tfehring (u/tfehring)

tfehring commented on Allianz Life says 'majority' of customers' personal data stolen in cyberattack techcrunch.com/2025/07/26... · Posted by u/thm

marcusb · a month ago

Why would it be? Is Allianz Life a covered entity? If so, why would it depend on the specific CRM being used?

tfehring · a month ago

Allianz Life publishes a HIPAA privacy notice at [0], which states:

> This notice applies to individuals who participate in any of the following programs under the closed line of business:

> • Long term care

> • Medical

> • Medical supplemental

> • Hospital income

> • Cancer and disease specific coverage

> • Dental benefits

> The Covered Entity’s actions and obligations are undertaken by Allianz employees as well as the third parties who perform services for the Covered Entity. However, Allianz employees perform only limited Covered Entity functions – most Covered Entity administrative functions are performed by third party service providers.

It sold long term care insurance policies until 2010.

(Disclosure, I happen to have worked at Allianz Life a long time ago, though I have no nonpublic information about any of this.)

[0] https://www.allianzlife.com/-/media/Files/Allianz/PDFs/about...

tfehring commented on Firefox now allows you to add custom search engine manually by default bugzilla.mozilla.org/show... · Posted by u/gslin

baobun · 3 months ago

I guess it's a regression fix (perhaps Windows-specific) where it used to work and broke at some recent version? Because the feature as described is indeed nothing new in Firefox.

From the linked bug:

> Firefox now supports adding your own custom search engines. Just right-click a search field of a supported website and select Add Search Engine, or go to Settings > Search > Add (below the search shortcuts table) to manually enter a search URL.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...

Mozilla documentation of the feature (updated 2024): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...

tfehring · 3 months ago

Not Windows-specific, I had to go through about:config to enable this on MacOS as of late last year.

tfehring commented on Measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico now 208 cases, 2 deaths arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/pmags

hoofedear · 6 months ago

“The _term goes here_ describes how successful protective measures like vaccines or pasteurization become victims of their own effectiveness. As these interventions eliminate visible threats over time, people forget the dangers they prevent, leading to skepticism about their necessity. This creates cyclical patterns where protective measures are abandoned, threats resurface, urgency is renewed, protection is restored, and eventually skepticism returns once the threat again fades from memory. “

I tried to ask Claude for a term that goes with that description but it used “prevention paradox” which describes something else

tfehring · 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

tfehring commented on Polars Cloud: The Distributed Cloud Architecture to Run Polars Anywhere pola.rs/posts/polars-clou... · Posted by u/neilfrndes

orlp · 6 months ago

Disclaimer: I work for Polars Inc, but my opinions are my own.

Polars itself is FOSS and will remain FOSS.

Self-hosted/on-site Polars Cloud is something we intend on developing as there is quite a bit of demand, but it is unlikely to be FOSS. It most likely will involve licensing of some sort. Ultimately we do have to make money, and we intend on doing that through Polars Cloud, self-hosted or not (as well as other ventures such as offering training, commercial support, etc).

tfehring · 6 months ago

Yep I totally get it and would probably go the same route in Polars' situation. Just sharing how some of the data teams I'm familiar with would likely be thinking about the tradeoffs.

tfehring commented on Polars Cloud: The Distributed Cloud Architecture to Run Polars Anywhere pola.rs/posts/polars-clou... · Posted by u/neilfrndes

whalesalad · 6 months ago

Never understood these kinds of cloud tools that deal with big data. You are paying enormous ingress/egress fees to do this.

tfehring · 6 months ago

That's almost certainly the main reason they're offering this on all 3 major public clouds from day 1.

tfehring commented on Polars Cloud: The Distributed Cloud Architecture to Run Polars Anywhere pola.rs/posts/polars-clou... · Posted by u/neilfrndes

0cf8612b2e1e · 6 months ago

I’ll bite- what’s the pitch vs Dask/Spark/Ray/etc?

I am admittedly a tough sell when the workstation under my desk has 192GB of RAM.

tfehring · 6 months ago

The obvious one is that you can handle bigger workloads than you can fit in RAM on a single machine. The more important but less obvious one is that it right-sizes the resources needed for each workload, so you're not running an 8GB job on an 8TB machine, and your manually-allocated 8GB server doesn't OOM when that job grows to 10GB next year.

tfehring commented on Polars Cloud: The Distributed Cloud Architecture to Run Polars Anywhere pola.rs/posts/polars-clou... · Posted by u/neilfrndes

tfehring · 6 months ago

This is really cool, not sure how I missed it. I assume catalog support will be added fairly quickly. But ironically I think the biggest barrier to adoption will be the lack of an off-ramp to a FOSS solution that companies can self-host. Obviously Polars itself is FOSS, but it understandably seems like there's no way to self-host a backend to point a `pc.ComputeContext` to. That will be an especially tough selling point for companies that are already on Spark. I wonder how much they'll focus on startups vs. trying to get bigger companies to switch, and whether they'll try a Spark compatibility layer like DataFusion (https://github.com/apache/datafusion-comet).

tfehring commented on Ride into the Future with Waymo on Uber in Austin uber.com/newsroom/waymo-o... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

throwawayffffas · 6 months ago

I have not and I believe you. But seriously, the incentive for automating anything is cost. Even if it's nicer, the removal of the driver does not make it a "premium" service, it makes it an automated service. The expectation is lower cost not higher. I know that supply and demand and competition right now might be at a place where the same price for eventually the same service is expected. But still "at no additional cost" read hilarious.

tfehring · 6 months ago

Anecdotally, I use rideshare every workday for last-mile transit from the train station, and I’ll pick the $13 Waymo over the $7 Uber every time. There are some inherent advantages to the self-driving, like improved safety [0] and not having to talk to the driver, but the main benefits are that it’s just a consistent experience with nice quiet cars, ~90%-ile driving quality, and much more accurate time estimates.

I look forward to competition bringing prices down, but on pure quality and willingness to pay, the premium price seems to make sense.

[0] https://waymo.com/research/do-autonomous-vehicles-outperform...

tfehring commented on California homeowners to fund half of high-risk insurer's $1B 'bailout' calmatters.org/economy/20... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

KerrAvon · 6 months ago

Those asking might want to have a chat with Florida residents, who have a completely ideologically opposite state government and have the same situation, but with flood insurance. Some risk has to be socialized or no one can live anywhere safely.

tfehring · 6 months ago

Insurance requires risk transfer but that's different from cross-subsidization. It's fine for 100 equally flood-prone houses to all pay the same insurance premiums even if only 1 of them floods in a given year. But people in a less flood-prone area, all else being equal, should be paying less for flood insurance. The alternative (aka the status quo) creates market distortions, making it artificially cheap to live in flood-prone areas and encouraging more building there.

Plenty of people would still live in those areas even if they were paying actuarially fair prices for insurance. And lots of places are safe enough from natural disasters that they're affordable to live in without cross-subsidization - in fact, eliminating cross-subsidization would make most people's cost of living go down, at the expense of a minority of people who live in very high-risk areas.

tfehring commented on California homeowners to fund half of high-risk insurer's $1B 'bailout' calmatters.org/economy/20... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

snakeyjake · 6 months ago

You think it is inappropriate to live in a fire prone area.

Your arbitrary line of appropriateness is wrong.

My arbitrary line of appropriateness is right.

It is inappropriate to live anywhere where there is a fire, earthquake, blizzard, sink hole, volcano, heat wave, tornado, and hurricane risk but also where there is not ample local (as in constrained to a single independent self-governing body) water, energy, and food resources.

Only those parts are truly less risky parts.

tfehring · 6 months ago

There's no need to draw a discrete line and say it's inappropriate to be on the wrong side of it. People should be able to live where they choose. But people should also pay actuarially fair insurance premiums and market-driven prices for energy and other services, based on those risks and the associated cost to serve them. That's not happening today, because market distortions created by government entities force people in lower-risk areas to cross-subsidize expenses for people in higher-risk areas.