astex

4943 pts ยท November 13, 2013


As much as I think she is a rat fleeing a sinking ship, MTG.

1 week ago | Likes 12 Dislikes 0

I do absolutely understand how fucked up it is to tie health insurance to employment. But also worth noting that I'm high income in a high income area. That is a measurable, but not unreasonable, amount of my paycheck. The cost of the insurance plan, at least at my company, scales with your income.

9 months ago | Likes 2 Dislikes 0

Like, I just finished a round of antibiotics for a bowel infection. I paid the doctor nothing when I went in and paid nothing for the drugs. However, ~$300 of each paycheck is withheld by my employer to pay for insurance.

9 months ago | Likes 3 Dislikes 0

I agree wholeheartedly, but we don't really pay that much. He's listing what it would cost you if you just walk up to a pharmacy and pay for the meds out of pocket. But, some 90% of Americans have private health insurance, which will pay for some portion of it or negotiate a lower price for you depending on your terms. I agree that this system is pretty broken (if I lose my job, I just die, I guess), but the details of this video are a little disingenuous.

9 months ago | Likes 3 Dislikes 2

Would the US and EU withdrawing support for Israel reduce the suffering of the people in Palestine? Or would it make it worse?

I believe that it would convince Israel that they need to gain a lot of territory from their neighbors quickly in order to establish food and fuel security. They certainly have enough arms already to do so. And they'd no longer have any reason not to. I believe they'd then try to establish closer relations with Xi and Putin, pushing Israel further towards fascism.

2 years ago | Likes 2 Dislikes 0

I'm not sure I see a better alternative.

"What if we try to stop Israel committing genocide?" looks an awful lot like the Gulf and Iraq wars.

"What if we just leave?" means Israel is incentivized to end the conflict quickly and violently to preserve resources. I believe this would mean the end of an independent Palestine entirely. It would also push Israel closer to our geopolitical rivals.

2 years ago | Likes 2 Dislikes 0

What I want is to minimize human suffering. I do not believe that more Chinese and Russian influence in the middle east is conducive to that end.

2 years ago | Likes 6 Dislikes 0

I'm not saying that I'm happy with the conflict or the US/EU response. I'm just saying that "we should have nothing to do with it" won't actually end it.

2 years ago | Likes 13 Dislikes 1

At the risk of trying to engage in good-faith debate, I think that most people agree that Israel needs to stop. I think most people know on some level that Netanyahu is, at the very least, driving a war of aggression as a cynical power grab. The gray area comes in when you ask "what should we do about it?". The reality is that, while we may have scruples, India, China, Russia, and Iran do not. Will us pulling all support from Israel defuse the conflict? Or just change who has influence?

2 years ago | Likes 24 Dislikes 1

My 19-month old is 31 lbs. I'm a bit worried about how long I'll be able to keep up.

2 years ago | Likes 5 Dislikes 0

Yes. We have updated our system to redirect to an error page that instructs users to turn off their adblock as a failsafe.

2 years ago | Likes 1 Dislikes 1

And we do. We have ~98% test coverage.

However, real systems can run into problems that are difficult to catch in testing. For example, unit tests are probably not going to make actual network calls to a third party API; so, if their API differs from its documented behavior (or their prod and dev environments differ), we'll likely only see issues during production or QA testing. Incremental rollouts and QA are commonly-used approaches to catch this kind of thing before it impacts every user.

2 years ago | Likes 1 Dislikes 0

Also, because it's hard to detect that this is happening (adblock was designed to make this difficult to detect), users with adblock enabled have had a degraded experience (all feature flags turned off) for most of the lifetime of our product without us knowing.

2 years ago | Likes 1 Dislikes 0

We can't do incremental rollouts, so the probability of any given user encountering bugs during a rollout is significantly higher.

Alternatively, we invest engineering hours in workarounds, resulting in fewer features for our end users.

2 years ago | Likes 1 Dislikes 0

I'm an engineer at a music label with a bunch of software offerings. Here's the problem with adblock: it doesn't _just_ block ads.

For example, we manage our feature flags via a service called Amplitude. This requires that you log a device id (based on user agent and IP address) and user token with their service when you log in. Then you request feature flags with those ids.

Adblock blocks those requests. So, even if we've set a flag to 100% rollout, users with adblock don't get it.

2 years ago | Likes 1 Dislikes 1

But that's not important right now.

2 years ago | Likes 6 Dislikes 0

I relate to the other side of this. I managed a small team for a few years with perfect reviews from my reports. A couple voluntarily took career hits in order to keep reporting to me. There were tearful goodbyes on the rare occasion someone had to leave.

New leadership came in and forced me out within six months because "it's not what you accomplish, but how you accomplish it". Fuck you, Anna. I hope leadership eventually cottons on to your nonsense fluff OKRs and army of yes-men.

2 years ago | Likes 56 Dislikes 0

I'm very happy with my marriage and wouldn't trade it for the world.

2 years ago | Likes 8 Dislikes 0

This. My wife has major depression. And, when she is in a depressive episode, she is a totally different person. For days at a time, it's like I just don't have a partner. Am I empathetic? Sure. Do I realize that she feels terrible the entire time? Yes. Do I do everything I can to help? Of course. But I also suffer as a result of her depression. And this kind of "who is suffering more" pissing match trivializes that.

2 years ago | Likes 77 Dislikes 2

A number is algebraic iff it can be expressed as the root of a polynomial with rational coefficients (e.g. x^2 + 2x + 1 = 0; x is algebraic). Transcendental is the opposite.

2 years ago | Likes 1 Dislikes 0

Or use lard.

2 years ago | Likes 2 Dislikes 2

Stop dead-naming Max.

2 years ago | Likes 4 Dislikes 0

4 years ago | Likes 6 Dislikes 0

Strongly recommend. Just avoid the episodes with rape scenes.

4 years ago | Likes 9 Dislikes 0

The lying, not the doing something about it.

4 years ago | Likes 2 Dislikes 1

I think they'd tell you that if there was anything they could do about it. Or, if they were willing to lie. That was Trump's whole thing.

4 years ago | Likes 3 Dislikes 1

Disagree. I've had some excellent landlords in the past.

4 years ago | Likes 4 Dislikes 0

You douche.

5 years ago | Likes 11 Dislikes 0

If someone had a feasible proposal on how to spend billions to end world hunger, Bill Gates would have done it. Money is not the problem.

5 years ago | Likes 5 Dislikes 1

Trump is willing to lie to them (about globalization, automation, jobs, ...). Biden is not. They're clinging to false hope. Hence, denial.

5 years ago | Likes 5 Dislikes 0