Spyke

Replies

Comment on

What's a scam that's so normalized that we don't even realize it's a scam anymore?

Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.

Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don't have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn't covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.

Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can't negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.

Comment on

Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame

The announcement did not include Copilot? No mention of 300 useless AI features being shoved down our throats??!

It's wild how by virtue of the fact that Valve isn't a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, the same Valve which has a history of putting out half-baked goods and which has an always-on DRM client called Steam, seems poised to surpass most of its competitors both in the user privacy and hardware hardware spaces with just straightforward products. They have a product to sell, and that's it. They don't need to micro-optimize for bullshit like seemingly every other large tech company does.

linux

Comment on

Why You Can't Currently Download Ubuntu 23.10

As an aside remark, it's really funny how everyone has to elaborate what the fuck they're talking about when they talk about Twitter.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) Ubuntu explains the situation

could have just been written as

In a tweet, Ubuntu explains the situation

but the epic genius elon decided to destroy all brand recognition. Truly incredible thing to witness. Twitter literally got its own branded terms into common lexicon and he just set it all on fire.

Comment on

OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants $7tn. For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it

Wake me up when "ai" makes the amount of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere trend downward. Generative AI is just a way to burn electricity to take value produced by humans and then replace those same humans, all to line the pockets of the companies that can afford to churn all the data in the world.

For the handful of genuinely cool and interesting things it can do, the number of extremely awful costs and externalities is like 1000x worse.

Comment on

*Permanently Deleted*

I really began to understand MLK Jr's line "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" in the past few years. For every injustice allowed (in fact, oftentimes rooted for) we are saying that it will actually be OK to do that elsewhere. Eventually the justification will be OK.

In the USA we said surveillance was OK. Just use it to profile "terrorists" in the so-called war on terror. Use it to profile everyone who appears at the border. Use it to profile every Palestinian in Gaza. Use it to only profile gang members and "criminals." Use it to clandestinely surveil every phone call. Finally, stop pretending: use it to surveil everybody.

How many databases is my face in just because I flew back home from out of the country a few months ago?

Comment on

GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

Reply in thread

The key point about codeberg as I understand it is it’s meant for foss projects. It’s not really much more complex than that. Want to host non-free software, or want to use it for your company’s private code repository? They don’t want that on their servers, so either find an alternative or self-host forgejo, which is the same code (derived from gitea) that powers codeberg itself.