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tracker1on My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry

I wish that rather than the closed govt medical programs we have... we simply funded a public, non-profit health insurance provider that is motivated by fiduciary responsibility, but not profit driven. While this may seem heartless as some would fall through the cracks, such as cases like tfa that wouldn't be covered, at least there would be more competition against the private insurance companies.

I'm not a fan of fully socializing medicine, but having a non-profit with negotiating power in the mix could only help.

tracker1on My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry

The collection laws also vary from state to state on this... in some states, medical collections are all but toothless, short of actually filing a lawsuit, which isn't likely, except some facilities actually have staff lawyers willing to harass and sue.

tracker1on My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry

Fortunately, out of pocket for relatively normal dental care isn't too bad... probably because Dental insurance doesn't really help much and often easier to just pay out of pocket.. though do shop around if you do so.

tracker1on My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry

I've had to go through this with treatments for my eyes... that I haven't been able to see a doctor on for about a year and a half because as a contractor my insurance sucks and even when I've had good insurance it was often problematic... wierd codes and then a back and forth call the insurance, call the provider only to ever get answers if I 3-way called them both and held them both to account.

More than once I was on the hook for a $15k set of injections that I had to run on a credit card. At this point, I'm maxed out, paying out of pocket for what I can and it sucks... I'm hoping to convert to a City employee (temp) vs contractor which at least gets decent medical, but my own experience has me doubtful even then. I've worked my whole adult life, didn't even take vacation time through my 20's and 30's... and never planned to retire... I don't want to, but I'm facing a reality that may not give me a choice in the long run.

I don't think shifting to public healthcare is the answer in the US... but would like something similar to fiduciary safeguards around medicine and insurance.

tracker1on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

I'm mostly OK with Data Centers.. my biggest issues are the tax breaks and the electricity usage should be funded by the data centers themselves. Giving 100% property tax breaks and preferred energy rates is kind of ridiculous in the context of serving the public/citizens. Most of the jobs are for only the construction and limited after.

tracker1on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

There's already cases where Google and I'd assume others are designing chips to work with specific models more efficiently in coordination... Personally, I could even see more specialty models called/coordinated from the larger models that can do smaller pieces of targeted work very well within limited scopes as a mixed economy so to speak.

Assembling a new model from scratch requires a ton of resources and knowledge bases... there's been a lot of sketchy activity just in training. You also have weighting, distillation and other approaches to create more portable options that can run on lesser hardware. But, K3 as an example takes massive compute resources to run.. and this isn't going to get to a portable device any time soon... as Moore's law is effectively dead, you may get newer/better tooling around the LLMs, or you may get an entirely new/unique approach to AI... but current trends aren't going to put a leading model on your own hardware anytime soon for most people.

tracker1on China's open-weights AI strategy is winning

I think part of it is definitely to weaken US providers and the US economy as a whole. China has a completely different domestic economic structure and motivations from western cultures... it's probably closest to a fascist economy mixed with a Maoist cultural ideology behind it. There's definitely winners and losers and the state tends to have tight controls over everything though.

I also think the restrictions on OpenAI and Anthropic are somewhat short sighted. In that the guardrails dramatically limit efforts towards securing your own software in many ways. Yes, it's also "dangerous" and maybe there should be a means of identifying "domestic" or otherwise "secure" accounts for those allowed to use the models without the same guardrails in place.

tracker1on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

Offline and pull based backups FTW... This is why I advocate for a pull or at least push/pull model for backups... where the remote system pulls backups out of your production environment, or otherwise from a drop point. Because a corrupt production system that controls backups can corrupt backups.

If your production system at most runs a backup to a drop site, then your backup facilities pull down versioned backups from there, you can better ensure older backup files are intact. More so by not allowing the two to see each other at all and not using backup accounts from a system that can access production resources.

tracker1on You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month

Funny, I've gotten into using the VS Code extensions a lot.. I liked the Azure SQL Manager or whatever it was called based on Code as well... I do wish the Microsoft Extensions for SQL were more in line with other database managers though.

That said, it's nice to use SQL from code directly in projects. Also, if you're on x86_64, you can always use SQL via Docker pretty easily if you aren't using the more advanced features. That said, I have a Windows Server VM expressly for testing MS-SQL.. I need to finish my ODBC based driver for Deno/Bun/Node (supporting FileStream).

tracker1on You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month

7z was added to Win11 as well as .zip ... noticed it on my assigned work computer.

tracker1on How Donkey Kong Toppled Atari

Worth remembering Mario Bros (Not Super)... it's basically the combat mode in SM3+ but as a stand alone game.

tracker1on How Donkey Kong Toppled Atari

I remember the January when the gaming market really crashed... the Atari games for 1600/7200 were dirt cheap at Toys R Us... In retrospect, I'd have been happier with Sega at the time... They had more games that I actually liked.

tracker1on Resetting Xbox

The stores themselves aren't losing money if there's a natural disaster.. the farm does, the distributor likely does.. but not the store. The store just raises prices against future inventory pricing, often ahead of the inventory itself.

tracker1on Resetting Xbox

I think there's a lot of room to grow in terms of ray/path tracing, etc... but I think it's studios and not real-time gaming that will really see the benefits near term. Bamers Nexus did an interview with a new Graphics MFG that's working more into that direction, but their near term focus is the professional space.

tracker1on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router

May just take a look at it... I'm not doing much with OpnSense, I'm running RPi on a separate system, that I'd like to integrate into DNS on the router itself, but that's about it. The only other feature I want to use but haven't configured is auto failover to a cellular modem. It's cheap, and enough for work, but not great for heavy use.

tracker1on Why we're moving off Cloudflare Durable Objects

I'm largely there with you... Cloudflare Durable Objects feel like the best means to implement a sequential number generator. I think a lot about mail and message systems... part of why I'd been really excited to see what CF had started with in terms of mail systems support. They've got really great natural privatives for a first class, modern mail and message systems. In practice, handling updates to threads or simpler value assignment/alias DO is just such a great fit.

For reference, part of where the thought exercises are for is in terms of replicating what might have been a traditional BBS message net, but a massive hub for such activity on Cloudflare hosting. Some pieces burrowed from FTN (Fidonet technology) but some rethinking in terms of more modern capabilities in practice.

tracker1on DOJ Closing Abbott Labs Case Spurs Wider Corporate Crime Retreat

I'm literally talking about libertarian values and that we aren't getting consequences because they aren't followed.

Libertarians aren't generally in favor of limited liability. Read it again, slower.

tracker1on Resetting Xbox

So you think the character looks like a fashion model? Really?

tracker1on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router

I miss the Tomato UI/UX... I don't care for LUCU or OpnSense's UI by comparison...

Been using OpnSense for about 8 years now though... it's just been the best option for me, I use separate commercial AP.

tracker1on AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

Because China can't ramp up production at all... no means to do so... they aren't even working on it at all.

tracker1on Resetting Xbox

https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelmemes/comments/17h76ej/so_a_i...

Of course, it's not like you couldn't have done a google search yourself, if you really cared.

tracker1on Resetting Xbox

Injecting LGBTQ+, then excluding it for certain markets is absolutely political.

tracker1on Resetting Xbox

And you totally skip the "self-insert"... But I'm sure you'd cast Lizzo as Helen of Troy.

tracker1on Resetting Xbox

Yeah, because video games are as essential to the home as groceries.

tracker1on Resetting Xbox

Absolutely... They've been able to make a lot of games just fun even if the graphics aren't stellar. To this day, I wish they'd have released a Wii Sports Golf as a separate title with several courses.

tracker1on You need a webring

Web-rings were really common in the later 90's... Mostly based on topic or focus of the site(s) in question. It was a common discovery mechanism... you'd usually have prev/next/random/list links, where you could navigate via prev or next, but also jump to a random site int he ring or to a list of sites in the ring.

It's nice to see some old ideas like this come back... also hoping to see more self-hosted conversational sites around topics of interest (bulletin boards) over the giant social media sites we have today.

tracker1on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

I would add that a lot of that extra code is often in test/demo paths... I tend to think of working with an Agent as a "team" of 1 + agent... where the developer is now wearing a QA and PM hat in addition to lead/sr dev. That the work getting done is now roughly the offset of what a team would have produced and that coordination needs to step back and treat each individual with an agent as roughly a dev team. Coordination overhead and mythical man month still apply, just at a layer up.

tracker1on OpenPrinter

Cool, unless you sometimes go weeks or a couple months without printing and everything gums up... I've never seen an ink printer that doesn't. I tend to favor laser, only because I can go months without printing and then fire off a print job, and it comes out without issue.

The continuous feed is nice though... I can see this used for banners like in the old sheet fed dot-matrix days... Print Shop Pro FTW!

tracker1on Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

For a redis cache? I think you're way over-valuing the effort it takes to keep a redis instance running.

For a persistent store.. sure... but that's true for PostgreSQL as well, which has some pretty painful major version migrations by comparison to other options.

tracker1on You Don't Own Your .io or .ai. You Rent a Country's Politics

All domains are pretty much rented... I know it's more fragile with cc-tld's but really, given the corporate interests behind other TLDs and the use of trademarks to re-settle established lands, so to speak... I wouldn't trust any domain to always exist.

That said, despite it being in a position where it would have normally disappeared, I don't think .io is going anywhere... there's way too much interest in keeping it around. I'd go so far as to suggest that maybe it should become "not" a "cc-tld" despite it being two characters and having it's origins in a national definition.