To be fair, the "War on Tobacco" has actually been a huge success[1]. I've been saying for years that we should end the War on Drugs in its current form and extend tobacco policy to other drugs. If you're old enough to drink, smoke, and get shipped off to a warzone, who is anyone else to tell you that you don't deserve the freedom to buy a bottle of pharmaceutical-grade heroin at CVS and shoot it up in the privacy of your own home?
But because we collectively insist on infantilizing ourselves, hundreds of billions of dollars per year are redirected from the pharma industry to black market criminal syndicates. Instead of funding medical research and stock buybacks, we're actively choosing to fund global chaos and mass atrocities. We could stop tomorrow, and it would cost us nothing. In fact, it would save the US billions of dollars in annual losses at all levels of government and generate billions of dollars in annual tax revenue, all of which could be used to fund things like addiction treatment services, law enforcement, and border security.
My partner 10+ years ago used to be very OCD about Asbestos when we had toddlers, and said that she would see tiny white fibers of it in the bark chips at a bunch of parks that the kids were playing at.
Turns out she was correct, its since been found in loads of mulch around Sydney.
We also came across a huge pile of it illegally dumped a bunch of years ago in the sand dunes at Kurnell beach, kids were happily playing in it.
I'd like to say I feel a lot better about having AirBnB help handle any problems or disputes that makes it worth paying some overhead... but it's really the other way around.
>I usually find the place I'd like to stay on AirBnB and then google the title & description and the property management website usually pops up.
Maybe it's selection bias but 80%+ of the airbnbs I stay at are mom and pop establishments with 0-2 other properties listed on their profile. I doubt they have enough scale to bother set up a separate booking website for their properties. That said I have noticed hotels advertising on airbnb, but they represent a small fraction (ie. <10%) of listings that I see.
I've got an LG Gram 17-inch laptop that weighs about the same as a 13-inch macbook air.
Having a huge screen on a super-light, super skinny laptop is so handy for portability and all the extra screen real-estate is great for a developer. Its difficult to go back to a 14-inch.
I wish more laptop manufacturers would make ultra-lights with large screens.
I was recently helping someone shop for a laptop and stumbled upon the LG gram. I was really impressed with the build quality and how light it was. I think it was a 16in though. I prefer smaller screen 13/14 but I was very tempted to get one myself.
That is impressive, but I’m also extremely sold on ARM viz. Apple Silicon. I haven’t touched a Windows laptop in years. The only thing that feels as snappy is my gaming desktop, and I would wager that my M4 Pro could probably beat it in pure computational power.
You used to walk into a newsagent and see the regular papers and magazines, and then the rack of playboy and porn just sitting off to the side, often not that far from the kids magazines and comics.
Japanese convenience stores still work this way. I’m still a bit bemused every time I see scantily clad ladies right next to the shounen manga, but maybe it shouldn’t xD
Dunno if this has changed, but it used to be this way in the US at basically any gas station in a ruralish area by a highway (in other words - stops with truckers), and you'd just have row after row of porn mags. The only 'censorship' is that they tended to be in racks that covered up about 3/5th of their height, so you could see the title and a bit more, but generally anything explicit would be in the lower 3/5th that you could only see if you picked it up.
Australians are more litigious than Americans, with similar insurance costs for doctors, yet our healthcare costs are still half of the USA's.
So insurance costs may be a factor, but its doubtful that its a large factor in healthcare costs, they largest factor is by far the public vs private system.
I experienced US healthcare when I went to visit a doctor in the US for a simple (obvious) ear infection. I was charged $600 USD for a five minute consult because the doctor wanted to milk as much $$$ from me as he could, giving me lots of unrelated/pointless blood tests (which were pointless because I was flying out the next day and wouldn't get the results).
In Australia it would have been a $65 fee paid by the government, and $10 for the antibiotics, around 1/10th of the US costs.
The problem in the US is that doctors and hospitals are incentivised to give patients unnecessary tests and medication, because it inflates their bills, and they make more profit.
I've noticed the same thing happening in Australia with private vets & vet hospitals because they are less regulated. They try and talk you into a lot of unnecessary procedures, test, and drugs because they make more profit, and the industry is not where near as well regulated as healthcare.
At least with a vet you can usually shop around, when you are sick often you cannot.
> The problem in the US is that doctors and hospitals are incentivised to give patients unnecessary tests and medication, because it inflates their bills, and they make more profit.
You’re right about what happened, but not for the wholly right reasons. The hospital charged you so much because they have to also negotiate prices with insurance companies (health insurance companies are just for-profit government agencies, they don’t actually serve a market value today) and pay for those who are uninsured. There are for-profit healthcare systems of course, but that’s only part of the story.
If the cost of the doctor’s time and the medication was $100, they can now cover let’s say 3 uninsured people for $300 each then take the other $300 you paid and book that against someone going bankrupt or a difference in negotiated cost with the insurance agency.
In America we have privatized profit for the insurance companies and socialized loss. They deny a claim, book a profit, the person with the claim doesn’t get treatment, then can’t work, then needs care, and society pays for it.
Purely from a cost perspective we should just go to single payer, but we won’t do that because who is going to the the politician that causes 10s of thousands in job losses of highly paid white collar professionals?
I was effectively uninsured as a foreigner, and had to pay for it myself hoping that I'd be reimbursed by my company later.
I had a nasty ear-infection, could hardly walk, and was in no state to argue, but the nurse gave me dozens of what they said were completely "normal procedure" blood tests from their in-house lab, which the doctor would have profited from directly. I told them I was leaving the next day and wouldn't get any results if they took a day, but they ignored and persisted.
I looked at the bill later and they were for loads and loads of completely unrelated conditions, diabetes, HIV, etc... a useless waste.
It was price gouging from the doctor directly pure and simple, no insurance providers involved, but I'm sure that normally that also adds an extra layer of silly costs.
In Australia its carefully regulated what a doctor can charge, and its a different company that does any tests, or gives out medication, the doctor or company can't profit directly from sending patients off for more testing, or for prescribing medication.
The main issue is you went to a hospital for an ear infection. You are subsidizing someone who is destitute getting a bullet wound treated potentially. The solution is the urgent care clinic for these situations. You would have paid quite a lot less. My last urgent care visit cost me $50 and I walked out with a $10 prescription.
I find that LLMs are almost comically bad at projects that have a hardware component like RaspberryPi or Pico, or Ardunio.
I think that its because often the libraries you use are niche or have a a few similar versions, the LLM really commonly hallucinated solutions and would continually suggest that library X did have that capability. I think because often in hardware projects you often hit a point where you can't do something or you need to modify a library, but the LLM tries to be "helpful" and it makes up a solution.
Based on my own modestly successful forays into that world, I have to imagine one problem the LLMs have in that space is terrible training data. A good three quarters of any search result you search for in that space will be straight-up out-of-date and not work on your system. Then you've got all the tiny variations between dozens of chipsets, and all the confidently wrong people on the internet telling you to do nonsensical things, entire ecosystems that basically poofed out of existence three years ago but are still full of all kinds of juicy search terms and Google juice... if I can hardly paw through this stuff with years of experience and the physical hardware right in front of me to verify claims with, I don't know how an LLM is supposed to paw through all that and produce a valid answer to any question in that space, without its own hardware to fiddle with directly.
The number of projects I’ve done where my notes are the difference between hours of relearning The Way or instant success. Google doesn’t work as some niche issue is blocking the path.
ESP32, Arduino, Home Assistant
And various media server things.
They’re also pretty bad at typescript generics. They’re quite good at explaining concepts (like mapped types), but when push comes to shove they generate all sorts of stuff that looks convincing, but doesn’t pass the type checker.
And then you’ll paste in the error, and they’ll just say “ok I see the problem” and output the exact same broken code lol.
I’m guessing the problem is lack of training data. Most TS codebases are mostly just JS with a few types and zod schemas. All of the neat generic stuff happens in libraries or a few utilities
Actually, it's because many of the people writing tutorials and sharing answers about that stuff don't know what the hell they're doing or grasp the fundamentals of how those systems work and so most of the source material the LLM's are trained on is absolute garbage.
Public Arduino, RPi, Pico communities are basically peak cargo cult, with the blind leading the blind through things they don't understand. The noise is vastly louder than the signal.
There's a basically giant chasm between expereinced or professional embedded developers that mostly have no need to ever touch those things or visit their forums, and the confused hobbyists on those forums randomly slapping together code until something sorta works while trying to share their discoveries.
Presumably, those communities and their internal knowledge will mature eventually, but it's taking a long long time and it's still an absolute mess.
If you're genuinely interested in embedded development and IoT stuff, and are willing to put in the time to learn, put those platforms away and challenge yourself to at least learn how to directly work with production-track SoC'a from Nordic or ESP or whatever. And buy some books or take some courses instead of relying on forums or LLM's. You'll find yourself rewarded for the effort.
> Presumably, those communities and their internal knowledge will mature eventually, but it's taking a long long time and it's still an absolute mess.
It won't because the RPi are all undocumented, closed-source toys.
It would be an interesting experiment to see which chips an LLM is better at helping out with: RPi's with its hallucinatory ecosystem or something like the BeagleY-AI which has thousands of pages of actual TI documentation for its chips.
It would be really nice if the LLMs could cover for this and circumvent where RPi's keep getting used because they were dumped under cost to bootstrap a network effect.
>Presumably, those communities and their internal knowledge will mature eventually, but it's taking a long long time and it's still an absolute mess.
I'm not sure they will. There's a kind of evaporative cooling effect where once you get to a certain level of understanding you switch around your tools enough that there's not much point interacting with the community anymore.
I was just today trying to fix some errors in an old Linux kernel version 3.x.x .dts file for some old hardware, so that I could get a modern kernel to use it. ChatGPT seemed very helpful at first - and I was super impressed. I thought it was giving me great insight into why the old files were now producing errors … except the changes it proposed never actually fixed anything.
Eventually I read some actual documentation and realised it was just spouting very plausible sounding nonsense - and confident at it!
The same thing happened a year or so ago when I tried to get a much older ChatGPT to help me with with USB protocol problems in some microcontroller code. It just hallucinated APIs and protocol features that didn’t actually exist. I really expected more by now - but I now suspect it’ll just never be good at niche tasks (and these two things are not particularly niche compared to some).
For the best of both worlds make the LLM first 'read' the documentation, and then ask for help. Make a huge difference in the quality and relevance of the answers you get.
We can't have true competition with utilities, because we'd need six sets of pipes into every apartment just to have six competing providers, so the government needs to step in and regulate utilities, because they are a natural monopoly.
The change is a good one, and there's still abilities that differentiate species, so dwarves still have toughness, and a bunch of other abilities.
Previously a Dwarven wizard was just a really bad choice, and you'd be noticeably less powerful than say an Elven wizard so no-one ever played one.
Now an Elven Wizard for instance has a few bits and pieces that might make them a bit better, but still leave a Dwarven Wizard as a viable choice.
This makes the game far more interesting in every way: players have more interesting builds, more character choices, and can play whatever combinations that they want.
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