crashed was because an icon wasn't big enough, discovered that Tesla wasn't adhering to safety standards, and filed a pretty solid lawsuit.

The recall says "look, we found a problem, we'll fix it, and now that we made a reasonable effort to let everyone know, we're off the hook and protected by the government for having done so officially."

Have you even looked at the Apple store? Some of the base Macbook Pro builds cost the same as the Vision Pro. They go up from there.

The Vision Pro is hardly "priced higher than almost any other apple product in history."

It is an iOS device. It's essentially an iPad Pro (with a lot of obvious other hardware) running a modified iPadOS.

In the late 90's, my dad was a screen printer and did a bunch of big runs of garments for Walmart stores. He'd built a good size business, doing regular jobs for Disney, action sports, NFL, etc, building a shop that usually ran two shifts of hundreds of employees. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that if it had a screen printed image on it, we probably printed it.

> very exacting in pick up and delivery times

Well, for us, not exactly. For our last contract with Walmart, there was a lot of language about timing. If the driver arrived and the order wasn't ready for pickup, we'd be penalized for every hour of delay. The penalties were such that you could end up losing crazy money on the job if you weren't confident about your abilities to deliver on time.

Not a big deal for us since we were tight, and could easily handle it.

Then Walmart arrived a day early. The driver had made a choice to stop for us first, which, after pulling up the contract, we realized it allowed for that. Our lawyer had determined it was vague enough that the agreed delivery date would prevail, contractually. Which is probably why we didn't notice that the contract also said the pickup clock started the minute the driver arrived, and that was also the official pick up time. Had we caught that during contract negotiations, we'd have refused the terms. But we missed it.

We weren't a small shop. We already ran two shifts, and quickly needed to pull in a third to be able to finish in time to get any profit out of the job.

We almost did that last contract with zero profit, and refused all business from Walmart after that day.

Thing is, I've heard of similar stories where Walmart would do similar tricks with produce from farms. Whether myth or not, I don't know, but I know with certainty how they treated us. There were probably incentive structures in place for drivers to show up early, and some of them had the balls to do it a lot earlier than others. In this case, they could give the driver an bonus for his better than on-time averages, then "buy" goods worth a retail $5M+ for the cost of the driver's salary and bonus, plus whatever the supplier (us) managed to keep after penalties.

Given Apple's emphasis on UX and UI: 100% across the board. Ask any Tesla Model 3 Owner what they like the least about their cars, and you'll hear a lot of them complain about the touchscreen-only (sorta) interface. There's some levers and thumb wheels, sure, but I abhor my touchscreen-only interface. Love the car. Hate the UI.

Apple knows how to build interfaces. Including interfaces outside of software. I suspect it'll be the primary thing they focus on in the product launch video, how they didn't screw up the UI and there will be knurled titanium wiper speed ring switchy things and tactile feedback in the damn mushroom leather wrapped heated steering wheel and Jony Ive whispering directions, seemingly inside of your head.

> “Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.

I hate hearing this.

I've tried with VR. I built my own HMD back when a bunch of people were building them, including the creator of the Oculus Rift. I've tried every commercial product I could get my hands on since, and without fail, something will flip a switch in my brain and that it, I'm sick.

Not just nauseated, but destroyed. Like, instant hangover with a side of migraine. It's unbearable.

My hope is that with high enough resolution/coherence/realism for passthrough video/environment, the VR sickness won't happen. I think I'm being more realistic though when I predict that that same "high fidelity" is just as likely to make the sickness occur, as any mismatch with my senses and what my eyes and ears are seeing will seem more obvious to whatever demon is waiting for its moment to strike.

I have both of those devices on my desk. The originals of both. The similarities of both: rectangular, displays, batteries (dead), audio jack, charging ports and could play music.

Aside from the large list of physical differences (like, one has cameras while one has a big flat physical turntable as its input device), the biggest category of differences is as large as the number of unique apps there are in the app store. Because the biggest difference is: one does anything, the other does one thing.

Still, you're right. One doesn't leap over oceans of differences. There were many products and ideas between the original iPod and the iPad, each one potentially sharing with or influencing the other.

Thank you. I choose to believe you. I'd like to fall asleep tonight.

> The downsides are always fine and ignorable because of the financials

Do you sincerely believe that the downsides (which are, in the context of the forum in which you said what you just said, child abuse of all flavors) are always fine because of money? How is that even remotely defensible?

I drove a six speed manual for 16 years and loved it, and almost always used engine braking. The regenerative braking the electric I drive now feels very similar, with maybe two exceptions.

Where my manual would stall, my electric comes to a gentle stop.

You also don't get the same sort of "neutral" feeling. You can get close, but it's not like shifting to neutral and taking both feet off the pedals and coasting. You have to simulate it with your foot and pedal position. It becomes second nature, but it is a difference.

Aside from that, it's the same to me. My right foot can still come all the way off the pedal and apply more braking, just like it would if I were engine braking and needed more. I feel fully in control.

Does an RTX A2000 even fit? I'd consider trying to find a pair if so. It's hard looking at the two machines I have with 192GB each doing nothing.

I do recall when capistrano became a thing (it was called switch tower but had to change for trademark reasons if I recall). Prior to that, most folks working with Rails in production were using ant. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other ways as well back then, given it was early days.

Could you actually describe this? How would that be a better analogy?

> letting grief permanently ruin one's life

And this is why we will disagree. What, by your definition, does "ruin one's life" actually mean? I bet it differs from mine. An easy bet, because we've led different lives with different experiences. What you think of as "ruined" may be my version of "it took 15 years to finally get over something tramautic"

What I see in my own grief, and the many, and I mean many parents who I interact with as part of my own support, is that each of us takes it day by day. Some people have a lot more days of waking up wishing they were dead than other people. Some people channel the grief into starting foundations. None of their behavior is strong, or weak, or entitled, good, bad, right, wrong, or whatever subjective sort of adjective you want to categorize it with. Nor are their lives "ruined", even if they're 14 years into waking up every day wanting to die. Day by day. It's people who have lost someone, someone so innocent, someone they're supposed to protect - there are no words to describe the pain. So while you're trying to decide if someone's grief is "weakness" or "entitlement", they're experiencing it.

Grief is evidence of your love for someone, and in my mind, that sort of love takes a certain sort of strength. To love, knowing it cannot last forever, takes strength. That is as old as humankind itself, and not new, nor a weakness.

I agree with your strong disagree.

I know, and help maintain, Ruby code written for 1.8 that hasn't been touched and is running fine in 3.2. No breakage along the way.

To be fair, that's not always possible, but Ruby's changes haven't ever been drastic.

I've not had as much experience with Python as a programmer - more as a user of apps written in Python, and I sense there's a bigger issue there than Ruby has ever had. It seems like a frequent problem that something that works in Python 3 doesn't work with Python 2 and vice versa.

Didn't most people use ant to deploy back then? I think it was a Java build tool or something? I feel like I should know this better - the maintainer of ant was actually working for us at the time, deploying early Rails apps using ant. I just remember deciding right then and there that I very much preferred writing code over troubleshooting deploys (and what we now call "devops").

My primary care doctor has to consider what my insurance allows when providing me care, and that includes knowing what my insurance will allow for procedures that require a specialist. We talk about it all the time, and he hates it, because he knows I need to see the specialist for a specific procedure, but knows that without the test, I'll end up with the bill instead of the insurance company.

Who should I trust more with my health? My doctor, or my insurance?

In October of 2019 I needed a hip replacement. I had bone grinding into bone. You could literally hear it if you walked beside me. Imaging showed it clearly. My doctor, being a doctor, knew that the best course of treatment was to replace it with a prosthetic ball and socket, despite the risks (I will need two more in my life, if I live to average age).

My insurance refused to pay for it, saying my age alone disqualified me (too young).

It's 2024. I'm still fighting that insurance company. I'm totally healed, feel no pain, and can actually run as a hobby. My health as a result has drastically improved.

Do you believe that health insurance companies provide value?

What you describe is certainly ideal.

But we don't have the ideal. We have employers calling the shots about what "we close at 5pm" means, and employees who would love to explicitly, in very clear language, explain why coming in within minutes of closing ruins their day. But if they did that, they'd lose their jobs.

I'm not saying we shouldn't fix what's broken. I'm saying because it's broken and that while it's broken, don't be an asshole to people stuck in the broken system.

It used to be that if someone said "Jeff got in a car accident," it usually meant that Jeff was dead or disabled for life.

Today, it simply means that Jeff is going to be 45 minutes late for work.

Since I lived in the "surely dead" era, I still react that way if someone mentions someone getting in a wreck. People must assume I'm upset over Jeff's surely totaled car (something that didn't always happen in the olden days).

I don't talk about this very often for obvious reasons, but I've lost a child.

Grief over losing a child is not entitlement, or weakness, or being spoiled. It's grief, as raw and human as it's always been.

It used to be normal for children to die in the mid-1800's-England. Something like 25% of children born didn't make it to their first birthday.

Today, that number is more like 0.34%.

I suspect the difference is that in the 1800's it happened a lot. You weren't the only one. You had people who were empathetic. Nearly any person you'd come in contact with likely had either experienced the same trauma, or loved people who had. That doesn't mean people didn't grieve over the loss. It just meant that living with the grief of a lost child was normal.

In "modern" times? If it happens to you, you're an outlier. Not only are you grieving the loss of your child, you're alone. No one you know has also lost a child. You're grieving the loss of potential, the legal garbage, insurance, funeral costs, you're doing it either with your partner, also grieving, or alone (or maybe worse, with a partner, but still "alone"). The amount of times you'll hear "I can't imagine what that must be like" help reinforce that feeling of being alone, because it's simply true. It's unimaginable. It was for me, and even having experienced it, still is.

Whether it's the 1800s or 2000's, humans are resilient. While losing a child often does lead to depression and divorce, we can heal from these things. We have an advantage over 1800s parents in that we have huge support networks that are no further away than our pockets that blow away whatever community support might have existed in the 1800s. Not to mention medicine and advances in our understanding of human psychology.

Grief isn't weakness. Grief is simply human.

I couldn't do it with a single R420. When that first booted up in my basement - good lord I wasn't prepared. There wasn't a soul in my house who wasn't suddenly in there with me trying to understand what had just happened.

Adjusting the RPMs in software helped a little, but even at the lowest speeds, it was a hovercraft. It had to go.

I inherited a few R420's from my work, and the coolest thing about it is the iDRAC. I'm not a SRE or anything of the sort, so don't get to see stuff like that much, but the utility of the iDRAC is fantastic.

The machines each have 192GB of ram, so I thought I'd set them up as LLM inference machines. I figured that with that much ram, I could load just about any model.

Then I discovered how slow the CPUs on these older machines is. It was so utterly slow. I have a machine I bought from Costco a few years ago that was under $1k and came with a RTX 3060 with 12GB of GPU ram. That machine can run around 20+/tokens per second on 13B models (I actually don't know - I stream the text, and cap it at 9 tokens per second so I can actually read it).

The R420? Its tokens per second were in the 0.005 to 0.01 range.

So, yeah, not a good CPU for that sort of task. For other stuff, sure. I thought I'd setup a small file server with one instead, but the fans are so jet engine loud that it's intolerable to have in any part of the house, even when managing fan speeds with software.

I think it's a valuable skill to develop a sensitivity towards how workers are treated by their employers and how your own actions, however small to you, can have a big impact on them.

We all know by now that low paying jobs don't just pay poorly, but take everything they can from their employees. Closing at 5PM means clocking out, then locking the door at 5PM. If a customer came in at 4:45PM and you had to stop cleanup, start cooking, then cleanup again after 5PM that's a shame. Maybe you need to be better at your job. And you're a part time employee, so you don't qualify for overtime. Do better next time.

Service workers are treated like garbage, by their employers and by customers.

No one is making excuses for poor communication either. Don't you think that the kid mopping the floor would like to explicitly articulate in every way he knows how that it's only a real asshole who comes in asking for a french dip 5 minutes before closing? Or should he maybe a make a sign to put on the door underneath the business hours describing how, though he can't make you, it'd make his life a lot better if you didn't order food during the last half our of the day? How long would he have a job?

The thing about "cultural norms" (why not "norms?") is that expecting everyone to understand them is precisely what makes them "norms" in the first place.