Yossarian is kind of a whiny bitch, but it’s because he’s trying to cover up his exhaustion and terror with anything that will keep him out of harm’s way. What I liked about it was all of the silly jokes that come back to hit hard in the second half of the book.

Oh hey, I’m reading The Martian right now! Also loved Project Hail Mary by the same author, Andy Weir. It’s a bit more fantastical and just a great read.

What have they done to us?

I’ve talked to my roommates about this, how we’d eat like a bowl of canned chili every day with a dollop of peanut butter as a treat.

A little late on this, but this is essentially true. Technically you can buy a plan on the marketplace, but they… kinda suck. The cheapest plan I could get from my state marketplace as a single person household is about $315 a month with a $9000 deductible, and God only knows how many places actually accept it. The available plans and reductions are also very dependent on where you live. The ones available through office jobs are generally cheaper with better coverage and lower deductibles, but anything other than a white collar job will give you absolutely bare bones options if anything at all.

Most places I’ve worked have two plans based on how much you want to pay, but they are offered by the same company so no competition there. The last big contender is Medicaid, which can give pretty good coverage without having to pay a deductible or copay (most of the time). However, there’s monthly income requirements based on which state you live in. Some go as high as $3000/month, some as low as $235 a month.

So that’s pretty much it as far a options go. There’s a whole mess of other vouchers and programs and individual practice discounts that you may or may not have available, but that’s even more dependent on what’s available in your area.

Having worked in Healthcare insurance, I can tell you it’s an absolute mess and no one really knows what’s going on. The whole thing is a rats nest of ever changing policies and algorithms arguing with each other while the humans try to keep up. It’s basically impossible to “call around” as some suggest to figure out how much any given procedure will cost at any given practice with any given insurance, because there’s a high chance that nobody knows until you actually run it.

Also, while looking stuff up for this, I found out that anyone living in a Medicaid funded nursing home is required to give almost all their income to the state to pay for it. Of the roughly $3000 limit, you are allowed to keep at most $200 a month, with most states limiting it to something under $100. So that’s fun.

instead of simply being a friendly and polite contributor to society.

Do you think allistic people are inherently incapable of doing this earnestly?

God, it’s like teachers trying to copy a link from their file browser. Well, bless them for trying.

They seem so directionless lately, and by god is AI the wrong horse to bet on for their users.

I should check out LibreWolf…

OpenOffice was a really solid Microsoft Office rival, and FOSS to boot. Made by Sun Microsystems, of course, and then ruined by Oracle (of course).

Thankfully LibreOffice was forked from it and is still going strong as a very capable suite of document tools. And OpenOffice is basically dead, womp womp.

Jellyfin ftw

Funnily enough, Libre Office is another great example of this, being forked from Open Office (and also way better).

Honestly the probably don’t even have to. In my experience, they tell you to fuck off because anyone who actually notices the price of the power bill isn’t wealthy enough to sue.

I mean, we’ve seen already that AI companies are forced to be reactive when people exploit loopholes in their models or some unexpected behavior occurs. Not that they aren’t smart people, but these things are very hard to predict, and hard to fix once they go wrong.

Also, what do you mean by synthetic data? If it’s made by AI, that’s how collapse happens.

The problem with curated data is that you have to, well, curate it, and that’s hard to do at scale. No longer do we have a few decades’ worth of unpoisoned data to work with; the only way to guarantee training data isn’t from its own model is to make it yourself

Wow, it’s amazing that just 3.3% of the training set coming from the same model can already start to mess it up.

I’ve read some snippets of AI written books and it really does feel like my brain is short circuiting

At least in this case, we can be pretty confident that there’s no higher function going on. It’s true that AI models are a bit of a black box that can’t really be examined to understand why exactly they produce the results they do, but they are still just a finite amount of data. The black box doesn’t “think” any more than a river decides its course, though the eventual state of both is hard to predict or control. In the case of model collapse, we know exactly what’s going on: the AI is repeating and amplifying the little mistakes it’s made with each new generation. There’s no mystery about that part, it’s just that we lack the ability to directly tune those mistakes out of the model.

I’ve had very few issues with whitespace in my decade or so of using python, especially since git and IDEs do a lot to standardize it. I’m a Python simp, tho

Honestly, I’ve been using type hints very heavily since they became a thing. I just use IDE completion too much to do without them.

Paradox seemed like the ones to do it, what with publishing Cities Skylines, but unfortunately their life sim was canceled.

Paralives is still going strong in development, though, with a pretty constant stream of updates. Really hoping that one sees the light of day. They’ve already got a pretty impressive building system working, but they’ve got some big ambitions, particularly when it comes to adaptive interactions with character heights.

That’s so very sad