My power company recently contacted me with an “exciting offer” where instead of billing me based on my energy usage they’d just bill me based on what my average usage was previously. I politely declined. I think I’ll keep paying based on something measurable instead of vibe based billing.

Resolve has some quirks on Linux. In particular it doesn’t support certain codecs.

There’s a certain irony in someone using a racist dog whistle complaining about fascism.

They should just run Linux, but if they have to do Windows then 7 is just as good as 10 now, they’re both equally unsupported. Blame Microsoft for fucking up 10 and 11 so bad nobody is willing to run them. If they had at least left 10 alone people would still be using that but they’re too greedy for everyone’s data and they couldn’t leave well enough alone. It’s also not like there aren’t an absolute ton of Windows 10 and 11 installs that are part of bot nets. Running a new version of Windows makes it slightly harder to get rooted, but doing stupid stuff no matter what you’re running is ultimately the problem, not the version of Windows. The age of worms self propagating through service 0-days is largely over, it’s almost all phishing and trojans these days. It would be one thing if we were talking Windows 98 or XP, but 7 is fairly solid out of the box.

Apparently some are even opting to reinstall Windows 7 rather than the trash fire that is 11. It seems like 10 was never loved, merely tolerated, and as MS continues to enshittify 10 in an attempt to force people onto 11 some are just going back to the previous good version of Windows.

To be fair to Arch, the AUR was always advertised as a caveat emptor type thing. It never really claimed to be secure in the first place.

Another example might be shopping carts or session storage. Anything that persists from page to page. Does the site have an option for dark mode display? Probably stored in a cookie. Option to change the display language? Yeah, also likely a cookie.

So the way the statement about Qualcomm supporting Linux was phrased made it seem like a blanket statement rather than referring to specifically the X1 Elite. The fact that Qualcomm’s Linux support seems to vary wildly based on the specific CPU is interesting and suggests it’s less about the CPU or Linux and more about the visibility and importance of the companies using that CPU. The X1 Elite got first class Windows support (although it sounds like only some specific laptops did) because certain large manufacturers were using it. Likewise the 8 Elite Gen 5 is getting first class Linux support because Valve is using it in a high visibility project.

If there’s a silver lining to this it sounds like Valve is doing the right thing by the FOSS community and is paying to have a company contribute bug fixes and improvements to the Vulkan drivers and FEX project for ARM in general and for this specific CPU. That combined with Qualcomm themselves wanting to look good and provide support should mean at least this CPU should work very well in Linux, and maybe that will also make it a little easier to support other Qualcomm CPUs as well. It’s just a shame that that level of Linux support by Qualcomm doesn’t extend to all their products.

So it makes me wonder how much Valve is paying them for support since the upcoming Steam Frame uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 CPU and is also running Steam OS which is just a fork of Arch.

Hmm, I like this approach. How about this though. When a state fucks up bad enough to need a federal bailout, and it has to be the states fault not something like a natural disaster unless the state itself either caused it or demonstrably failed to prepare for it (looking at you Texas power grid) then the federal government does the following.

First they decide how much they’re budgeting to fix the problem. Then the State needs to decide if they’re going to provide a plan to keep that problem from happening again. If the state provides a plan then the federal subsidy payments are done in installments and those installments are conditional on implementing that plan. If however the state either refuses to make a plan or doesn’t make one that’s acceptable instead that money is put into a fund that people can claim some amount of to cover expenses for moving out of that state and into another one. This could potentially go all the way up to the cost of buying a house in a different state, although they then actually have to move out of their current state including selling any property in that state or else the money gets clawed back.

This way the problem gets solved one way or another, either the state improves or else there are fewer people stuck in shitty states.

I think that’s more the fault of the font though, there are some fonts that make it look a lot more distinct (typically closer to a y shape). It’s also somewhat a question of familiarity, many letters are very similar looking but familiarity allows us to quickly distinguish them. Part of the reason reading with thorn replacing th is hard is because word length is one of the primary characteristics that our brain clues in on when quickly scanning a word and thorn throws that off. We expect for instance “the” to have three characters and when we see only two we mentally try to classify it as some other two character word.

Turns out letting the guy who habitually bankrupts businesses run the government “like a business” leads to financial problems. Who could possibly have predicted this? There’s also the fact he’s a complete moron, and likely is suffering from early onset dementia, and he’s a felon and conman just for that extra bit of spice.

Really getting this kind of energy here.

Agentic AI is just a buzzword for letting AI do things without human supervision. It’s absolutely a recipe for disaster. You should never let AI do anything you can’t easily undo as it’s guaranteed to screw it up at least part of the time. When all it’s screwing up is telling you that glue would make an excellent topping for pizza that’s one thing, but when it’s emailing your boss that he’s a piece of crap that’s an entirely different scenario.

Thinking about investing in new AI IPOs?

Not even remotely.

There’s a time and place for disagreements, but basic human rights ain’t it. If this was the 1980s and we were all arguing over whether the wealthy getting yet another tax break would actually benefit the poor you might have a point. At this point the argument is about whether trans people should be allowed to exist and whether birth right citizenship should be removed (to say nothing of the concentration camps). Those are not disagreements anyone needs to hear.

Windows will be the default until suddenly it isn’t. Valve is doing amazing at destroying the core of Microsoft’s support. This story would be different if this was a decade ago, but these days most average people do their computing on phones and tablets. The ones sticking to traditional PCs are mostly gamers and now more than ever Linux is a viable alternative to Windows. Vanishingly few games can’t be played perfectly fine on Linux. Once enough gamers are using Linux it will become the default choice, and once it’s the default choice for gamers it will become the default choice for most people, at least the ones not on phones and tablets.

OK, but now, what if instead of everyone using that money to buy insurance the government just bought the insurance for everyone. And then what if instead of paying an insurance company to pay healthcare expenses the government just directly paid those healthcare expenses. It would be so much simpler with a lot fewer middlemen involved.

Only the first one can be fixed by competition, the rest aren’t impacted by that at all. There are too many moving parts for it all to magically go away by just saying “make them compete”. For instance what happens when insurance companies compete to offer the best deals on group rates to employers but then charge exorbitant premiums to employees? Or what if insurance premiums all magically came down but pharmaceutical prices kept skyrocketing?

Medical costs are an inelastic demand as well as a non-discretionary expense. That’s an absolutely terrible combination which means they’re almost entirely isolated from market forces.

Consider for instance a situation I find myself in. I need a certain medication for a permanent medical condition. Fortunately there are multiple medications available (often due to patents there’s only a single option). Unfortunately I’m allergic to all but one of them. That means it doesn’t matter if the pharmaceutical company is charging $5 or $5000 I’m paying for it. I literally have no choice. Whether my insurance pays for 100% of that or 0% doesn’t change what the pharmaceutical company is charging. Further for insurance I was offered a choice of about 5 different plans through my employer (which is a lot by most standards, often employers only offer one or two plans). My insurance is by all metrics terrible, I pay thousands of dollars every year in deductibles, but once I hit those deductibles it covers everything at 90% which with my medical expenses save me tens of thousands of dollars a year. There are cheaper plans of course, but then the tradeoff is that I’m restricted to a tiny handful of doctors who are all terrible and every single medical decision has to be pre-approved by the insurance company or they don’t cover it and I’d rather pay the extra thousand dollars a year to keep those decisions between me and my doctors.

The US medical system is a hydra and fixing any one part doesn’t actually solve anything. The entire system needs to be overhauled top to bottom. Switching to a single payer system is just the first step in that process but it’s a necessary one because otherwise the problem is intractable. It’s likely the patent system is going to need to be overhauled at least with regards to medications before it’s fixed as well.

Mostly because:

A) Insurance companies collude with each other

B) are only half the problem (the other half being hospitals and pharmaceutical companies cranking prices up)

C) Most Americans get their insurance through their employer

and

D) Healthcare costs are complicated because they’re split between insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses and typically raising one lowers the other and vice versa

Insurance was always a terrible way to handle healthcare expenses because healthcare costs are generally non-discretionary and have far too many moving parts and payers.