(At least the Democrats seem to be more open to actually taxing to make up for shortfalls, unlike Republicans.)

> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?

It's funny you should bring this up in the context of healthcare. Amazon acquired One Medical a few years ago. Within no more a year, One Medical got so much worse. Harder to book appointments, wait times increasing, and care team not responding to in-app messages as quickly. (And sometimes being significantly less helpful than they used to be; e.g. "you don't need a recommendation or a referral for a general surgeon since you're on a PPO; just look through UCSF Health's directory and pick one". And this, after I specifically asked for a recommendation, twice. Not to mention most of UCSF's departments will turn you away without a referral, regardless of what kind of insurance you have.)

So I don't know if Amazon is bloated, corrupt, or inefficient, but Amazon acquiring what used to be a genuinely useful medical group made it much, much worse, and I assume that was all in the name of "minimizing costs".

COBRA is always an option when you leave a job and don't have another one lined up that will give you another insurance plan without a gap.

Yes, it's annoying to have to make the switch in general to a new employer's plan, since your existing slate of doctors might not be covered by your new plan, deductibles reset, and you have to navigate a new-to-you bureaucracy.

> I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with

You can, you just aren't going to like the price tag. ACA marketplace plans are open to everyone, even if your employer offers health insurance. You can always decline the latter and sign up for your own plan. Depending on where you live, you might be able to get a barebones plan for as low as $350/mo, but in some markets your cheapest option could be hundreds of dollars more. And that's going to be a HMO-type plan with a high deductible, so you'll be paying out of pocket to the tune of thousands of dollars for anything other than preventative care, and your choice of providers will be limited. If you want something similar to what an established tech company offers (for example), you'll be paying north of $1k/mo in most situations.

(Source: our COBRA just ran out a couple months ago, we don't have jobs that offer health insurance, and I went down this rabbit hole and spent hours researching options.)

> I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so

I'm with you there. What we have sucks. We (or our employers, which we end up paying for indirectly) pay much more for care than people in other developed nations with socialized medicine, and our outcomes are not meaningfully better, or at least not anywhere near better enough to justify the added cost.

> more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can

That's good that you're able to, but in the absence of an insurance system, and no state-supported subsidy, healthcare would be something only a relatively privileged few would be able to afford in the US.

While our private insurance system does cause inefficiencies that raise the price of care, eliminating it won't solve enough of the cost problem to matter.

I don't think there are better options than some sort of single-payer, government-subsidized healthcare system. Those systems do of course have their flaws (some of them quite significant), but they tend to provide care to everyone more or less equally, with generally good outcomes, and completely avoid the problem of people facing a choice between foregoing needed care and bankruptcy.

Studies like this are useful inasmuch as they help us understand a disease more fully. Not sure what you mean by "misdirection"; the study's methodology seems sound?

Skill level is an attribute you use to weight the dimensions. Sure, if you're an expert player who rarely gets hit (and can optimally use a mini boost to recover when you do), acceleration doesn't matter as much. But most people are not expert players, and play too casually to ever get to that level. Ignoring acceleration just won't create a fun experience for them.

How do you get this "reliable, but not spectacular" income in one of these places? What are these places?

That's just so inefficient and wasteful. Assuming a world in which LLMs do most of the coding work, do we want to burn electricity having the LLM build an options dialog or config file parser once, or do we want to burn electricity millions of times as users want to change any little thing about the software they use?

I really hope what you should expect is my answer to that question isn't controversial.

Having an LLM do bespoke customizations that are unlikely to be interesting to other people? Great, sure. But adding a generally-useful feature to a piece of software, but not caring to try to upstream it? Lame. Lame, lame, lame.

(Entertainingly, if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we wouldn't need this database... or police or militaries for that matter.)

At any rate, even if I could ensure, in perpetuity, that my DNA would not be used inappropriately (where I get to decide what that means), I would still not want it collected and database'd. People deserve to have privacy in their bodies.

And still are. When I got to his "Lots to cover today! Let's get to it.", I was like "wait, we haven't started yet?"

I used to read his stuff regularly prior to his Sourcegraph days, and I don't recall why I stopped. Completely agree that he was always fun to read.

So I was really disappointed to start reading this one (I'll leave the tab open, but probably won't finish it). Sounds like he's pretty out of touch with reality these days and isn't grounded at all.

Like the sibling poster, I gagged a little at his casual mention of six-figure teaching engagements, and the "suckers" (that's what "whales" read to me as well) keeping his game alive.

I still haven't gotten around to trying it, though, so I don't know what the reality is. And new open-weight models have been released since then that I'd want to evaluate...