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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Certainly the latter.

    I have pretty decent insurance through work, but if I’m picking up a prescription, it’s cheaper for me to say I don’t have insurance and use a free discount card (like GoodRx) than to use my insurance. We’re talking $150-$200 for one prescription (a one month supply) with insurance vs $30 without.

    To be fair, I have an HDHP with an HSA so my insurance is only supposed to negotiate a discount until I hit the deductible, rather than paying for it. Full price is $200-$250, I think? (I get generics and each generic variant has a slightly different price.) So technically they’re providing a discount, just not a very good one.

    Insurance also likes to require a “prior authorization,” which was always a fun surprise after making it through the pharmacy line. That normally takes a couple days to resolve, at minimum, and sometimes longer. If you’re not familiar with prior auths, it’s basically when the insurance company says “Hey doc, can you justify why you’re prescribing this and answer these eight questions?” and then they have someone without a medical degree review the answer and see if it’s good enough.

    The only downside to paying out of pocket with a discount card is that the $30 doesn’t go toward my deductible. But since my deductible is multiple thousands of dollars, unless something else happens during the year, I won’t hit my deductible off the $150-$200 prescriptions + regular doctor visits alone. But that’s at most $360 out of pocket that wouldn’t have gone toward the deductible, assuming I had a health crisis in December, vs $1440-$2040 saved if I don’t.

    X-rays are even worse, because you’re not told the price ahead of time.


  • hedgehog@ttrpg.networktoComic Strips@lemmy.worldAss Ads
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    18 days ago

    Glaring doesn’t imply a negative meaning. In this case it’s used to mean “obvious”.

    Unless you’re suggesting that “glaring” means “obviously staring” (it doesn’t - that would be “glaringly staring”) this doesn’t make any sense.

    “[He’s] glaring at [direct object]” is an example of a sentence that uses the present participle form of the verb “glare,” which explicitly communicates anger or fierceness.

    If you’re not convinced, read on.

    —————

    The verb form that takes an object is:

    Glare (verb with object): to express with a glare. They glared their anger at each other

    The noun form the above definition references is:

    Glare (noun): a fiercely or angrily piercing stare.

    “Glaring” can be an adjective and one of those definitions does mean “obvious” or “conspicuous,” but the use of that form of the word doesn’t make sense in her sentence. Think about a comparable sentence like “The undercover operative is conspicuous at the bar,” where the bar is the location. (Even then, most people wouldn’t use “glaring” in that sentence, as “conspicuous” or “obvious” are much less ambiguous; the operative could be staring piercingly or angrily at the bar rather than being glaring while being at the bar.) Another example that makes a bit more sense is “The effect of the invasive plants is glaring at the park.”

    But for that interpretation to be valid here, you’d have to:

    • believe that the dude is trying to hide/blend in, or otherwise explain how he - not what he’s doing, but the dude himself - is conspicuous
    • believe that the woman’s referring to her own ass as a location
    • assume that she isn’t commenting on how the guy is looking at her ass, even though the joke depends on giving him something different to look at

    That’s a bit of a stretch.


  • There’s a whole history of people, both inside and outside the field, shifting the definition of AI to exclude any problem that had been the focus of AI research as soon as it’s solved.

    Bertram Raphael said “AI is a collective name for problems which we do not yet know how to solve properly by computer.”

    Pamela McCorduck wrote “it’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, but that’s not thinking” (Page 204 in Machines Who Think).

    In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter named “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet” Tesler’s Theorem (crediting Larry Tesler).

    https://praxtime.com/2016/06/09/agi-means-talking-computers/ reiterates the “AI is anything we don’t yet understand” point, but also touches on one reason why LLMs are still considered AI - because in fiction, talking computers were AI.

    The author also quotes Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence:

    Now we can see the entire picture. Nature first created animals such as reptiles with sophisticated senses and sophisticated but relatively rigid behaviors. It then discovered that by adding a memory system and feeding the sensory stream into it, the animal could remember past experiences. When the animal found itself in the same or a similar situation, the memory would be recalled, leading to a prediction of what was likely to happen next. Thus, intelligence and understanding started as a memory system that fed predictions into the sensory stream. These predictions are the essence of understanding. To know something means that you can make predictions about it. …

    The human cortex is particularly large and therefore has a massive memory capacity. It is constantly predicting what you will see, hear, and feel, mostly in ways you are unconscious of. These predictions are our thoughts, and, when combined with sensory input, they are our perceptions. I call this view of the brain the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.

    If Searle’s Chinese Room contained a similar memory system that could make predictions about what Chinese characters would appear next and what would happen next in the story, we could say with confidence that the room understood Chinese and understood the story. We can now see where Alan Turing went wrong. Prediction, not behavior, is the proof of intelligence.

    Another reason why LLMs are still considered AI, in my opinion, is that we still don’t understand how they work - and by that, I of course mean that LLMs have emergent capabilities that we don’t understand, not that we don’t understand how the technology itself works.




  • Why is 255 off limits? What is 127.0.0.0 used for?

    To clarify, I meant that specific address - if the range starts at 127.0.0.1 for local, then surely 127.0.0.0 does something (or is reserved to sometimes do something, even if it never actually does in practice), too.

    Advanced setup would include a reverse proxy to forward the requests from the applications port to the internet

    I use Traefik as my reverse proxy, but I have everything on subdomains for simplicity’s sake (no path mapping except when necessary, which it generally isn’t). I know 127.0.0.53 has special meaning when it comes to how the machine directs particular requests, but I never thought to look into whether Traefik or any other reverse proxy supported routing rules based on the IP address. But unless there’s some way to specify that IP and the IP of the machine, it would be limited to same device communications. Makes me wonder if that’s used for any container system (vs the use of the 10, 172.16-31, and 192.168 blocks that I’ve seen used by Docker).

    Well this is another advanced setup but if you wanted to segregate two application on different subnets you can. I’m not sure if there is a security benefit by adding the extra hop

    Is there an extra hop when you’re still on the same machine? Like an extra resolution step?

    I still don’t understand why .255 specifically is prohibited. 8 bits can go up to 255, so it seems weird to prohibit one specific value. I’ve seen router subnet configurations that explicitly cap the top of the range at .254, though - I feel like I’ve also seen some that capped at .255 but I don’t have that hardware available to check. So my assumption is that it’s implementation specific, but I can’t think of an implementation that would need to reserve all the .255 values. If it was just the last one, that would make sense - e.g., as a convention for where the DHCP server lives on each network.



  • hedgehog@ttrpg.networktoComic Strips@lemmy.worldThe Witch's Curse
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    2 months ago

    The witch turned the creep into a woman and the spell was complete by the time she flew away. Unfortunately, like many women, the creep was born with the body of a man (she’s AMAB). Maybe the witch could have changed her body, too, but that would have made things far too easy, given that the point of the curse was to teach her empathy.


  • Your comment wasn’t in a meta discussion; it was on a post where they were venting about people complaining about them having a women’s only space. There was certainly no indication that the regular community rules didn’t apply, nor any invitation for men to comment.

    Commenting that it’s hostile for them to have a women’s only space might be ironic, but couldn’t possibly be good faith, in that context. And if the same mod banned you from multiple communities, then either it was out of line and you could appeal it, or it was warranted due to the perceived likelihood of you causing problems in those other communities and the perceived low likelihood of you contributing anything of value to them.

    Even now, you’re acting like the mod(s) banned you because of her / their emotions. You don’t see how that’s misogynistic?

    It makes logical sense for bad actors to be preemptively banned. Emotions have nothing to do with it.






  • This is an interesting parallel, but I feel like I missed some key part of it.

    In the US, at least, we historically killed off a lot of deer’s natural predators - mostly wolves - and as a result, the deer population can get out of control, causing serious problems to the ecosystem. Hunters help to remedy that. The relatively small violences that they perform on an individual basis add up to improving the overall ecosystem.

    That isn’t the same as being a bigot, or a sexist, or a fascist… and I don’t know why anyone would assume that a person holds those views because they’re mean and petty. They hold those views for a variety of reasons - sometimes because they’re a child or barely an adult and that’s just what they learned, and they either don’t know any better or haven’t cared enough to think it through; sometimes because they’ve been conditioned to think that way; sometimes because they’re sociopaths who recognize that it’s easier to oppress that particular group.

    It doesn’t really matter what their reason is. Either way, they’re a worse person because of it, and often they’re overall a bad person, regardless of the rest of their views, actions, and contributions.

    Being a hunter, by contrast, is neutral leaning positive.

    It makes sense that a rational person who loves being in nature, who loves animals, who wants their local ecosystem to be successful, would as a result want to help out in some small way, even if that means they have to kill an animal to do so. It doesn’t make sense that a rational person who loves all people, who wants their local communities to be successful, would as a result want to oppress and harm the people in already marginalized groups.

    I don’t think equating being bigoted with holding unjustifiable opinions does it justice. The way we use the word opinion generally applies to things that are trivial or unimportant, that don’t ultimately matter, e.g., likes and dislikes. Being a bigot is a viewpoint; it shapes you. For many bigots, their entire perspective is warped and wrong. And there’s a common misunderstanding that you can’t argue with someone’s opinions; because it’s just how they “feel.” But being a bigot, whether you’re sexist, racist, transphobic, queerphobic, homophobic, biphobic, etc., is a belief, and it’s one that, in most cases, the bigot chooses (consciously or not) to keep believing.

    If an adult with functioning cognitive abilities refuses to question their bigoted beliefs, then they’ve made a choice to be a bigot.


  • I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Alpine Linux Alpine Linux is in fact Pine’s fork, Alpine / Alpine Linux Pine Linux, or as I’ve taken to calling it, Pine’s Alpine plus Alpine Linux Pine Linux. Alpine Linux Pine Linux is an operating system unto itself, and Pine’s Alpine fork is another free component of a fully functioning Alpine Linux Pine Linux system.




  • Good point!

    If OP is hourly, those 3 hours should be billed as work - probably under a generic HR-related category if one is available.

    If OP is salaried exempt, then this would fall under “doing any work at all” (all that’s needed to be paid for the day) and if sick time is tracked by day and not by hour, then OP doesn’t need to use one. If it’s tracked hourly then OP should make sure to only use 5 sick hours (or less, depending on how long the work-related conversations took) and depending on employer policies may not need to use any sick time at all.

    This also cut into the time OP could have been using to rest. It would be very reasonable for OP to need an extra day to recover, as a result.



  • Generally, usage of the term “gentrification” refers to the improvement of neighborhoods - or other places where people live, like apartment complexes - and, due to increased cost of living, the displacement of the people who used to live there. Displacement of less wealthy current residents when gentrification occurs is so common that it’s implied. If it weren’t, people wouldn’t have such low opinions of gentrification.

    If a forest has been gentrified, therefore, then - if you interpret “gentrified” in the same way - it follows that people who have been living there have been displaced. And since those people were living in a forest - not in a cabin in a forest - they’re necessarily homeless. Since OP didn’t say that they were building houses or apartments in the forest, that would mean that the wealthier people who displaced them were also homeless.

    Since the context was another commenter calling “gentrified forest” a cursed phrase, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that.