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bobthepanda commented on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M   theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/sebastian_z
bc569a80a344f9c · 2 days ago
Whatever you’re using handles international employees (UW has visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests, etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any other weird combination universities run into?

I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement.

Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.

bobthepanda · 2 days ago
UW and Washington University are two totally different, unrelated institutions.
bobthepanda commented on Koralm Railway   infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/... · Posted by u/fzeindl
ChrisMarshallNY · 3 days ago
Isn't Italy a little geologically unstable?

I'd be a bit nervous, going through a long tunnel, in a region known for vulcanism and earthquakes.

bobthepanda · 2 days ago
Tunnels are actually pretty safe in earthquakes, Japan for example is criss crossed with them.

A tunnel is actually the least likely to shake; if you shake a jello with fruit inside it, the surface moves a lot but the interior fruit won’t move all that much.

bobthepanda commented on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free   riviantrackr.com/news/riv... · Posted by u/doctoboggan
ghaff · 3 days ago
Auto companies, yes. As I understand it, airline credit cards are mostly just co-branded cards with existing banks like Chase.
bobthepanda · 3 days ago
Frequent flyer programs are basically banks if you consider miles/points are currency.
bobthepanda commented on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free   riviantrackr.com/news/riv... · Posted by u/doctoboggan
estearum · 3 days ago
These allegedly cover only ~25% of residential lots in HTX (mostly the wealthy ones). So sure that's a similar tool and probably distorts things, but I would be very shocked to hear this is anywhere near as important as the infinite supply of ultra-cheap land on the outskirts of town plus public subsidized roads (which will eventually bankrupt the city).
bobthepanda · 3 days ago
Houston has these, parking requirements, etc. I would argue if anything that mandatory parking requirements have a larger impact than zoning. Parking lots themselves push things farther apart and make not driving unpleasant.
bobthepanda commented on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free   riviantrackr.com/news/riv... · Posted by u/doctoboggan
estearum · 4 days ago
It's not really.

If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely.

Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl.

"A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the far superior place 8min down the road.

bobthepanda · 3 days ago
Houston doesn't have zoning laws, but it does have private deed covenants enforced by the city which effectively work as zoning laws. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Neighborhood/deed_restr.h...
bobthepanda commented on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free   riviantrackr.com/news/riv... · Posted by u/doctoboggan
Karrot_Kream · 4 days ago
I doubt autonomous car makers will offer this themselves. They'll either partner with existing insurers or try to build a separate insurance provider of their own which does this.

My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.

bobthepanda · 3 days ago
Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy.

Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.

bobthepanda commented on Most technical problems are people problems   blog.joeschrag.com/2023/1... · Posted by u/mooreds
zaphar · 9 days ago
My personal anecdotal experience is considerably different. I've worked multiple places where I had to learn the stack on the job. Up to and including the language at least once.

I've never found it too difficult to get hired even when the requirements don't list something I've done already.

bobthepanda · 9 days ago
At least in the current market there is a lot less leeway for this
bobthepanda commented on Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October   finance.yahoo.com/news/te... · Posted by u/doener
stackghost · 19 days ago
It's baffling to me that TSLA shareholders can see their CEO's antics (Nazi salute on global television, DOGE, splitting time between idk how many companies, being erratic on Twitter, committing securities fraud ("funding secured")), and still decide that this clown is the right man to lead the company.

I just can't get myself into a mindset where that makes sense.

bobthepanda · 19 days ago
TSLA has been a meme stock disconnected from fundamentals for a while and literally the only reason is Elon. If Elon wasn't CEO and there was just a normal person then they'd probably be priced a lot closer to the P/E ratio of a regular automaker (~5 instead of 288)
bobthepanda commented on Google's new 'Aluminium OS' project brings Android to PC   androidauthority.com/alum... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
vbezhenar · 20 days ago
I'm asking for Android-based desktop.

Windows is so bad, that I've lost any hope for it to recover.

MacOS is not that bad, but it's tied to Apple hardware and I don't like it. Also it's not getting better either, new releases bring more bloat and features I didn't ask for.

Linux is what I use, but I also lost hope for it to ever become polished experience. Just recent months they introduced another bug to GNOME which probably will not be resolved in years. No big company wants to invest in desktop Linux and without investments it's just not good. I can navigate Linux bugs and workarounds, but I'd prefer not to.

Expecting some new unknown operating system to appear and be ready is foolish, it won't happen.

So Android is the only operating system that could realistically be ready in the foreseeable future. Linux have good support for desktop hardware. Android have good polished stack for applications. Developers know how to write apps for android. Security story for Android is miles ahead that of desktop Linux. So I totally see that Android Desktop could actually be a good thing, with Google sponsoring its development. And if Google will put too much bloat in it, its open source nature would allow for volunteers to build better distributions of it.

bobthepanda · 20 days ago
Isn’t Valve having a go at making Linux more consumer friendly?
bobthepanda commented on Montana becomes first state to enshrine 'right to compute' into law   montananewsroom.com/monta... · Posted by u/bilsbie
ptero · a month ago
This is likely very regional. As a single data point, raising the family in the Boston area for the last 25 years I do not recall not being able to see a doctor the same day for the regular scares, from ear pains and high fever to falling and later vomiting (is this a concussion?).

A few times when we needed to see specialists, we often saw them within 24 hours; occasionally longer but I would say with a median of 48-72 hours. Even things that are clearly not urgent (for dermatologist "hey, I have forgotten about skin checks for the last 2 years, can we do the next one now", for ENT "hey, my son is getting nosebleeds during high intensity sports; can you check if there is a specific blood vessel that is causing problems"?) always happened well within two weeks. Three caveats to this happy story:

1. This is Boston area with likely the highest concentration of medical practitioners of all kinds in the US. I had good insurance with a large network, decent out-of-network coverage and for most cases not needed a pre-approval to see a specialist.

2. Everyone is generally healthy and our "specialist needs" were likely well trodden paths with many available specialists.

3. Our usage of the doctors, as the kids became generally healthy teenagers and adults, dropped significantly in the last 5-7 years. I hear post-covid the situation is changing and I may be heavily skewing to the earlier period.

bobthepanda · a month ago
At least from what I can see, COVID and the changes in attitudes towards medical professionals are driving a lot of burnout and leaving the profession; and since then economic pressures are squeezing private practices out of existence and a lot of specialists end up working for private equity now.

u/bobthepanda

KarmaCake day15818May 16, 2015View Original