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creer commented on Solution to US debt crisis is severe austerity triggered by a fiscal calamity   fortune.com/2025/12/06/us... · Posted by u/mohi-kalantari
Hammershaft · 2 months ago
That R&D money to private space companies has lead to the biggest advances in space technology in our lifetimes.
creer · 2 months ago
And for very small amounts too (compared to the whole mess). Fantastic return (on that little bit, out of the whole mess). Same for medical research.
creer commented on Solution to US debt crisis is severe austerity triggered by a fiscal calamity   fortune.com/2025/12/06/us... · Posted by u/mohi-kalantari
Taikonerd · 2 months ago
IANA economist, but if there were a debt crisis, it would ultimately be about the psychology of the investors who would buy government debt. They want to be very, very confident that they will be paid back (which is why they're willing to accept a low interest rate).

If those investors are satisfied with a return to a late-80s fiscal posture, then great. But if they're worried that spending would just creep up again once the pressure is off, they might "demand" further cuts.

creer · 2 months ago
In particular, investors often like to see the contrast of infrastructure development (investing in future GDP), as opposed to paying day to day operating costs, retirements, interest on debt (never mind larger debt as far as the eye can see), and other creative ways to prevent future GDP. And there is very, very little infrastructure development in US budgets.
creer commented on The fuck off contact page   nicchan.me/blog/the-f-off... · Posted by u/OuterVale
marscopter · 2 months ago
It depends.

Suppose we are a design agency which build merchandise shops for sports teams. We have specific market knowledge, research, and experience in tailoring these shops to improve the experience for sports fans.

Out of the blue, a logistics company contacts us to help them build a merchandise shop. Could we do this? Sure, but it would require a lot of upfront work and given that it's not our area of expertise could possible result in a subpar experience for both us and the logistics company.

Given such, it's reasonable disqualify such clients. We can do this through our sales process, but by adding a simple "painful" field (e.g., "What sport does your team play?") you encourage such clients to disqualify themselves.

It saves us the work and effort. And it means the clients who get through the form are more likely to be the type of client we want.

There will always be a balance because our ideal clients will always be vaguely defined to some extent. This means some legit clients might get disqualify unnecessarily (e.g., a lacrosse team because we didn't think to include that in the list of sports), but it also means the quality of leads and/or inquiries which come through the forms would be higher quality.

creer · 2 months ago
Sure, if you have too much business that you can't be bothered to check these other leads. Same for browser incompatibility: you end up with a form which demands no blocking of anything, many specific js capabilities, MSIE only (I kid - you would think), etc, etc. Each incompatibility might only concern 2% of the population, but the whole mess mostly works flawlessly on the CEO's computer.

A single qualifying question like "What sport does your team play?" is a good direction - instead of the data fetishism of these forms.

creer commented on Cancer is surging, bringing a debate about whether to look for it   nytimes.com/2025/12/08/he... · Posted by u/brandonb
bryanlarsen · 2 months ago
And I'm sure neither were one of the cancers discussed in the article as candidates for lower screening. Nobody's suggesting we stop looking for lung cancer or any of the other many deadly ones. OTOH, increased screening for thyroid cancer had 0 impact on life expectancy in South Korea.
creer · 2 months ago
They ARE suggesting such things (including forms of "not looking") even for deadly ones. In these cases, it is couched in terms of what follow-up is "deemed necessary" (see later) depending on stage classification of that cancer. There is a range of responses that's possible and new research and procedure advancement coming online on a 5-yearly basis in addition to variations in capabilities from hospital to hospital - so a pretty volatile environment - yet the staging recommendation gets changed often based on what health care professionals estimate they can sustain society-wide - i.e. manpower - rather than what might be optimal from a survival point of view for that patient.

To pick one specific example, skin cancer visual screening seems currently recommended on a frequency based not on the speed of evolution of, say, melanoma - which can start and evolve pretty fast -, but on the manpower availability of dermatologists.

creer commented on Cancer is surging, bringing a debate about whether to look for it   nytimes.com/2025/12/08/he... · Posted by u/brandonb
kulahan · 2 months ago
I'm pretty sure every medical show had an episode where the "money-grubbing hospital admin" character want to start selling full body medical scans, and the "very well-respected and honor-bound doctor" character points out how this is quite literally one of the most useless and corrupt ways for a hospital to make money.

There are probably a dozen things wrong with your body right now. That doesn't mean they're even affecting you. While you may have some type of cancer that is at the absolute first day of detectability, or a bone slightly out of place, or a weird spot on your heart, someone else has a case that is 6 months deeper and needs more dire treatment.

There is zero benefit to society to massively overburden our healthcare system (this is true of any nation) by searching constantly for random problems that may or may not exist.

If there were good reason to do this, you'd have regularly-scheduled checkups, like with colon or breast cancer.

creer · 2 months ago
Perhaps BOTH the "money-grubbing hospital admin" and the "very well-respected and honor-bound doctor" are wrong for not involving their patients in these decision? And their insurance for that matter.

Recently my US-system, world-ranking university hospital complex was first convinced that my insurance would not pay for XXX (and consequently did not recommend it and delayed it). Then after I insisted and got that done, they told me how surprised they were (1) that my (US) insurance did in fact cover every single bit of everything we eventually got done and (2) how MUCH that same US insurance in fact paid them for each of the bits. On the first try. That insurance company has horrible problems, but I can't complain that they didn't cover the hell out of the thing. You know - on the same year we read everyone else's horror stories.

The whole system is very sick.

creer commented on Perl's decline was cultural   beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
syncsynchalt · 2 months ago
Code golfing originated in perl.

There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible, ideally as a CLI one-liner. Books[1] were written on the topic.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/perl-one-liners-130-programs-t...

creer · 2 months ago
One-liners is one of the ways you can use perl. You can also use it as the embedded language in some larger project. As perl CGI. As mod_perl. etc. There is no "cultural pressure" to use any of these. You can choose to mess around with one-liners and you can choose to spend time shaving a few characters off your code. Or not. None of this is the one true way. This is not python.
creer commented on Perl's decline was cultural   beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
altairprime · 2 months ago
Those experts were horrendously vicious. I can name them and can still describe their dismissive cruelty, since I spent ten years socializing nonstop in the Perl5 core communities (and have a CPAN id, and have an Authors entry in Perl5 core). Think “Linus before he learned to stop insulting people’s worth and focus on critiquing their work instead”. It was absolutely intended as a form of cultural propagation: I can do this more succinctly, so You Should Be Ashamed Before Me. If somehow you weren’t exposed to that aspect of it, I envy you.

Interestingly, that same prideful “my way is so obviously better that it’s a ridiculous waste of my time considering yours” ended up carrying forward to Mozilla, which was launched in part by cultural exports of the Perl5 conservative-libertarian community, and for a decade developer hiring was filtered for cultural sameness, leaving a forest of TMTOWTDI trees that viewed meadows as an aberration to be reforested back to their sameness.

creer · 2 months ago
You indeed ran into toxic environments. I don't feel that the common, new perl programmer intake path was anything like that. Not what I ever ran into.

Support in forums and such was needlessly short in using RTFM as an answer. People could have pasted a one paragraph pointer to the documentation intake path and that would have helped.

creer commented on Perl's decline was cultural   beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
atherton94027 · 2 months ago
Seems like you and a few other posters are making the article's point – that Perl's culture is hermetic and that new programmers would rather learn Python, Ruby or Javascript rather than figure out which sigil means what.
creer · 2 months ago
I wouldn't call it hermetic in that the many forms of documentation are insanely thorough and accessible - if not well advertised. There is no gate-keeping (from my point of view). New users are welcome. It's easy to learn (for the people for whom reading is not an obstacle).

But yes, no contest that the world has been on a simplicity binge. Python won by pushing simplicity and by having giant software corporations choosing it (and not complaining about the line noise nonsense). If you want to go into programming professionally, for now many years, you need python.

I don't know that I would put Javascript in the same bag. I mean, it's the other way: it looks simple and it isn't.

But python, yes, python won because it looks simple and google pushed it.

Many other languages now have to reckon with the python supremacy. This is not specific to perl / raku. It will take work for anything to replace python.

creer commented on Perpetual futures, explained   bitsaboutmoney.com/archiv... · Posted by u/sirodoht
Animats · 2 months ago
It's striking how much the crypto world depends on trust in other parties. The whole point of crypto was supposed to be that it was "trustless". But it's not set up that way. All these crypto derivatives are not set up as contracts on a blockchain, with assets locked up until the derivatives settle. They're book entries with some weakly regulated exchange in Outer Nowhere.
creer · 2 months ago
> The whole point of crypto

There is a common confusion in this (perhaps?). Most businesses get created primarily to make money. Not primarily to solve the world's problems. It's easy to say "if they really had their customers at heart...". Well, yeah, but that's not and has never been the priority. It's not a cynical view, it's being realistic.

All kinds of mayhem follows. All the way to fundamental research papers such as "on average actively managed mutual funds do not beat XX index". Well, yeah, mutual funds don't get created because someone is good at it. They get created because someone wants to make money. Beating XX is not the first objective, or competence, of the entrepreneurs. Hopefully that fund doesn't last too long but often it does, and anyway there are many of them.

So anyway, there are plenty of ways to try and leverage ideas of cryptography, crytocurrencies, block chain - most of which are still accessible - and most of the ventures in the field are not going to be primarily about solving the users' problems.

creer commented on Perl's decline was cultural   beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
weare138 · 2 months ago
Then use one of the type systems for Perl.

https://metacpan.org/pod/Type::Tiny

creer · 2 months ago
You can't do that if you gave up at the very first sigil puzzle.

I'm fine with that: to program in Perl you need to be able to follow manuals, man pages, expert answers, - and even perl cookbooks, or CPAN or web searches. It's a technical tool. The swiss army chainsaw. It's worth it.

u/creer

KarmaCake day2152June 25, 2023View Original