Hospitals are required to provide emergency treatment - what we call ED or ER visits - regardless of ability to pay. Patients are expected to pay for that treatment. It’s just that the hospital isn’t supposed to deny treatment based on whether they think patients will or won’t pay the bill. This is getting-stabilized treatment.

This is an important point in arguing for universal healthcare: if people can’t afford treatment, they’re more likely to go to the ED where they won’t be turned away. ED visits tend to cost more than non-emergency, so that drives costs up.

One of favorites cds to the root of a project directory from a subdirectory,

# Changes to top-level directory of git repository.
alias gtop="cd \$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"

That’s a helpful one! I also add a function that creates a tmp directory, and cds to it which I frequently use to open a scratch space. I use it a lot for unpacking tar files, but for other stuff too.

(These are nushell functions)

# Create a directory, and immediately cd into it.
# The --env flag propagates the PWD environment variable to the caller, which is
# necessary to make the directory change stick.
def --env dir [dirname: string] {
  mkdir $dirname
  cd $dirname
}

# Create a temporary directory, and cd into it.
def --env tmp [
  dirname?: string # the name of the directory - if omitted the directory is named randomly
] {
  if ($dirname != null) {
    dir $"/tmp/($dirname)"
  } else {
    cd (mktemp -d)
  }
}

I’ve done Mindfulness meditation, and I find it very helpful. It gets easier with practice too. But I haven’t developed a habit of meditating regularly so I don’t actually do it often. It’s hard to keep up with things that feel optional.

Something that helps me to meditate more often than never is to think of it as something I can do anywhere, without preparation. Then when I find myself waiting for something I can take that time to meditate. Like waiting for a train, in a waiting room, etc. I sit normally; I often don’t close my eyes.

Our decisions are heavily influenced by emotion. We have the sense of empathy, which is an adaptation that makes communal living work. Empathy motivates us to do things for other people sometimes. You can say, “you do helpful things to satisfy your own emotional needs.” But that’s pretty much saying, “you do helpful things because you want to.” I think self-interest is a big factor in how we act, but I don’t think it’s the only factor.

I’ve been at it for less than a month so my impressions are preliminary. I’ve been doing GTD digitally for a long while. I’ve wound up not doing the planning often, and I have lists of actions piling up, and I haven’t developed the habit of looking at my lists in those “I have time, what do I do next?” moments.

I got into using an app called Sunsama that encourages spending a few minutes every morning making a daily plan. That has been very helpful for me! It makes me spend a little time taking stock of what I’ve previously noted I wanted to do, and what I can get done today. I still had an issue of tending not to check back in with the app during the day.

The journal is not just for todos: it’s where I jot down things I want to remember to do, notes, things that happened that I’d like to remember or that I want to tell my wife about, daily reflections. So I’m interacting with it frequently through the day. When I do I see the plans I’ve written, and think about what I can cross off. It’s a nice way to see everything laid out - a notebook is easier to take in quickly than a digital device, and comes with fewer distractions. So I think I’m more likely to check in with my plans at opportune times.

The migration system makes it less likely for todos to pile up endlessly. From time to time I copy my list of unfinished todos to a new page. If it’s not important enough to copy then it doesn’t need to stick around in the list.

I’ve taken the bullet journal ideas, and combined them with the Sunsama daily planning idea, and the daily reflection practice I picked up from The Cortex Theme System. My wife has also been using a bullet journal. We’ve got a new ritual of sitting together with our journals, and coordinating calendars and action items.

Oh yeah, I’ve heard some things. For now I’m into fine-point gel pens. I’ve already made multiple orders with Jetpens to try out different refills.

It looks like the setting is max_parallel_downloads in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf. Here’s a post on how to increase it - so do the opposite, and set it to 1.

Oh… oh dear!

Linux on ARM is getting better all the time!

I sometimes tell my kids about things I was taught, and survival habits I picked up in the “dad qualification program”. I based the idea of the program on a brief description of air force officer survival training in the book The Hatchet, and a generous dose of imagination. The kids have never questioned it.

Good point! We should only use date formats that are allowed by both standards! https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

Don’t say “acronym” when you mean “abbreviation”!

“Acronym” specifically refers to an initialism that forms a new word. For example,

• scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus)
• NASA (pronounced like a word - you don’t say “ehn eh ess eh”).

It’s acro- (height) -nym (word) - a word that exists on top of / above other words.

In contrast “NIH” is not an acronym because it isn’t pronounced or read as a word. It’s appropriate to say, “‘NIH’ is an abbreviation” or “‘NIH’ is an initialism”. But saying “‘NIH’ is an acronym” is wrong!

The images probably don’t have to look meaningful as long as it is difficult to distinguish them from real images using a fast, statistical test. Nepenthes uses Markov chains to generate nonsense text that statistically resembles real content, which is a lot cheaper than LLM generation. Maybe Markov chains would also work to generate images? A chain could generate each pixel by based on the previous pixel, or based on neighbors, or some such thing.

Yes, I meant miles, but I forgot about the abbreviation collision

I raised my kids using metric temperature for weather. Now that they’re older they hold me to it!

1 cm is about the width of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 m is about the distance from your nose to your fingertips if you hold your arm out, and extend your fingers.

100 m is the length of the straight section of an athletic track, which is about the same length as a football field.

1 mL is about the volume of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 L is about 1 quart, which is half a carton of milk (unless you get milk in the smaller 1 quart size).

The mile-to-km conversion is pretty close to 1½.

The kg-to-pound conversion is two-and-a-bit.

A difference of 1°C is close to a difference of 2°F.

Edit: My milk comparison was wrong - I’ve corrected it.

Edit: Of course by “m” I meant “mile”

This advice is also golden!

I’m not sure if I’ve used more in the last 25 years. And when I did I think it was in MS-DOS.

For the sake of benefit of the doubt, it’s possible to simultaneously understand the thesis of the article, and to hold the opinion that AI doesn’t lead to higher-quality products. That would likely involve agreeing with the premise that laying off workers is a bad idea, but disagreeing (at least partially) with the reasoning why it’s a bad idea.