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Comment Re:Search Everything (Score 1) 48

Windows search used to be kind of OK. Never as good as Everything, but Everything didn't exist for most of history. But they really fucked it up somewhere along the line, which I didn't notice because I was using Everything, and now it's very challenging to construct a complex search without learning a whole new language of keywords.

Comment Re:Let's see (Score 1) 36

I'm sure the shareholders will be lining up in droves to accept your offer of 1/25000 of a cent per share.

In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad. :-)

Comment Re:whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also rea (Score 1) 227

This is why Medicare for all, by itself, wouldn't do anything to lower healthcare costs. It would probably reduce the cost and complexity of billing, which would cut overall cost by a few percentage points. To really reduce costs, it would have to force providers to lower costs.

Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.

Branded drugs cost 2-3X as much (though generics are often actually cheaper in the US) than elsewhere), which is an area that is obviously ripe for savings... but there's a risk there because those high prices fund a lot of research (pharma is also not terribly profitable; that revenue mostly gets sunk into new drugs).

Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.

The vast majority of hospitals in the US are non-profits, so that 50% figure is based on relatively thin data. However, those few for-profit hospitals compete directly with lots of non-profits, so their price and cost structures have to be comparable.

One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.

Comment Re: It's bots and ragebait, thats why (Score 1) 90

Meanwhile, every other entry in the feed is an advert.

Every other entry? Try every entry. Something like 1% of my Facebook feed is actual organic content from friends. 14% or so is from groups. The other 85% is ads. And I'm being optimistic when I say that it is only 85%. When I see about the first or second ad, I close Facebook, because it's just going to be ads all the way down after that.

Comment Re:whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also rea (Score 1) 227

FWIW, healthcare insurance shareholders aren't getting rich

The top shareholders and the executives are. Hence Luigi.

The main driver of high cost in the US is the providers, not the insurers

The insurers are motivated to drive health care costs up by the so-called affordable care act, which caps their profits at a percentage of those costs. Since they're not the ones paying the bills, the insured are (and via APTC, the government is, which means the taxpayers are) they want those costs to go up because they get to collect more profit. You need to not ignore reality if you want it to make sense.

Comment Re:whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also rea (Score 1) 227

"Medicare for all" is a sham.

"sabbede" is a dumbfuck.

Medicare is age restricted

The proposals address that, because the people who write them are not dumbfucks. Also, there are already people who are less than 65 getting Medicare. They have disabilities. The BASIS code for their Medicare eligibility is "D" instead of "A", for disabled instead of aged. Maybe don't fucking try to educate me about things you know fuck-all about? TBF that means you shouldn't try to educate me about anything, but that would be just peachy.

Comment Thought for the day (Score 1) 32

What if...

Someone (say someone who was familiar with doxygen and GCC) developed number of comment types, where some stipulated preconditions that must be true for the function to run correctly, postconditions that must be true once the function has run, kernel facilities that the function definitely needs, and kernel facilities that the function definitely doesn't need. These would all be optional for any given function.

A static checker could then validate if the code meets the behaviour expected by the programmer. This is precisely what is done in SPARK, a fork of Ada for high-reliability code. Combined with existing static checker capabilities, this would greatly increase the number of bugs that could be caught with all kinds of tools, AI included.

It could ALSO build a full fine-grained mapping for any fine-grained mandatory access controls system. You'd also want includes that you could import for precompiled libraries. This would allow someone to verify if the code was making unanticipated/undesirable calls but would also make SELinux possible to develop for at the application level.

It would not be trivial. If it was trivial, it would have been done simply because it already IS done in other languages and that makes it "obvious" to anyone who has been programming for a while. However, it should not be massively complicated, simply because you can use AI as the static checker. Once it has a definite set of bounda that must be satisfied, it should be much more capable of knowing what paths would violate those bounds. Which means that the checker stage essentially is trivial today, leaving only the markup stage.

Comment Re:Management (Score 1) 32

That's something no one should do today (or any time in the last 20 years or so), but it was commonly necessary when writing C++ in the 90s.

Oh yes, but any experienced professional will have developed (consciously or subconsciously) methods for maxxing out whatever metric is being used to evaluate them. Lines of code, whatever. If you are evaluated on LoC I recommend double-spacing.

The difference between the "hacker" (MIT definition) and the professional is revealing. Each is trying to write code that maximizes the perceived requirement. The hacker making the code elegant (in this case, brief), and the professional maximizing LoC.

Comment Re:Old man yells at clouds (Score 4, Insightful) 32

I get the wish to avoid changing your process, and Iâ(TM)m sure Linus puts a lot of thought into how he does things, but I think heâ(TM)s very likely yelling and shaking his fist at the clouds here.

That's an irritating way to say you disagree with him. Just give your counter-argument, don't insult him.

I think anyone whoâ(TM)s worked in a professional setting is going to know the value of code review. Having a tool that can easily give you an extra, high quality code review is incredibly useful.

Are you trying to make the point that AI easily gives you high quality code reviews? It's not clear what your point is or why you don't like Linus.

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