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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah, there’s a very real chance that the issue was my GP, but since you’re essentially stuck with the GP that you can get it is what it is. I don’t live there anymore so I can share these details in case it saves someone else. I lived in Dublin so obviously both are there, the GP was in Kilmainham medical center and the hospital for the specialist and expensive blood work was Black rock hearth Hermitage Clinic. I have a friend who just went through a similar situation so it’s not exclusive to me, but he does live in the same building I used to so he might go to the same GP, and that GP might have some arrangement or something with the people from that other hospital, not to mention he blocked me from seeing a cardiologist for years saying I didn’t needed it (wanted to do a checkup because my entire father’s side family died of heart related conditions, and after the ridiculous amount of money it costed to see the other specialist I just let it go.

    I’m saddened to think it could all have been due to a bad GP, my time in Ireland was very badly affected by these experiences with medical care. And speaking with friends they had had similar experiences so I never thought it could have been a bad GP.

    The health plan from the company wasn’t bad, at least I don’t think it was, but I don’t have any parameters to compare it to. I worked for 2 companies while I lived there and both used the same health plan. I don’t remember what it was, but at the specialist they said that I needed to pay and then talk to my health plan, and the health plan only refunded half of the value. I still work for the same company but on a different country, and here the health plan seems to cover everything, so I doubt they would have a good plan on one country and a bad one on the other, but it could happen.


  • I have lived in several countries so I can give you a few answers:

    Brazil:

    You have two options, private which is generally expensive but fast and good and public which is free but usually slow and mediocre. Most people who can afford it use private, but public system is honestly quite good in some places. I lived in two different cities, on one of them you didn’t go to the public system unless it was an absolute emergency, because otherwise chances were you would come out worse, on the other city the public system was slow and under budgeted but very good otherwise, you would still prefer private if you could afford it, but people tight on money would use it, so you might do time insensitive stuff on the public system for example.

    If you break your leg you would call an ambulance, get taken to a public hospital and be treated all free. You might have to wait on the hospital as people with graver injuries would be taken ahead of you.

    Ireland:

    There is a public system, but you have to earn below a certain threshold to be able to use it. Emergencies I think are covered for everyone, luckily I never had an emergency while living there so can’t speak from experience. You MUST have a GP, and most of them (at least in Dublin) are not taking new patients. Once you find a GP you must go through them to get to any specialist, for that you pay €60 and then you go to a consultation with them and they can decide whether to forward you to a specialist or not. If they forward you to a specialist you will have to pay their consultation fee, then pay for any exams, they pay to see the specialist again. All-in-all I’ve spent around €1000 trying to get a diagnosis once, luckily I had health insurance and it paid me back half.

    Spain:

    My wife twisted her ankle while visiting here as tourists, someone called an ambulance, it took us to the hospital, and after some wait se was seen and they did an x-ray, confirmed nothing was broken and gave her some special socks to prevent the joint from forcing too much. Because we forgot to bring our sanitary card from Ireland we had to pay for that, it was a total of €200.

    We live here now, and since moving here a couple of years back we have gone through dozens of doctors and exams. I have a health plan from my company so this might not be the same for everyone, but I have never paid a single cent for anything, including X-rays, blood works, CAT scans, etc. Honestly I keep thinking at some point I will receive a huge bill from the health plan, but so far it has never happened.


  • To me it’s abhorrent that Ireland is seen as having good healthcare. That just goes to show how shitty the system is in the USA. I lived in Ireland for 4 years, had a health plan paid by the company I worked, still had to pay 50% of every visit, and to get to any specialist you need to go to your GP (€60) and then, if your GP agrees (which he might not), they will contact the specialist for you which you will have to pay for out of your own pocket (usually €150-€300 depending on specialty), that specialist will ask for exams (blood works are €80 on the GP, but specialist might require specific tests that GP doesn’t offer, I have paid around €600 for some blood exams), then you go back to the specialist (and pay €150 again for a consultation) for him to check the results of the exams and tell you there’s nothing wrong so you can do another round of exams to see if they find anything… We’re already at around €1000 and the health insurance will only return me half at some point… The max €80 in prescription medicine was quite nice though.


  • Alexander is a common name, but it depends on context, if you say “at the time Alexander conquered X” most people would understand, but if you say “Alexander was here” you might be talking about a work college.

    There’s not only one Caesar, while you probably beat Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius and others were also “Caesar”, and you might referring to any of them. For example, “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s” does not refer to the same Caesar you probably meant.

    Slim shady is a made up name and it’s way more specific than <common name> the <common adjective>.

    Charlemagne is short for Charles Magnus, or in English Charles the great, so that’s exactly the same.

    Attila is a very unique name, I’ve never met nor heard about any other Attila so the name is disambiguation enough, but it’s likely that if that is a common name in some country they have an extra qualifier to it, I’ve heard Attila the Hun, but there might be others.

    There’s nothing special, if a name is common you need disambiguation, if a name is overly specific you don’t, same reason why we have last names, “I met with John the other day”, “which John?”, “The Smith”, “Ah yeah, John Smith, not John the son of Richard”, “No, I haven’t seen John Richardson in a few weeks”.




  • I know this might go against the flow here, but realistically if they’re using the tools in the way they say they are (which you should 100% check with your doctor to let him know about possible hallucinations) it’s not that bad. Speech-to-text is not prone to hallucinate, it can fail and detect wrong things but shouldn’t outright hallucinate. After that, LLMs are good at summarizing things, yes they are prone to hallucinations which is why having the doctor review the notes immediately after the session is important (and they said they do), so I don’t see this as such a big issue from the usability point of view.

    You might still have issues from a privacy point of view and that’s a much more complex discussion with them about what kind of contract they have with the LLM company to ensure no HIPAA violations (as from the LLM point of view it’s just making a summary of a text it might store it, and then the whole stack is suable). They need to understand that just because they haven’t kept a copy around doesn’t mean the other party hasn’t, and because they shared it out without your agreement (you’re only agreeing to AI note taking which can be done locally so them sharing information with third parties is entirely up to them) they would be liable. I’m not a lawyer, so you might want to double check that, but I would be very surprised if that’s not the way it works, otherwise Drs could get away with a bunch of HIPAA violations by having you sign something that says they use a computer to store data and then storing things in shared Google drive.


  • Cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital currency, it can be used for the same thing as any other digital currency, the difference being that you can use it without relying on a centralized authority like a bank or similar financial institutions.

    Yes you can buy pizzas with it, although that’s less common nowadays because there are more practical ways to pay for that and you probably don’t mind the bank and government to know you buy pizzas.

    I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.

    You don’t? If I were to offer you 1BTC for your mouse, would you accept it? If you say no you’re stupid, if you say yes you confirmed you see it as valuable and are willing to exchange it for goods directly.




  • Not exactly bait and switch, but a long time ago I was looking for a job, had an interview that I aced, I can’t overestimate how much I aced it:

    • There was a “coding challenge” that was supposed to take half an hour and I finished in 10 min
    • They asked a question and my answer was so complete that I could see them turning pages and skipping the next follow up questions
    • One of the few times they got to ask me a follow up question which was very related to the work I would be doing the answer was "I would just do the same I’m doing for my master thesis, and proceeded to explain how I have solved that problem on my thesis and later I found out it was roughly the same way they had solved it on their use case.

    Then they told me “our initial salary is X, but that’s for Juniors, which you clearly aren’t, we’ll finish this round of interviews and contact you”. They contacted me a week later and offered me a Junior role paying X. I can’t really said they baited and switched since they didn’t change the offer, and what the other person told me was more informal. Since I needed a job and they have accepted me part time while I finished my masters I accepted thinking that once I went full time I would get a raise. Nope, they said they only did reviews and raises annually, and I had started right after that. I worked my ass off for that year, proving to them that I was worth the raise. Got to my annual review and was told everything is excellent, we’re bumping you to Junior 2 with a whooping 5% increase in salary…

    That’s when I decided fuck them. They want a Junior, they’ll get a Junior. I started to listen to podcasts and YouTube videos during my work and dragging my feet, taking weeks to do what I would have done in less than a day before, and still outperforming all other juniors. I quit before the next year for unrelated reasons, and went through training a replacement who, let’s just say, was really a Junior.



  • Don’t.

    First of all, Chinese are not that well viewed abroad either, a lot of the Chinese tourists we get in Europe are the top earners kids and are entitled as fuck.

    Secondly no one judges people from their country, sure there are a lot of obnoxious Americans and Chinese tourists, but I imagine that’s just survivor bias, you don’t notice the non obnoxious ones which I assume to be the majority.

    Thirdly, and maybe most important, you won’t be able to do it. This question is proof that you think and act like an American, you have some ancestor who came from China so you think you’re Chinese-american, and that that somehow means you’re Chinese, but you grew in a different culture, eating different food, watching different TV shows, etc. In short, you are an American of Chinese ethnicity, you are not a Chinese who was born in America.

    Do you want to know what’s one of THE most obnoxious bullshit American tourists do? Teaching Italians about Italy because they’re Italian-American, or thinking they know all about Ireland because the grandpa of their third-cousin once removed came from Ireland, so they’re Irish-American. Unless you spent a significant chunk of your life in China, especially during the formative years, you will not behave Chinese, you have an “Americanized” image of what a Chinese is, and at best you would have fooled someone who doesn’t care about your nationality as long as you treat them with respect. There’s a song that I think sums out this feeling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0_yCNSV-c it is a very common one, I’ve lived both in Italy and Ireland which is why I use them as examples, and every so often you’d get the X-American thinking they’re X, and you could tell them apart from across the street.



    • Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Life of Brian and Meaning of life (in that order of rewaches). Although I haven’t seen them in years, now that I live somewhere where weed is legal I should do that (never seen them stoned)
    • Primer, which if it’s not on your list here you either haven’t seen it or haven’t understood it
    • The Mummy and Harry Potter (especially the first couple). They’re one of my wife’s comfort movies so we watch them every once in a while if she’s feeling down
    • LotR, although it’s more of an event to rewatch them.
    • Stargate, every few years we rewatch the TV show when we have nothing else to watch, we do that with some other TV shows as well as it’s good background noise to just relax. And since it starts and ends with movies we’ve watched those several times.
    • Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555 are awesome music albums so I have watched those several times
    • Hair, similarly love the musics

    And although I haven’t seen them too many times (but at least twice) Memento is a great movie if you haven’t seen it. Also I haven’t seen it multiple times but The Strangers is a great horror movie.




  • One curious thing if you understand this is to think on purple. Purple is blue+red, but like you pointed out 2 colors should give you the average wavelength, which in the case of blue+,red should be green. So why the hell do we see purple as something different? Well, that’s because humans have 3 sensors for colors, roughly corresponding to Red, Green and Blue, triggering both Blue and Red without triggering green at the same time gets interpreted differently than green, even though it shouldn’t. Which means that purple is not a color, but rather a mind trick your brain plays on you.