Perl was also my first productive language, and I do miss it a little. Write something like []string{"foo", "bar", "baz"} in go and you really appreciate qw(foo bar baz). Perl was always designed to be easy to type in, and maybe not so easy to maintain later. Good memories, but not for me anymore.
Yeah, Zepbound is $499 now. Out of reach of many, but an improvement from $549 last year.
The terms and conditions are confusing. You can only use the half-off coupon they provide if you have prescription drug insurance. Even if insurance doesn't cover it, they still require the processing pharmacy to check that you have some sort of valid insurance and only process the coupon if so. If you fall into that bucket, it's $1200 or something. (Had to pay that amount one month because Amazon Pharmacy was very confused about my gender marker changing on my insurance. Many, many support tickets later, and it got fixed.)
There is also some price difference between the autoinjector and the single-use vial + provide your own needle and syringe. I haven't looked into that because it's the same with the coupon, but if you can't get the coupon to work, it's an option to just inject it yourself. Honestly I prefer not using the autoinjectors (I inject other medications), but it's the path of least resistance.
Finally, the coupon claims it only works for 7 fills, but I've been taking the medication for a couple years and all my fills have been covered. I don't really understand it. I have a feeling that I'm the only person in the world that read the fine print, including the pharmacies and manufacturer :/
>It improves quality of life, health, reduces risk when surgery is needed,
And as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, needs to be taken forever as the vast majority of patients regain most or all of the weight they lose after taking GLP-1s.
>Why create a new account just to litigate how statistically relevant the grandparent comment's anecdote is?
Red herring. My account was not created today, I’ve participated in numerous other threads prior to this one, and it’s irrelevant to the content of my comment.
Oh well. I'll be taking my omeprazole medication for the rest of my life, too. Sometimes the body has a chronic issue that needs lifetime management, frequently with medication. Only with GLP1 does this suddenly seem like a moral issue for some.
Yeah, I'll be taking minoxidil for my hair forever. And zyrtec for my allergies forever. So it goes. "What if you get lost in a cave system for 30 years? What then?" I guess I'll lose my hair and be sneezing a lot, and gain weight. So it goes. Until then, it doesn't really bother me.
Why is it that people can't seem to grasp that the brain is just as biological as the kidney or pancreas? If your pancreas isn't producing the right chemicals in the right quantities at the right times for normal healthy functioning, of course we need to treat that. But if the brain isn't producing the right chemicals in the right quantities at the right times for normal healthy functioning, then obviously its willpower or laziness or whatever.
Literally no one is saying overweight people are magically defying the laws of physics. Managing weight involves the brain, and the brain is a biological organ that is affected by genetics and the chemical and hormonal signals from other organs in the body. this moralizing about using a drug to lose weight being wrong or lazy or cheating or whatever is no different than people saying depressed people need to just stop being sad or ADHD people need to just pay attention.
The solipsistic idea that because your brain has the ability to do X means that everyone must work the exact same way, therefore if my brain is able to do something everyone else must too. If I can sit down and focus, ADHD must just be lazy and choosing not to. If my feelings of hunger are mild and easy to moderate, overweight people must just be weak willed and gluttonous.
To frame this as trying to argue for basic thermodynamics is such a strawman that my pet crow flew out the window in fear. If you think fat people are lazy and refuse to use willpower, and using a drug is a lazy substitute for mental willpower, then say so and have an honest discussion.
That's actually really neat. It suggested regclient/regclient as a repository I'd like. I looked and, yup, I had no idea that existed and it is a sort of thing I like.
People complain about The Algorithm but it can be useful...
When people talk about "The Algorithm", they're not talking about just some function that sorts stuff by X or Y, but an feed optimized for "evil X", usually trying to drive longer attention, or push up engagement.
If GitHub started using the submissions GitStars to recommend repos in people's GitHub feed, I don't think people would get their pitchforks out about "The Algorithm" in that case. But if GitHub started to make the feed so you spend as much time there as possible, by whatever means and potentially irrelevant stuff, then the GitHub feed would start being considered as one of "The Algorithms" by many, would be my guess.
I like how the Unicode Consortium really doesn't want to accept any more flags, but you can still probably shoehorn them in if you're Apple or Google and you have a glyph sequence that is backwards compatible. One way of getting things done -- just do it.
I knew the details behind this because Windows 10 didn't include font with the trans flag by default, and so it always rendered as flag + trans symbol. I eventually installed the emoji font from the Windows 11 betas and found much of what I read to suddenly be a lot nicer looking.
That's true, they won't process any proposals for flags anymore. The first link in the linked post is a detailed FAQ from the Unicode people:
> Flags for countries with Unicode region codes [ie. recognized by ISO] are automatically recommended, with no proposals necessary! [...] the Emoji Subcommittee is no longer taking in any proposals for flags of any kind.
They have a section addressing new pride flags specifically near the end of the FAQ.
This is a thread about flag emojis, hardly tangential!
And it isn't flamebait to point out the f*cked up power dynamics in highly-government-influenced standards orgs. Especially the Unicode Consortium, since you can fit the alphabets of the official language of every country but one into a 16-bit space (no I'm not advocating Han Unification -- in fact precisely the opposite). The whole rest of the world has to deal with variable-length encodings and "grapheme cluster" nonsense just to keep one country happy.
dang, you have impugned my honor. I demand satisfaction in the form of a duel! Nerf guns at twenty paces.
IMO veering from minutiae of 5-codepoint Unicode sequences to hot geopolitics ("for fairly obvious reasons") is a classic generic flamewar tangent, in the textbook sense of "tangent": there's one point in common and otherwise the lines don't intersect at all.
These tangents always go in the same direction, too: they bump the thread off the back road (obscure Unicode details!) and onto the well-paved multi-line highway (to hell!).
None of that matters though, if you're going to be as good-humored as this!
There are no country flags in UTF. The flag you're seeing is the interpretation of a 2 character ISO country code by your OS.
> Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded. This allows the Unicode consortium to avoid any issues surrounding which countries to include (and, de facto, recognize), instead leaving it entirely to the system implementation as to which flags to include (see: partially recognized state).
There is no flag in the encoding. Instead, there are codepoints for each of ISO 3166-1's "Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1
Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China agree that there exists an entity called "Taiwan, Province of China" (TW). They have different views about what that entity's flag is (and many other things about that entity), but Unicode doesn't offer any opinions on that.
To clarify, 3166-1 is for countries, dependent territories (i.e. Guam), special areas (Taiwan, Hong Kong) i.e. TW gets a flag being in 3166-1 list but under UN resolution 2758, PRC gets to subsume TW as special area - "Taiwan (Province of China)". 3166-2 is for subdivisions (TW provinces, UNDER CHINA), i.e. all TW provinces are considered subdivisions of China/PRC. Same with HK. Unicode doesn't offer opinion in the sense the opinion is whatever UN recognize as countries, which will never include TW as long as PRC holds P5 veto.
In the meantime this arrangement works out since ROC constitution still legally asserts it's but part of One China polity, i.e. it doesn't matter what TWers think or DPP claims, or tries to legally engineer (additional articles /legal fiction limiting ROC political jurisdiction to "free area" of tw + islands). Until TW voters&politicians actually formally separates / declares independence, as in change ROC constitution by renounce claims on mainland, they'll lose 3166-1 designation because PRC gets to remove them, and won't get a new one because PRC veto. They'll lose their emojis (maybe iso codes, maybe domain depending on US/ICANN drama)... which TBH will be least of their worries.
Almost nobody in Taiwan would call it a "province of China" (some would if you redefine what China means, ie not PRC). But as usual standards bodies bend to whoever has power at the moment.
While a previous government of Taiwan claimed that it was the legitimate ruler of China, the current government does not. It considers itself to be a separate sovereign state. The KMT that fought for control of China and fled the mainland is only a small fraction of Taiwan's population and only ruled over the majority by political suppression.
This is a clear tell that your knowledge of the situation is basically just Wikipedia plus media reporting. Approximately nobody in Taiwan views it that way. It is an obscure legal fiction of no relevance. It only persists because of a red line drawn by the PRC.
It’s kind of like how New Zealand is included as a province of Australia, technically, in their constitution.
I didn't saw anything about how people view this? As you state, it's a legal fiction, but it's quite useful in numerous contexts like this, because it lets Unicode de facto include the Taiwan flag without actually including the Taiwan flag.
Taiwan is the last vestige of original ”China” and PRC already redefined it when Taiwan (ROC) lost the mainland to the communists in 1949 during the Chinese Civil War.
I had to take Computer Ethics as part of my degree, but it didn't really anticipate the sort of problems that software engineers run into today. It mostly focused on Therac-25 and integer overflows. Indeed, letting your integer overflow kill a bunch of people is horrifying and is something we should avoid. But we have a much wider reach than people thought at the time. Software is pervasive throughout society and touches every area of life: food delivery and banking are among the examples listed in this thread, and were never touched on in any class I took.
Software didn't create the gig economy or the microloan economy, but as engineers, we had the opportunity to step up and say "hmm, this doesn't seem right, I don't think we should do that". We didn't.
AI is a whole 'nother can of worms. I watched a lot of my friends deactivate social media over the holiday as their pictures got posted to Twitter and got live AI edited by Grok into things that horrify them. You probably wouldn't have gotten an A in Computer Ethics if you said "yeah, we should publicly show women nude pictures of themselves if someone asks in the comments section", but here we are.
It's not great. As a field, we have been remiss in our duty to society.
I just feel like this becomes time consuming after a while. Will there be soap? Toilet paper? A bed? You don't know unless you ask! But ... c'mon ... they can just tell you on the website.
Or just don't travel if every detail becomes an issue. I make certain basic assumptions--yes I assume there will be a bed and toilet paper--but, in general, I adapt as necessary.
That is fair. I have noticed doors going missing in hotels but typically travel alone so it didn't really register as an issue. I would not want to share a room with a coworker ever, bathroom door or not.
If you’re going on so much travel that this is a burden then you’re truly privileged. Maybe your assistant or travel agent can handle this issue for you.
Jabs aside, you don’t need to be rich to use a travel agent or Rick Steves guidebook instead of blindly booking hotels on Internet sites. If there’s an issue like this you’ll easily find it on review sites and most of those are searchable.
The same thing applies to other experiences like restaurants and museums. For example, it’s always smart to jump on Google/Trip Advisor reviews and type in “kids” or “stroller” into various attractions to make sure you are prepared if you’re bringing kids along.
Travel is never perfect. I’ve been in weird rooms with actual glass walls with a perfect framed view of the shitter facing the bed. I have no idea why they did this, maybe this culture values natural light in bathrooms? I witnessed it more than once so it wasn’t just one creepy place. Individual privacy especially within the same family is something of a recent and western concept from my understanding.
Either way it was hilarious and a minor inconvenience considering it was a lot minute hotel. It’s just peeing and pooping, we all do it. My traveling friend and I took turns averting our eyes. We had warm clean beds and a story to tell.
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