Then turn it into a tax and be done with it. I don't shop for my tax collector and I don't pay taxes to companies with the biggest buildings in the city. Companies that don't actually provide health care, but just collect their pound of flesh from patients and providers, driving up costs for everyone.

I'm glad your child has received care. I'm very much behind the idea that pre-existing conditions should not preclude anything from receiving _care_. I'm completely opposed to mandating a private 3ᴿᴰ party be between me and my provider.

All of the providers have consolidated. I don’t know if ACA affected that or not, but wait times for checkups went from later this afternoon to sometime 6 months from now.

Part of my experience is going from corporate health insurance to marketplace, but in the past 5 years, ACA plans have consistently gotten worse and more expensive while service for those plans has gotten significantly worse in almost every way.

Who is it better for?

I’ve always thought this should be a whitelist tied to students enrolled in particular classes. Videos could be chosen to be universally available for all students by district admin, available to all students at a school by site admin, or available to students in a class by individual teachers.

What about hotel reservations, or literally any other thing you book ahead of time.

If a bus is taken out of service the people who were waiting for that stop at that time don’t go to the back of the line, they get the next bus. I’m sure airlines feel they are more sophisticated than public transit, but as a passenger I see little difference.

If you look at it just from a cost perspective, then you’re absolutely right. And that’s why everything sucks. If you look at it from a human perspective and design around customer service the end result would be different.

Also: here’s a list of things we are constitutionally not allowed to require, but if you choose to opt out you have a random 1:1 chance of being selected for an invasive “enhanced” screening.

Also: here’s where you can pay your bribe^H^H^H^H*Hfee to be prescreened so the whole process is easier for you unless we decide we you should be on the list that we randomly select for “enhanced” screening. Then your children get to watch a large man put his hands all over your body in ways that they’ve been told to never let a stranger touch you. And if you speak up, we’ll do it you your minor children too.

I was at O’hare for the first time in a few decades a few weeks ago and my flight was delayed due to some mechanical issue with the assigned plane. At least that’s what the app said. Because of the delay, the gate kept changing. We were supposed to know this because every once in a while the gate we were at no longer said it was our flight, so there must be some other location. I think at least one of the times it was mentioned over the PA, but besides the flight number everything else was unintelligible.

We see other flights to our destination that were scheduled after ours from the same airline on the same type of plane boarding and leaving. It doesn’t matter that our tickets were from earlier in the day. They’ve already screwed over 150 passengers. Screwing them over more is far less bad than delaying them slightly but having to also delay later flights by a little bit, too. I think we watched three flights leave. As a group of six, with four children, the likelihood of standby coming through on any of these is less than zero.

On the departure board the flight was referred to by a carrier other than the one we bought the tickets from, because of course everyone should know every carrier’s partner airlines and how their flight numbers map.

Three hours of delay had arrived but the plane was finally at the gate. FAA says I’m entitled to a meal for the delay, so I go ask how to redeem it. I’m told to go back to customer service near security and stand in a line to get a voucher. But if I miss the flight, there’s nothing they can do about it. I’m sure that’s not how that’s supposed to work, but I’m several hours delayed already, my plans for the day are shot, missing the flight it really an option just so I can get some airport food.

The time has arrived to start boarding. I’m on chat complaining about the service when it disconnects. The app stops working, so I check the airline’s website, and get a hard down, unstyled error message. I tell my wife that something seems wrong with their site and have my suspicion confirmed a few minutes later that their entire system is down and all flights are halted until further notice. No ETA.

At this point Reddit has more information about what’s happening than the gate agent. It’s another 45 minutes before a mumbly PA announcement tells us flights are delayed due to a global system wide outage.

Fortunately, their IT staff seemed to be on it, and the whole thing only lasted an hour. Then they put us on the plane like nothing happened and even got people to cheer for the crap service. Ice water in hell, I suppose.

Saying inline ASM is no different than a function call is like saying standard control structures are no different from function calls. I suppose from a Smalltalk perspective that could be true, but is that the mental model most programmers use?

I work on a system from the 90s with custom instructions. GNU-as was patched to understand the instructions. They’re used through macros that ultimately expand to inline ASM. Without this, you’d need function inlining, which may or may not be possible with a linked object (it certainly wasn’t standard in the 90s). So now a single instruction turns into stack management, a jump, more stack management and a return. At that point any benefit to a specialized instruction may be erased, or in the case I’m dealing with talking to external hardware becomes unreasonably expensive.

My MacBook is showing its age, though. Hearing that 2027 wont be any better makes me hopeful all the vibe coders can ask for memory efficient implementations to stretch existing hardware a little further.

Last year, for the first time since 2003, I didn’t upgrade to the latest macOS (né OS X) release. I’m hopeful for Golden Gate and continue to love the hardware, but man Tahoe is a low point.

The Swift UI-ification of System Preferences and all of the consistency lost by moving AWS from AppKit drag macOS down to the level of lesser systems and even Electron (that is to say, I’ve used more Mac-like electron apps than some of the first party Swift UI rewrites).

20 years later and desktop Linux still has no consistency. I’m not even sure how people use Windows. Could this be the year Haiku saves the desktop?

I can think of little modern philosophy more regressive than the idea that a self-appointed superior can determine that another is inferior to the point that they (or their offspring) should be culled from existence. Eugenics and racism have been intertwined since the beginning and with a modern twist continue to target vulnerable populations.

First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games.

I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.

I hated the properties addition in Objective-C. Why add that and not a dot syntax for all messages? Having a dot operator in a pointer blurred too much of the line between C and Obj-C syntax for my taste.

I worked at a FAANG and a team was tasked with implementing a new REST framework to replace/augment the supported RPC framework. Metrics were very important and this team might have know HTTP/REST well, but they didn’t understand what operators needed. It wasn’t even on their radar. As a senior engineer, without much traction I complained and fortunately someone one level higher from across the company saw my message and had the necessary influence to get them to pause and think. I don’t know if anyone has done that at Apple.

Things that used to work universally - key bindings, drag and drop, context menus - just don’t work by default anymore. Why? Because now everything is some low level UI element and whose behavior is completely up to the programmer. Sounds like web programming, not like Mac programming.

From a programming perspective, I don’t even like the paradigm. Once understood, IOC in AppKit and Interface Builder was incredibly efficient.