jasonwatkinspdx (u/jasonwatkinspdx)

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy

mettamage · 2 days ago

I've met Hungarian people in the Netherlands and they're doing everything they can to become Dutch. One Hungarian even speaks fluent with no accent, and that is quite a feat.

I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.

jasonwatkinspdx · 21 hours ago

For what it's worth I had a conversation with someone in the same situation just the other day. They have a Hungarian passport but currently live in the Netherlands. They're not thrilled with the prospect of having to nationalize as Dutch, just due to all the bureaucracy, but they're getting the ball rolling now vs waiting to see how things pan out.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Cat Gap en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat... · Posted by u/Petiver

Sharlin · a day ago

Yes, this is (outdoors, stray, or feral) domestic cats, which is exactly what I mentioned. And as I said, it's largely the females and their juvenile offspring that form colonies – unfixed adult males, while certainly capable of having friendly social encounters on "no cat's lands", definitely don't willingly share their territory with other adult males.

But my point was that their immediate ancestor (and practically still the same species – they easily interbreed) the African wildcat is not similarly gregarious, and neither is almost any other felid, big or small.

jasonwatkinspdx · 21 hours ago

This is a bit off the mark.

Cats have only been domesticated for like ~10k years, so not much in the way of change or adaptation has happened. So wildcats have the same capacity for forming social bands and such, they just don't in the wild as they don't have any incentive to.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Cat Gap en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat... · Posted by u/Petiver

b112 · a day ago

This seems like a book.

Humans extinct for a billion years, AGI and robots tasked to feed and "take care of the cats".

I imagine entire cities, houses built, all empty save cat and humanform robot.

jasonwatkinspdx · a day ago

You might like the game Stray. Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJawWyRUOBM

It's about a cat that lives in a city of robots long after humans are extinct.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Cat Gap en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat... · Posted by u/Petiver

gradus_ad · a day ago

It's funny to think that no matter how our technology develops, cats will be right there along for the ride, completely ignorant of it all. It's humorously comforting to think of an interstellar civilization powered by fusion and AGI serving cats just as they're served now. Scratching posts on starships seems to be inevitable.

jasonwatkinspdx · a day ago

The domestication of cats happened because of the invention of farming.

If you store grain in a granary, it attracts a lot of insects, rodents, etc. Cats that could tolerate getting close to human settlements found a good food source. And humans like this, because the cats protect the grain without eating it. So you can see why ancient agrarian societies like the Egyptians held cats in high esteem.

And despite only having a few thousand years to adapt to each other, ends up cats and humans can understand each other and form emotional bonds pretty easily.

I imagine we'll see cats on spaceships of the future just like they were the norm on ships in the age of sail.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us... · Posted by u/signa11

brightball · 2 days ago

That is the program, yes. I’m not trying to sell you on it, just sharing our experience.

I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.

I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.

jasonwatkinspdx · 2 days ago

If you threatened me with 3+ hours a day of speed reading clocks instead of a normal summer I'd probably double down on effort too. And probably not in a way that's healthy long term.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us... · Posted by u/signa11

thrwaway55 · 2 days ago

Why would you write in cursive? If you care about WPM key board toasts it.

If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not.

Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.

jasonwatkinspdx · 2 days ago

> Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.

There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.

My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.

I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.

I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us... · Posted by u/signa11

msteffen · 2 days ago

This one? https://www.arrowsmith.ca/cip-arrowsmith-school

jasonwatkinspdx · 2 days ago

Just $6k to change your life by speed reading clocks for 3 hours a day for two months...

Needless to say this trips my crank/cult smell meter.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/sebastian_z

alephnerd · 2 days ago

> Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities

Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a major medical network in it's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were also medical networks.

But the issue is, medical PHI is important, and outages can lead to liability and potentially patient risk.

> At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity

Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.

jasonwatkinspdx · 2 days ago

Yeah, I had an unexpected insight into all this as growing up, my best friend's dad was a COBOL programmer for Metlife insurance.

The upside of those old mainframe centric systems is they do have impressive reliability. But you increasingly become dependent on just a handful of old souls like my friend's dad that are the only people who understand it in sufficient detail to try to update it.

My friend's dad had good job security but it seemed pretty demoralizing otherwise.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/sebastian_z

alephnerd · 2 days ago

Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount.

HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].

[0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-lou...

[1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/

[2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/

jasonwatkinspdx · 2 days ago

I worked for a CRM reseller for a bit when I was younger.

At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity.

So a sort of stockholm syndrome mentality takes root where they just hope they can limit the bleeding as much as possible.

Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities.

jasonwatkinspdx commented on ULID: Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier packagemain.tech/p/ulid-i... · Posted by u/der_gopher

sedatk · 6 days ago

> You only need to lock sequence if you care about IDs being ordered within a millisecond

Yes, and that's when sequences are only used. I guess that's to avoid hogging the CPU or emptying the OS entropy pool during high loads.

However, that "optimization" is a failure mode if you're not aware how ULID internals work. It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot by blindly trusting ULID will always generate a unique ID across threads without blocking your thread. That's a sneaky footgun.

> That generally only matters when you create a batch of IDs at once

No, any web service instance can receive requests at arbitrary times, and sometimes in the same millisecond zone. The probability is proportional to the number of concurrent users and requests.

> If your goal is to have global order intact, then neither ULID nor UUIDv7 is going to work for you.

Agreed.

jasonwatkinspdx · 6 days ago

> or emptying the OS entropy pool during high loads.

Just a heads up that's not really a thing. If the CSPRNG is initialized correctly you're done. There's nothing being depleted. I know for ages the linux docs said different, they were just wrong and a maintainer was keeping a weird little fiefdom over it.