SoyViking [he/him]

I remember how everyone in my country who have opinions for a living were clutching their pearls saying “war in Europe” as if it was orders of magnitude worse than war everywhere else.

In Denmark we have mostly public healthcare. Everybody can go to a GP, a hospital or a specialist free of charge. Prescriptions have co-pays that can be really nasty up front but at least the co-pays gets smaller the more drugs you need and there is a cap to how much you can end up paying over a year.

Dentistry is not covered for adults due to dentists and medical doctors being represented by different lobby groups half a century ago. Dental health is scary if you’re poor although you can beg the local municipality to cover the cheapest possible treatment if you can demonstrate that you’re poor enough. Glasses are the same story and although the national health insurance pays some part of the cost for hearing aids, that only covers the cheapest and most basic models.

You can have private health insurance in addition to what you get from the national health insurance. Many people working in the private sector, especially in PMC jobs, has health insurance as part of their remuneration. These private insurances enables you to skip waiting lines for treatment and diagnosis by sending you to a private hospital, it is also common for them to cover physiotherapy and treatment for gambling and substance abuse disorders. Some of them even partially covers dental care. In essence the purpose of these private plans is to get you back to work as quick as possible and they have some really arbitrary limitations, like covering psychiatric care but not anything related to ADHD or anxiety.

There’s also private health insurance you can buy as an individual if they suspect you won’t need it. They will cover part of the costs of prescriptions and glasses as well as letting you skip the waiting lists.

George Washington. This thing should have been nipped in the bud.

I’m used to driving old shitboxes but a few years ago we rented a completely new car. It was almost driving itself, making sure I stayed in my lane, it had automatic beam selection, a big screen for playing music and navigation, tiny little plastic thingies that pops out when you open the door making it harder to dent adjacent cars. It was a fucking spaceship. I’m not going to lie, I would love to have all of those fancy features.

So breaking things up aggressively into small components you can reason about in isolation tends to be the best way to write reliable code you can maintain over time.

This is so true. Something that has really improved my coding has been having a linter that whines to me about assignment branch condition size. Compared with learning how to properly stub methods in tests it has helped me break tasks down into simple manageable chunks with little room for error.

All these newfangled high-faluting AI tools are ruining the software industry and making developers go soft. Back in my day we didn’t need no robot to get things done, we knew the value of hard work and wasn’t afraid to pull up our sleeves and copy/paste the code from Stack Overflow ourselves.

This has been my entire last week. Our client has a tight deadline for this feature I’m working on, in part due to their own indecisiveness and in part due to an external API developed by a big corporation being late and buggy. This means we’re doing testing and bug fixing simultaneously with doing new development and even with speccing and estimating new subtasks. And with this client, this close to the deadline, every little bug is critical and needs to be fixed right away. Meanwhile, a junior developer is being onboarded to the project and another developer is working on a different feature derived from an architecture I made. There’s always a fire I need to put out, a question I need to answer or a feature I need to describe. I’m writing more emails than code these days.

I normally go “what the fuck did I even do yesterday?” five minutes before daily standup and look at my git commits and calendar for the day before to piece together a plausible version of my workday (I do my timesheets the same way as well btw). Very little serious information gets passed on but somehow it makes my boss happy and he has told me that he likes the way I do standups.

I work at a small company where most projects only have one or two developers so standup meetings are usually a lot of completely irrelevant information. It’s very boring. “Yesterday I worked on the thing on the project you barely know what does.”

But have you considered that the economy is doing great and that the people struggling with debt should just pull themselves up by the bootstraps and should be blamed and shamed as individuals until they do so?

One would hope work would be significantly less miserable under socialism though

Never trust anything you read on the internet

Under capitalism workers have to put up with jobs that makes them miserable. Otherwise they will become unemployed and even more miserable.

This is the best, most efficient and most rational economic system ever.

It also has the must expensive healthcare system in human history.

Ordinary people are getting scammed.

In Danish we have “you can’t cut the hair off a bald guy”

If the US’ official self-understanding as a country with the rule of law, checks and balances and strong protection of private property is true, the TikTok ban should be overturned by any court.

If.

I’ve received checks three or four times in my life. I’ve never written one. As a kid I had a physical paper booklet for the savings account I put my birthday money into. The only way I can get to own a house is by winning the lottery. I remember when small shops had manual credit card machines that would transfer your account details to a slip of paper. I also remember when local stores would give credit to people from the community. I get low-key annoyed when I have to use cash instead of digital payments. My retirement plan is not to retire.

This is where the idea of “personal responsibility” is useful for liberals. Flatly admitting that they want a desperate underclass is too mask off for them to feel like good people so they invent a way of blaming individual victims rather than the economic system.

The poor has a theoretical opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so when they don’t do that it’s really their own fault. Of course that theoretical opportunity doesn’t translate into actual opportunity for most people but that’s fine, as there’s enough window dressing of meritocracy to make the opportunity look real if you are careful not to go into too much detail.

This is also the reason why liberals hate discussing real-world examples. Their logic only works in abstract thought experiments where they get to control the variables. Saying that everyone has the opportunity to succeed is a lot easier than saying that Bob, who has a set of very concrete and undeniable material conditions, has the opportunity succeed.

It’s so annoying that being irrationality afraid of nuclear power is simply assumed to be a leftist position where I live, by leftists and non-leftists alike. No thought goes into it, nuclear power is scary because of nuclear bombs and Chernobyl and that’s it.

I once read that when Sweden decided to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar they didn’t do it all at once, disliking the idea of jumping so many days forwards/backwards (I can’t remember which way the Julian is out of sync). Instead they opted for a plan to move their calendar one single day every year over several decades. I remember the place I read about it saying that it just confused everyone and the plan was scrapped after a few years.

If you can’t use it for porn and you can’t use it to make pictures of powerful people in unflattering situations then what is the use case for AI?