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But this is actually not what happens and for the most part democratic governments that do provide health care are the ones with the best health outcomes worldwide, so what point are you trying to make?

My point is that governments should focus on national security and integrity of elections and law. Every dollar spent on healthcare is a dollar that cannot be used to enhance the nations' defense or legal systems. It also raises the cost of government b/c of the necessary added bureaucracy.

Let private businesses sell insurance. Let people buy what insurance they desire.


Yeah and we’ve seen that fail again and again and again. So no.

How do you define failure? When did "again and again" occur? I don't see that you have any valid argument or any supporting data whatsoever. Private health insurance exists and works.

Insurance doesn't have to cover everything: any aspect of coverage is debatable since it is a contract between buyer and seller with the courts as the deciding powers when either buyer or seller believes the contract has been violated.


> All these recent proclamations of disappointment in Tahoe seem insanely overblown to me. The problem that this post leads with is that thumbnails' corners are too rounded, which "misrepresents" the original? Seriously?

The example in Photos is absolutely egregious, and as a user of Linux for the past 25 years and recent user of a Mac for work I can’t remember something that bad in a mainstream desktop environment on Linux.

In fact from a usability perspective a modern Gnome desktop seems for more usable and consistent than modern Mac OS and that’s saying something. Font scaling seems to work better in Linux, UI wisgers in Gtk seem to be more consistent. Dark themes have been around on Linux far longer and it shows.

I don’t use the latest Mac OS version; it’s _okay_ from a usability perspective. But this new version seems like a clear downgrade for something where the purpose of paying large sums of money is for higher productivity and comfort.


The C code comparison exists because people have written DRM drivers in Rust that were of exceedengly high quality and safety compared to the C equivalents.


So kernel devs claiming Rust works isn't good enough? CloudFlare? Mozilla? Your're raising the bar to a place where no software will be good enough for you.


But it's not about reciprocity if you're truly committed to free speech right?


The first amendment isn't a suicide pact, and foreign corporations were never covered by it.


It's not a 'suicide pact', it's a clear commitment that the government will not ban speech it finds inconvenient.

It's not done a great job of living up to that promise.


Americans still have free speech. There are many other platforms to use. Foreign governments never have had free speech rights and I doubt most people support them having those rights.


> There are many other platforms to use.

That will promptly proceed to bury whatever the government tells them to bury.


> When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.

Way to show you really, really don't understand the politics of Latin America and who funds the various interests that run the show.


> What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?

* Employer-bound health insurance in the US

* Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members

* Noncompetes and NDAs

* Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers


> Employer-bound health insurance in the US

Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.

> Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members.

This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them

Is there any evidence that this is happening to Id employees?

> Noncompetes

Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.

> Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers.

Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.


> Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.

If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.

> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them

Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.

> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.

So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.

> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.

Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.


Id employees can apply for jobs while remaining employed at Id. You're writing as though Id employees must first quit their jobs before seeking a new one. And even if they do have a period of unemployment between jobs, COBRA continues to cover them for up to a year.

> Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees

If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.

> So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.

Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.

> Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.

And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.

If an Id employee is not willing to work non-gaming software development jobs that's a restriction imposed by their own decisions, not by their employers.

People in this thread are comparing Id software developers to slavery. The fact that they'll have to go on COBRA in between jobs doesn't make this comparison to slavery any less absurd.


> If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.

Yes because companies are famous for being highly law-abiding under every circumstance and every major instance of corporate fraud has been identified and properly punished at a criminal basis.

C'mon man, the US is a country where wage theft is 3 times higher than all other formst of theft combined. Informal blacklists are as simple as keeping a notebook in writing and letting people know through hidden WhatsApp channels.

> Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.

The rule is vacated by an injunction.

> And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.

I have no idea why you think that a job being desirable and in high demand means that the people who effectively perform the job are somehow less deserving of workers' rights. The entire point behind having workers' rights is that basic job affordances and rights a non-negotiable because we do not allow certain forms undignified work.


So you're asking to prove a negative with respect to blacklisting?

Some factories have been caught physically locking employees in the building and not letting them leave. Can I say with certainty that this isn't happening at Id? No, but it's still not valid to baselessly assert that it is happening at Id Technologies because other instances of this behavior have been documented.

The fact that desirable jobs like game dev means employers don't have to compete as hard to attract talent. That's not infringing on game developers' rights. Game developers have the ability to work in jobs other than game dev. If they choose not to pursue those opportunities that's a choice they're making on their own initiative, not an infringement on their rights.

Workers rights like safe working environments, minimum wage, and other laws still apply to game devs.


> An econ 101 observation

Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.

In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.

Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.


> second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.

Exactly, the purpose is to teach concepts, not the whole picture.


The problem is that second and third order effects _are_ the concepts in many cases.


US war propaganda is full steam ahead.


> Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human.

I no longer believe this. A friend of mine just did a stint a startup doing fairly sophisticated finance-related coding and LLMs allowed them to bootstrap a lot of new code, get it up and running in scalable infra with terraform, and onboard new clients extremely quickly and write docs for them based on specs and plans elaborated by the LLMs.

This last week I extended my company's development tooling by adding a new service in a k8s cluster with a bunch of extra services, shared variables and configmaps, and new helm charts that did exactly what I needed after asking nicely a couple of times. I have zero knowledge of k8s, helm or configmaps.


If you are in charge of that tooling, how do you ensure the correctness of the work? Or is it that at this point the responsibility goes one level higher now where implementation details are not important or relevant at all and all it matters is it behaves as described?


Just look at what they are stating:

> that did exactly what I needed

> I have zero knowledge of k8s, helm or configmaps.

Obviously this is not anything resembling engineering, or anything a respectful programmer would do. An elevator that is cut lose when you press 0 also works very well until you press 0. The claims of AI writing significant chunks of code come from these sort of people with little experience in programming or engineering in general, SPA vibe coders and what not. You should tremble at the thought of using any of the resulting systems in production, and certainly not try to replicate that workflow yourself. Which gives you a sense of how overblown these claims are.


> The claims of AI writing significant chunks of code come from these sort of people with little experience in programming or engineering in general, SPA vibe coders and what not.

I'm sorry man but I've been doing this for 25 years and I've worked and studied with some extremely bright and productive engineers. I vouch for the code that I write or that I delegate to an LLM, and believe it or not it doesn't take a magician to write a k8s spec file, just patience to write 10 levels of nested YAMLs to describe the most boring, normal and predictable code to tell your cluster what volume mounts and env variables to load.


> I have zero knowledge of k8s, helm or configmaps

> I vouch for the code that I write or that I delegate to an LLM, and believe it or not it doesn't take a magician to write a k8s spec file…

I have been writing code since 1995.

That has zero relevance to my skill at rolling out deployments in a technology I know nothing about.

One of the two things you’ve said is false:

Either a) you do know what you’re talking about, or b) you are not confident in the results.

It can’t be both.

It sounds to me like you’re subscribed heavily into a hype train; that’s fine, but your position, as described, leaves a lot to desired, if you’re trying to describe some wide trend.

Here my anecdote: major cloudflare outages.

Hard things are hard. AI doesn’t solve that. Scaffolding is easy; ai can solve that.

Scaffolding is a reliable thing to rely on with ai.

Doing it for K8s configuration, if you don’t know k8s is stupid. I know what I’m talking about when I say that. Having it help you if you do know what you’re doing is perfectly legit.

Claiming it did help when claiming you have, and I quote, “zero knowledge” (but you actually do) is hype. Leave it on LinkedIn dude. :(


> Either a) you do know what you’re talking about, or b) you are not confident in the results. It can’t be both.

You've been coding for a lifetime yet you don't seem to get that certainty in software is a spectrum? I have sufficient confidence in the output of LLMs to sign my name under the code it writes when putting up a PR for a specialist to read. That's good enough for 90% of the work that we do day-to-day. You think that's not hype-worthy?

> Doing it for K8s configuration, if you don’t know k8s is stupid. I know what I’m talking about when I say that. Having it help you if you do know what you’re doing is perfectly legit.

"Knowing" k8s is an oxymoron. K8s is a profoundly complicated piece of tech that can don insanely complicated things while also serving as a replacement for docker-compose or basic services that could have been hosted on ECR. The concepts behind basic k8s functionality are not difficult, but I saved myself two weeks of reading how to write helm spec files, a piece of knowledge I have no interest in learning because it doesn't add any appreciable value to the software I produce, and was instead able to focus on getting what I needed out of my cluster automation scripts.

This really isn't that complicated to understand. I don't care for being a k8s expert and I don't care for syntactical minutiae behind it. It isn't hype that I now I only need to understand the essential conceptual basics behind the software to get it working for what I need instead of doing a deep dive like I had to do years ago in when reading similar docs for similar IaC producs to get lesser functionality going.


Because after 25 years of coding and a dozen infrastructure description languages I know that you test your code and you get someone expert in the field to look at your PRs.

LLMs are _really_ good at writing infra code if you know how infra works, believe it or not. And the ultimate responsibility still lies in human beings for code ownership.


It depends on the task though, right? I promise I'm not in denial; I use these things all the time. Sometimes it works immediately; sometimes it doesn't. I have no way of predicting when it will or won't.


* Infra code description languages like Terraform and K8s/helm spec files are like magic; they get 90% of the code right 90% of the time. In my experience that's about half of the work; the other half is spent debugging and correcting details that matter, but still applies to the code that I write myself.

* SQL works almost as good. It's especially useful when you need to generate queries with long lists of fields and complex query criteria. Give it a schema and let it rip.

* Python code works reasonably well. If your description is terse and clear it will generally do the right thing. It has a knack for being excessive in comments and will sometimes do things in ways that feel unnatural, but business code will be as good as the context that surrounds it. For boring, repetitive tasks like setting up program args, annotating types, and writing generic request/response cycles with common frameworks it will do boring old vanilla code. You'll likely want to touch it up and adapt it to your personal preference.

* Debugging is very much or miss. It has been absolutely fantastic at troubleshooting failed and stuck k8s jobs and service configuration issues, having no qualms about creating its own shell or python scripts to investigate ports or logs, and writing JSON parsing scripts that are snoozefest for a human to write. The regexes that I'd barely be arsed to write to parse enormous logs it writes trivially. For business logic, the more convoluted your logic the harder the time it will have, and for most debugging issues I prefer to let it run and list some hypotheses and potential issues and my intent is to learn and understand the problem myself deeply before committing to a fix.


It sounds like it works better for declarative schema than imperative scripting/debugging (speaking loosely here). Do you agree? Seems like a good heuristic for me to keep in mind


Very much so.


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