Content? Hardly.

Disinformation. Lies. Etc.

Wasn’t sure I’d agree when I started reading, but I like the way you think.

I benefit from an orphan drug, and the R&D was most definitely subsidised by the public purse.

My insurance pays a few grand a month for it.

The mfg coupon covers most of the rest, minus a copay.

This is the second iteration of the original drug. The first hasn’t meaningfully fallen in price and only the original company can manufacture and distribute the generic even under the name of competitors.

There was no breakthrough in the second iteration, and the logic to solve the “problem” they solved was straightforward. So now I pay more, for an anecdotally less effective version that addresses a risk irrelevant to me but present in the original.

There is yet a third iteration on the way.

Shock revelations:

• pharma companies are greedy and will double dip against both government subsidies and patients/insurance at every opportunity.
• XX Pharma didn’t pay for the original R&D, my gov did.
• if one replaces Na with a/several similar elements, one still ends up with a salt, often resulting in a drug variant that “doesn’t affect blood pressure” and offers no other real benefits, nor risks.
• Clinical trials for said alternative salt are broadly leas expensive than for the original. That does not result in lower prices.

Nationalise pharma research, if not the manufacturers.

Also, generics are often manufactured in countries with, shall we say, fewer controls and regulations. Know who makes those pills and where. If you can’t stomach the FDA reports on that manufacturer, find a pharmacy who will sell you something else…

Probably cheap at the price compared to burning Jet A by the tens or hundreds of gallons.

Not that I am unconcerned about the resource usage. Lesser of two evils.

At one time, Reddit (or at least the core server) was open source. Statistically, it’s relatively likely that someone, somewhere forked and is maintaining that code for their own purposes to this day, but I’m not actively aware of any examples.

If someone has been maintaining a fork, I’d love to see the old comment database imported into it and made available, though I don’t know offhand what license either the code or the comments were released under.

A FOSS Reddit, without the chaos that took over America during the presidential administration installed in 2016, and branching from there, would be an interesting point of diversion to say the least.

Edit: quickie DDG search found me one fork archived in 2023 and a further form updated a year or so ago. That’s recent enough the damn thing just might build with a little work.

2023 fork of open source reddit

~2024 fork

I’m sure there are others…

Generally? Well within the executive power / administrative law of any given state as noted by BlueFalcon below.

Practically? I’d expect it to be quite a struggle. For licensed professions in general (doctors, real estate, insurance, hairdressers, etc.) most or all states ask a question to the effect of “Has your license for profession ever been suspended or revoked in any other state?”. It may or may not be an automatic disqualifier, but even if not it’s an uphill battle.

It prevents the real estate agent who stole someone’s earnest money from upping stakes to the next state and getting licensed, but since the standards for suspending/revoking licenses vary widely by state I lean towards believing that perhaps it should be a factor, and perhaps the state board of profession should meet to review the application, but previous disciplinary action in some other state is in no way an absolute statement about someone’s fitness to practice in their chosen field.

And no asinine private jet commute required for the AI CEO…

Sell them to someone who will test and resell them to the airline or medical industry… Manufacturing is a likely customer as well, plenty of legacy equipment there that’s airgapped and still running decades-old hw/sw.

Youtube warning, some Boeing 747s

Recent BBC article

(This is a wrong answer since you only have a single pack. If you had several cases, you might actually be able to make a buck)

Saw a post on mastodon in the last day or so that someone dug up a network card for the old 486 they had been working on getting back to life. Might be a use case there, as well as in aviation and medicine - fields that move exceptionally slowly and tend to have expensive equipment with long lifetimes.

Was always curious why there was an extra step to confirm when making a call through the GV app. Not using it anymore, but I see the logic behind requiring that confirmation.

Google Voice, with built-in dialer, voicemail, etc., was useful once upon a time, from when they acquired GrandCentral (original company) up through a few years ago.

Not so much anymore, just recently ported out the last couple of numbers I was using them for. I don’t see much use case for replacing the dialer, except insofar as the ability to do so has value in terms of freedom and open markets.

It’s already trivial to get local banking details from many countries, (e.g., ‘multi-currency’ debit cards) but as far as I’m aware there’s not a practical way to get a foreign debit card without the usual hoops that the full account would require.

Probably because demand for such a thing is low - I can generate disposable card numbers on the fly, but only from my home country. Can’t imagine (aside from this specific edge case in question) generating foreign card numbers would be all that useful most of the time.

End-user support for such a thing would also be a challenge - I’m very accustomed to entering the usual data points with my card, but users would forget the associated postal code, or any number of other things, and then call support whining that it’s ‘broken’.

IOW, not something that one stuck in Ameristan can realistically override. Damn.

A handful of those factors are fairly trivial, but addressing all of them concurrently sounds like a tall order - especially since presumably one can’t talk to countryd directly and feed it the desired data.

Appreciate the clarity - iOS just isn’t a platform I have a need or the tools to code in.

Have an Al-Star and a Safari with two of my favorite inks close at hand nearly always. Can’t remember the last time I so much as thought about cleaning either, even the one with a shimmer in it. I just keep refilling them, and they just keep working.

Dirt cheap, given the quality, too, IMHO. They could charge twice what they do for the lower end of their products, and there would still be value there.

And here I thought that outsourced “HR” folks were a travesty.

Had a small payroll issue recently having to do with some time off and a misunderstanding by the (outsourced) HR folks, was able to speak with enough people who understood one segment or another of the (rather complex) scenario to get it resolved in a couple of days.

AI would be a hard fail in that application, guaranteed.

At least one giant multi-national corp is actively soliciting examples and use cases from their employees.

“Toy” example submissions is fine, the company is just so eager for something to do with AI - they’re hoping for their actual AI folks to be able to take off of that uncompensated IP, while the employee with the idea gets a pat on the head.

Have I had ideas I might otherwise submit and that are well within my capabilities to implement at “toy” level? Hell, yes.

Do I want to contribute concepts into that sort of pipeline? Absolutely not. Not when they more or less automatically own my work product and whatever I do on company time already.

I use Arch, btw…

Kidding, of course - but there are some of those folks out there. TBF, they’re the vocal minority, but they are vocal nonetheless.

There really is a dearth of choices. I’ve little love for Google’s version of android, mostly for privacy reasons.

If I could get a decent phone that ran at reasonable speed for a tolerable price, without the tracking, I’d be willing to give it a go - and endure more than a few pain points.

I should have marked mine more clearly as a “first pass” from the start.

Worked with too many hotshot folks to trust future/past humans quite that much.

Once in a while, I’ve even been that hotshot guy. Definitely not excluding my own “oh that was prod…” adventures when I worry about humans, didn’t mean to come off like I think I might have.

But interesting, and certainly worth kicking around.

In green fields projects, this makes a fair bit of sense at initial reading, tentatively.

But new code becomes old code, and then builds on the quality / discipline / cowboy status of the last person to touch the code, in a complex and interlocking way.

I can’t say I’d be excited to find a partially converted existing codebase of this. But in fairness, I’m on my couch on a Sunday and haven’t actually worked through your examples (or read the original paper). I see the benefit to having both types of extensibility, obviously. Just not sure it outweighs the real world risk once actual humans start getting involved.

I don’t know a single person who can’t say they’ve never taken a single “good enough” shortcut at work, ever, and it seems this only works (efficiently) if it’s properly and fully implemented.