> Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves.
The usual note for this is your insurance premiums were already going towards that, just indirectly by way of paying for heart disease treatments, diabetes management and other secondary effect of obesity.
But I'd also like to propose that "could just do themselves" is carrying a lot of assumptions that may not hold for any individual. A few years back now I started a medication with the side effect of appetite suppression, and I learned something about myself. To the best of my ability to recall, I had never before starting that medication not been hungry. "Full" to me was a physical sensation of being unable to fit more food physically in my stomach, but even when I was "full" I was hungry. Luckily for myself as a teen and young adult I had an incredibly high metabolism. I could eat 3 meals a day, 3-4 bowls of cereal and milk as an "afternoon snack" after school and some late evening snacks while watching TV and I still was in the "almost underweight" category. It was in this context, a time when I could go to a fast food restaurant and order two meals just for myself and stay well inside a healthy weight range that I learned to eat as an adult. Eventually though, the metabolism slowed down, and I started packing on weight but the hunger never subsided. Oh sure, as I got older the idea of and ability to eat an entire pizza by myself slowly went away, but hungry was always there, so I was still always eating and always eating more than I should have.
And I did manage to lose weight on my own many times. Through extremely strict self control and portion control, multiple times I managed to lose 25, 30 even 50lbs, one painstaking week at a time. Every day was strict tracking and weighing of everything I ate, and many days were hard battles of "I know I'm hungry, but I've already hit my limit for the day, so I can't eat more", and going to bed extremely hungry with the hope that when I woke the next morning that feeling would have subsided a little. And it worked each time, until inevitably something happened to disrupt the routines and habits built over the months. Maybe it was a set of family emergencies that had me eating on the run, unable to properly monitor everything and adding some "stress eating" on top of it. Maybe it was running into "the holidays" where calories are cheap and abundant even if you are still keeping track. And sometimes it was just being unable to sustain the high degree of willpower it required to keep myself on the schedule. And what takes month of carefully losing 1lb a week to do only takes a month or two to almost completely undo.
Hunger is probably the closest thing I've ever experienced to an addiction. I've thankfully never had to battle an addiction for anything else, but when it comes to hunger that eternal gnawing was ever present and the more weight I lost by sheer force of will, ever distracting. If the idea popped into my head after lunch that "I'd like a snack", it was an idea that would not leave my head until either I'd given in and gotten a snack or forced myself to not give in and waited until dinner. But that forcing meant dedicating ever larger parts of my mental energy away from my work and tasks at hand to just convincing myself to not go get the snack. And worse, when the time for dinner finally came, I was already feeling "hungry" on top of my normal hunger state, so often not eating the snack just meant delaying the excess consumption to dinner or having to continue that fight at dinner. If it sounds exhausting, in a lot of ways it was. But of course, like you said I can "just do" this. It's simple CI < CO math. And yet it never stuck, in part because unlike a lot of other unhealthy habits you can pick up in your life, you cant just not eat. Yes you can eat different things, or eat healthier, both of which can help with weight problems, but you can't stop eating. You have to eat, the hunger is always there and the same thing the hunger wants is the same thing you NEED to literally survive.
But that medication with its appetite suppressant effect was a game changer for me. For the first time in over 30 years, I actually felt full. Not physically stuffed, but "done eating". I could eat a small lunch and think to myself "that was good, and I feel satisfied". For the first time, when the idea of an afternoon snack popped into my head, I could remind myself that dinner was in 2 hours and I needed to make sure I had room to eat that so the snack could wait, and that would be the end of it, no fight necessary because the hunger wasn't gnawing at me the whole time. When I first started, I was concerned that the medication was giving me anxiety attacks because about 6PM every day, I'd start getting this feeling of my stomach tying itself in knots, and this sensation of "needing something". And after a week or so it occurred to me that what I was feeling for the first time in my life was the feeling of transitioning from having been full and satiated to being hungry again. I'd never not been hungry before. And I know that sounds insane, because it sounded insane to me then. Before taking the medication if you'd asked me if I know what it felt like to be full or to not be hungry I would tell you that I did. But apparently I didn't, and I didn't know that until I started that medication. And for the first time since the weight started coming on, the weight I've lost is staying lost.
So yes, you can "just" eat better and less and control your portions and not eat so much. But from personal experience, it's a hell of a lot easier to have that will power when your body is giving you the right signals and isn't constantly pushing you over the limits.
At the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, I lost about 60lbs, and it was a basic calorie counting thing. For me, it wasn't too hard; I was able to get used to the hunger and after about a month the feeling of wanting to eat all the time was somewhat tolerable.
In May of 2024, I started taking Pristiq, and one of the side effects is a huge increase in appetite. Like you said, I would feel "full" in the sense that my stomach wouldn't fit anymore matter, but I was always hungry and pretty much perpetually craving sweets. I would get a whole large pizza for lunch, a large meal at Popeyes for dinner, and chase it down with snack cakes, and I would still be "hungry" the entire time.
I managed to undo all the progress I had made with my dieting and a bit extra, and it was kind of weird. It's not really "hard" to know what to do. Obviously everyone knows to eat less processed food, focus more on protein and fiber, etc, but despite me "knowing" this, it was strangely hard to actually do it.
I'm very thankful that I found out about Metformin. I'm not diabetic and never have been, but it's prescribed off-label for weight loss, and according to my doctor it can be useful in the particular case of "canceling out the appetite-increase from medication", and to my surprise it worked shockingly well. I'm still not quite down to my diet weight yet, but I'm down about 30lbs in the four months I've been taking it, and I don't really feel hungry all the time. I still enjoy eating unhealthy food, but food is considerably more transactional now: I eat food because I need energy to survive. I budget about 200 calories lower than what my smartwatch says I burn during the day. It's much easier to treat food as a more utilitarian necessity.
If anyone here is in the unfortunately situation of not having their insurance covering GLP-1 medication, I highly recommend seeing if you can get your doctor to prescribe metformin. It's been out of patent for decades and cost on the order of ~$5 a month [2] and there are very few side effects [2], so it's a relatively low-risk experiment.
The article also says that Uber sets various thresholds around this already and that their system flagged it at a score that was "higher than the late night average". What it doesn't tell us is what the threshold is/was for Pheonix, or how that threshold compares to other cities, or even how much higher the score was over the "average". Maybe their threshold for canceling a ride is 0.85, and the late night average is 0.8 in this system. So 0.81 puts the driver over the late night average as per the article and under the threshold for canceling the ride.
Your email provider has systems for detecting spam and removing it from your email. If an email comes into their system and falls under the threshold for being declared spam, but is over the average spam rating for emails in your account, have they done something wrong by allowing it through if it's spam? What if it wasn't spam and they removed it?
These sorts of headlines that espouse a "they knew something and so therefore they are liable" viewpoint seem to me to be more likely to result in companies not building safety measurement systems, or at a minimum not building proactive systems, so that they can avoid getting dragged and blamed for an assault because they chose thresholds that didn't prevent the assault. And not all measurement systems are granular enough or reliable enough to be exposed to end users. Imagine if they built a system that determined that if your driver was from a low income part of town and the passenger lived in a high income part of down the chance of an assault was "higher than the late night average". How long would it be before we saw a different lawsuit alleging that Uber discriminated against minority drivers by telling affluent white passengers that their low income minority drivers were "more likely than average" to assault them? I would hope that this verdict was reached on stronger reasoning than "they had an automated number and didn't say anything" but if it did, none of the articles so far have said what that reasoning was.
> system flagged it at a score that was "higher than the late night average"
Being charitable to the quality of Uber's legal team, I feel they could easily and compellingly have offered this defense.
It's telling that other documentary evidence highlighted that Uber decided sharing its reservations/acting on its system would be detrimental to growth.
And so what messaging do you propose Uber puts in their app for this? "Your driver has a higher than average probability of assaulting you, you may want to wait for another driver"? That will last until the first driver sues for slander. It's one thing to tell you that "prices are higher right now" it's a completely different thing to imply to you that your driver is a criminal.
User is definitely a term that long predates the modern SaaS world. And it’s an appropriate term in many cases because even today the customers of a computer hardware or software company are often not the same people using that hardware or software. I am the user of my work computer, but even as a software developer I am certainly not the “customer” of that purchase. My company has requirements as a customer that might be counter to my desires as a user. And likewise I have needs as a user that my company as a customer does not care about (except in so far as having those needs met allows me to do my job)
> Doesn't that linked webarchive page say specifically that the ACE is a "Apple/TI co-designed USB Type-C Port Controller" If that isn't a "USB Controller" what do you mean when you say "USB Controller"?
"USB controller" in common parlance means a USB host controller, the hardware that actually controls the USB signals and interfaces with the host CPU(s). They are required no matter if the physical port is type A, B, C, ...
A "port controller" is something completely different, but still related to the "USB type C port" specification. It's a piece of logic (in this case in a separate IC) that handles things like negotiating PD, as well as which protocol(s) will be used over the high speed lanes etc. See the section about pin usage in different modes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
comex's comment is inaccurate with respect to the commonly understood meaning of "USB controller" - while that port does have the CC lines going to ACE, the actual USB data lines go to the Apple SoC directly.
This is contrasted with a different design where the USB data lines could go to a standalone IC, and that IC is connected to the Apple SoC via PCIe for example. DFU is significantly more complicated in this type of design because it requires bootstrapping and interaction with this external component.
Does your landlord stand for election? That's a huge huge difference. The landlord is only out for themselves, but the government can potentially make decisions that benefit society as a whole and are rational.
The basic problem in America today is an absolute lack of democratic control of the government and our capitalist class. I can go into this in some detail but it is a large digression from the topic at hand. But I will add, that even Donald Trump is afraid to directly cut popular programs, or at least has some limits.
Yes, every time my lease was up, I elected to stay or move. I did that multiple times for 15 years. By contrast, every time I moved, I was in the same state, so never changed governments.
The purpose of an election would be to effect a change in "management". For 15 years, whenever I wanted a change in management for where I was living, I simply changed what property I was renting at the end of my lease. And every time I signed a new lease, I got to choose how long I wanted to have to wait before I could change again. Within any given area, I would have a choice of tens to hundreds of different managers. And if something is sufficiently important that voters feel it's necessary for all rentals to implement, we still have the option of voting for a legislative body to craft those laws.
By comparison, if I had lived in a world where all residential property was owned by the state, I would likely have to wait anywhere from 2-6 years before I could even begin to make a change in management. Then I would have to hope that the majority of voters in my area wanted the same things I wanted from my management. Then assuming that my preferences carried the day, I would have to hope that whatever changes I voted for were implemented before the next election or run the risk that they would be overturned by a subsequent election loss. And all of that for no additional upsides. The ability of the public to dictate rental law remains the same. The only difference is now every possible change, whether it would normally rise to the importance of a legislative debate or not, is now subject to that legislative debate process.
Landlords also contribute to educational and class mobility. Students can study at distant but better schools because they don't need to buy a home before they can move and they can return home or anywhere else much easier because they don't have to then find a buyer for the property to cash out. Job seekers can take a job across the country and not need enough spare cash to make multiple flights back and forth across the country to house hunt first. Landlords allow people to take vacations and trips to places they would otherwise never see because they don't live there. Landlords allow small businesses to launch without first needing to buy commercial real estate.
I spent 15 years living in my current state before I bought a home. In that time I moved on average every 2 years often due to changing jobs or changing living circumstances. There is no way I could have afforded to buy a home when I first moved here, and even if I could have, I didn't know anywhere near enough about the area or where I would be in 5 years let alone 10 or 20 to have made a good choice for where to buy that home. I love my home but owning this home has cost me well over 50k in repairs and maintenance in the 15 years I've owned it. That is absolutely money I would not and did not have when I first moved to this state and it would have financially ruined me to have bought and owned a home when I first moved here.
Have I had some crappy landlords? Sure. I've also had some great ones too and have very fond memories of some of the places I've lived over the years. None of which would have been possible without landlords in general.
> a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business,
The linked website indicates this decision was made on or around Jan 7. Your own liked page is dated for the 12. Unless you’re asserting that the decision was made and effective before Q4 2025, this sounds like them putting in writing that they intend to follow through on preexisting contractual obligations for prior sales. Not really “doing business with while not doing business” IMO.
I would argue that laws are “bad” if there’s no way to get a proper hearing when you’re accused of violating them. Laws should constrain both sides of the law (the person subject to them and the person enforcing them) otherwise they’re just arbitrary rules by the person with more power. And while that’s a perfectly valid way to run something, it’s dishonest to dress “arbitrary personal decisions” up in the trappings of law. And realistically that applies to all the things you listed, COC, NDA, TOS etc.
But if someone can just drag out a law and vaguely accuse someone else of violating that law and then enforce a punishment with no way for the accused to get a hearing or present their case and have a real chance to prevail, then yes I would say the law is bad.
I'll propose my pie in the sky plan here again. We should overhaul the copyright system completely in light of AI and make it mostly win-win for everyone. This is predicated on the idea that the NIST numbers set is sort of the "hello world" dataset for people wanting to learn machine vision and having that common data set is really handy. Numbers made up off the top of my head/subject to tuning but the basic idea is this:
1) Cut copyright to 15-20 years by default. You can have 1 extension of an additional 10-15 years if you submit your work to the "National Data Set" within say 2-3 years of the initial publication.
2) Content in the National set is well categorized and cleaned up. It's the cleanest data set anyone could want. The data set is used both to train some public models and also licensed out to people wanting to train their own models. Both the public models and the data sets are licensed for nominal fees.
3) People who use the public models or data sets as part of their AI system are granted immunity from copyright violation claims for content generated by these models, modulo some exceptions for knowing and intentional violations (e.g. generating the contents of a book into an epub). People who choose to scrape their own data are subject to the current state of the law with regards to both scraping and use (so you probably better be buying a lot of books).
4) The license fees generated from licensing the data and the models would be split into royalty payments to people whose works are in the dataset, and are still under copyright protection, proportional to the amount of data submitted and inversely proportional to the age of that data. There would be some absolute caps in place to prevent slamming the national data sets with junk data just to pump the numbers.
Everyone gets something out of this. AI folks get clean data, that they didn't have to burn a lot of resources scraping. Copyright holders get paid for their works used by AI and retain most of the protections they have today, just for a shorter time), the public gets usable AI tooling without everyone spending their own resources on building their own data sets, site owners and the like get reduced bot/scraping traffic. It's not perfect, and I'm sure the devil is in the details, but that's the nature of this sort of thing.
This alone will kill off all chances of that ever passing.
Like, I fully agree with your proposal... but I don't think it's feasible. There are a lot of media IPs/franchises that are very, very old but still generate insane amounts of money to this day with active developments. Star Wars and Star Trek obviously, but also stuff like the MCU or Avatar is on its best way to two decades of runtime, Iron Man 1 was released in 2008, or Harry Potter which is almost 30 years old. That's dozens of billions of dollars in cumulative income, and most of that is owned by Disney.
Look what it took to finally get even the earliest Disney movies to enter the public domain, and that was stuff from before World War 2 that was so bitterly fought over.
In order to reform copyright... we first have to use anti-trust to break up the large media conglomerates. And it's not just Disney either. Warner, Sony, Comcast and Paramount also hold ridiculous amounts of IP, Amazon entered the fray as well with acquiring MGM (mostly famous for James Bond), and Lionsgate holds the rights for a bunch of smaller but still well-known IPs (Twilight, Hunger Games).
And that's just the movie stuff. Music is just as bad, although at least there thanks to radio stations being a thing, there are licensing agreements and established traditions for remixes, covers, tribute bands and other forms of IP re-use by third parties.
According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.
As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.
The usual note for this is your insurance premiums were already going towards that, just indirectly by way of paying for heart disease treatments, diabetes management and other secondary effect of obesity.
But I'd also like to propose that "could just do themselves" is carrying a lot of assumptions that may not hold for any individual. A few years back now I started a medication with the side effect of appetite suppression, and I learned something about myself. To the best of my ability to recall, I had never before starting that medication not been hungry. "Full" to me was a physical sensation of being unable to fit more food physically in my stomach, but even when I was "full" I was hungry. Luckily for myself as a teen and young adult I had an incredibly high metabolism. I could eat 3 meals a day, 3-4 bowls of cereal and milk as an "afternoon snack" after school and some late evening snacks while watching TV and I still was in the "almost underweight" category. It was in this context, a time when I could go to a fast food restaurant and order two meals just for myself and stay well inside a healthy weight range that I learned to eat as an adult. Eventually though, the metabolism slowed down, and I started packing on weight but the hunger never subsided. Oh sure, as I got older the idea of and ability to eat an entire pizza by myself slowly went away, but hungry was always there, so I was still always eating and always eating more than I should have.
And I did manage to lose weight on my own many times. Through extremely strict self control and portion control, multiple times I managed to lose 25, 30 even 50lbs, one painstaking week at a time. Every day was strict tracking and weighing of everything I ate, and many days were hard battles of "I know I'm hungry, but I've already hit my limit for the day, so I can't eat more", and going to bed extremely hungry with the hope that when I woke the next morning that feeling would have subsided a little. And it worked each time, until inevitably something happened to disrupt the routines and habits built over the months. Maybe it was a set of family emergencies that had me eating on the run, unable to properly monitor everything and adding some "stress eating" on top of it. Maybe it was running into "the holidays" where calories are cheap and abundant even if you are still keeping track. And sometimes it was just being unable to sustain the high degree of willpower it required to keep myself on the schedule. And what takes month of carefully losing 1lb a week to do only takes a month or two to almost completely undo.
Hunger is probably the closest thing I've ever experienced to an addiction. I've thankfully never had to battle an addiction for anything else, but when it comes to hunger that eternal gnawing was ever present and the more weight I lost by sheer force of will, ever distracting. If the idea popped into my head after lunch that "I'd like a snack", it was an idea that would not leave my head until either I'd given in and gotten a snack or forced myself to not give in and waited until dinner. But that forcing meant dedicating ever larger parts of my mental energy away from my work and tasks at hand to just convincing myself to not go get the snack. And worse, when the time for dinner finally came, I was already feeling "hungry" on top of my normal hunger state, so often not eating the snack just meant delaying the excess consumption to dinner or having to continue that fight at dinner. If it sounds exhausting, in a lot of ways it was. But of course, like you said I can "just do" this. It's simple CI < CO math. And yet it never stuck, in part because unlike a lot of other unhealthy habits you can pick up in your life, you cant just not eat. Yes you can eat different things, or eat healthier, both of which can help with weight problems, but you can't stop eating. You have to eat, the hunger is always there and the same thing the hunger wants is the same thing you NEED to literally survive.
But that medication with its appetite suppressant effect was a game changer for me. For the first time in over 30 years, I actually felt full. Not physically stuffed, but "done eating". I could eat a small lunch and think to myself "that was good, and I feel satisfied". For the first time, when the idea of an afternoon snack popped into my head, I could remind myself that dinner was in 2 hours and I needed to make sure I had room to eat that so the snack could wait, and that would be the end of it, no fight necessary because the hunger wasn't gnawing at me the whole time. When I first started, I was concerned that the medication was giving me anxiety attacks because about 6PM every day, I'd start getting this feeling of my stomach tying itself in knots, and this sensation of "needing something". And after a week or so it occurred to me that what I was feeling for the first time in my life was the feeling of transitioning from having been full and satiated to being hungry again. I'd never not been hungry before. And I know that sounds insane, because it sounded insane to me then. Before taking the medication if you'd asked me if I know what it felt like to be full or to not be hungry I would tell you that I did. But apparently I didn't, and I didn't know that until I started that medication. And for the first time since the weight started coming on, the weight I've lost is staying lost.
So yes, you can "just" eat better and less and control your portions and not eat so much. But from personal experience, it's a hell of a lot easier to have that will power when your body is giving you the right signals and isn't constantly pushing you over the limits.
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