The hoops providers have to jump through to get around our horrible healthcare and insurance systems; it’s astounding there hasn’t already been a revolt.

Honestly, it’s the worst of what’s bad about capitalism.

A pretty girl is a pretty girl… I can overlook a little espionage.

Actually, really good point. Sorry, person-I-responded-to. I thought you (PIRT) were comparing Maria to Postgres, when you (PIRT) were referring to Maria vs MySQL.

Both PostgreSQL and MariaDB are OSS and free; MySQL is covered with cooties and boogers, and you don’t want to get any of it on you.

I can’t answer why you’re getting calls, but I’d be suspicious.

It’s where your primary care physician goes independent and stops accepting insurance. You pay them a flat fee a couple of times a year, and get their service for free. That is, you’re obviously paying them whether you use them or not, but you don’t pay them every time you see them.

You still need insurance, to cover things like specialists, and many tests the doctor performs - blood work, etc - can still be billed to insurance. But you go to a flat fee for your doctor.

My wife and I did it because our primary care physician, who we’ve been with for years and like, went concierge; we decided to stay with her despite it costing more than to switch to a different doctor.

Many things changed, mostly for the better.

• It is more expensive
• We get appointments with her often the same day - no more scheduling three weeks out
• We have an instant messaging app, and message her any time, and get a response within minutes up to a half hour. I’ve messaged her on the weekend and gotten an immediate response. She’s not the only one who answers - her PAs field some stuff, like appointments, but getting the immediate response is fantastic
• We no longer worry about co-pay or getting bills from her. Unless there’s lab work, all we pay is the bi-yearly fee. The emotional value of feeling free to contact her any time about anything can not be undervalued
• She loves it because, apparently, working in a clinic is hell for physicians. Shitty records systems, slow information responses, bureaucracy, crammed scheduling. She’s happier.
• I have yet to have to wait to see her. If I have an appointment, any time of the day, I show up and she’s ready. No sitting in the waiting room for a half hour.
• We’re able to hold cheaper insurance, because we’re paying for the GP out of pocket.

There is really the only one downside: insurance does not cover concierge, and it is not cheap. It’s within reason for middle class, but it’d be utterly unaffordable for lower or lower-middle class. It’s totally entitled. OTOH, if we had a single payer universal healthcare system, or if every provider were concierge, healthcare would be cheaper all around and maybe it’d be affordable.

Anyway, we did it because we followed a doctor. I don’t know that I’d jump into it with a provider I didn’t know. In our doctor’s case, she only offered it to her existing patients and doesn’t take on new ones (or, not often), and keeps her work load more manageable; I’d expect this to be common.

If insurance is trying to get you to do this, there’s an angle and I’d be suspicious. Either because they have to pay less (because concierge fees aren’t paid by insurance); or some company has figured out a way to “give you insurance” where you pay them and they pay the concierge fee, in which case they’re just a middleman skimming money and you’re paying more.

We are extremely happy with our concierge service, but we love our doctor, we can afford it, and it’s been a massively better experience for us. But that’s us. YMMV.

Maria database is free and open source.

Why are you implying that PostgreSQL isn’t?

People fervently believe what they desire, regardless of evidence to the contrary. It’s a really annoying fact of human nature sadly few people are able to resist.

She wants it to be normalized so that her situation will be validated, and so she naturally believes it will be. Not an unusual behavior at all. Even scientists who should know better (fusion power within the next 10 years! GAI within the next 5 years!) are susceptible.

Greeblings. Not ghosts, greeblings.

There are a couple of posts on Red-dit and Thre-eads, but I won’t link to those; here’s another description, although it’s wrong. It attributes Greebles to Red-dit, but the term predates not only that site, but the web entirely. I first heard about greeblings in 1983.

Wall of text incoming, sorry, I get anxious trying to explain myself

I asked; no worries!

I can’t find affordable loose-leaf tea in any store nearby. Ordering something I need regularly online is difficult because I need to remember that I need to do it and then also do it.

Ok, word of warning: I’m a guy, and an engineer, so I’m going to try to solve all of your problems whether you want me to or not. That’s my burden.

I would definitely look for tea online. Unless you’re in a big city, you’ll have better options, and tea ships better than, say, coffee. If you can find a place that sells a tea you like, they may offer an auto-ship service so you don’t have you worry about it.

You say you like having a handful of options to select from - many tea vendors offer samplers and this is an opportunity to go on a culinary voyage of discovery. Once you find a tea you like, from a vendor that has an auto-ship service, you’re set!

As far as brewing, there’s not much more to loose leaf than a tea bag, really. We get keep our tea in big jars, and keep a tea scoop in the jar. With one of those tea infusers I linked, it’s just: one scoop into the infuser, fill with water, and 5 minutes later put the infuser on top of a cup and it dispenses itself. Dump the used leaves in the trash, rinse the infuser, and done. I used to wash the thing, but haven’t in years.

But! Just keep doing what works for you! I just don’t want you to think it’s any more trouble using loose leaf because - in your case - it probably wouldn’t be. And there’s a whole extra world of tea open to you if you can use loose leaf.

Huh. Ok! Whatever works!

Thanks for asking!

I work on a variety of projects. Most are in Go, but I could have used Rust if I liked it more; they both tend to compile statically linked stand alone executables.

Most relevant to the discussion is Claptrap, a flags library for Go that has no external dependencies and could be imported into a project my copying one file and changing the package. I deal with added functionality with additional, optional, packages that can be imported to add features like conf file support, env var support, man page generation, pretty printing, etc. Each package used adds another dependency, but they’re each optional and relatively small, readable (I hope!) and auditable. I wrote Claptrap after changing flags libraries something like 5 times with each new project because there was something I didn’t like about the last one I tried. I even did an analysis of dependencies and code complexity on about two dozen different popular options.

Then there are a bunch of little tools I use daily. One’s Legume, which is a distributed ticket tracker based on code comments. No external db, no external service, relies entirely on standard code commenting conventions developers have been using for decades. Again, single executable, and it’s pretty fast. It’s not the first such tool, but I think it’s the best.

I have several other little tools I use daily. I have what I think is a really nice set of scripts and zsh functions based around todo.txt files. The main one is tdp, which provides a bunch of functions for doing executive lists, accessing special todo files more easily, and interacting with then through fzf; that may be the set of tools I use the most throughout the day, but it’s not really packaged for release or especially well documented. I rely heavily on todo.txt.

I wrote a keep-a-changelog generator for Mercurial projects. It’s not as fancy as git-cliff, but it does the job.

I’m the maintainer for gotop since the original author abandoned Go for Rust. I’ve not been spending a lot of time on it because it needs a refractor and I haven’t found the energy for it, and there are so many good alternatives. That project is all dependencies, so nothing minimal about that.

There’s a really rough TUI SMS chat app I’m writing called dsms, because I hate communicating on phones. It relies on two programs to be running on your Android phone, because there’s no app that both forwards SMSes and allows sending through an API call, so it’s kind of a pain and nowhere near ready for primetime.

And I recently wrote a CLI tool called dvalv for encoding and decoding files encrypted with the Android app Valv (which I _didn’t_write), so if you SyncThing your Valv directory to your desktop, you can decrypt and access your files there.

And I have a really obtuse, byzantine set of tools for taking a resume.json file and generating Word, ODT, HTML, Markdown, and pdf (via Typst) output, via a couple of different templates. The projects unimaginatively called “resume”. That’s entirely for myself, but it someone wants to use it, I’d be happy to walk them through the process of getting everything set up to do so. It uses a couple of very nice templates that I patterned after a couple of professional career councilors. The repos isn’t up to date; I need to push some changes, but since I’m positive I’m the only user I haven’t made it a priority.

A tool I’m extremely happy with and use maybe even more than tdp is rook. This one I did announce on Lemmy. It’s a sort of headless secret store backed by a KeePass DB, and it’s one of the most useful tools I’ve written recently. Rook’s in both AUR and Alpine testing.

There’s a little busybox-compatible Lua script for DD-WRT routers that’ll shuffle and pick a VPN exit node from ones stored in the router; I use it to hop my exit node once or twice a day via a cron job. I use Mullvad and there script might have some assumptions built-in that won’t work for non-Mullvad accounts, but it’s not exactly rocket science.

I forked a lightweight, pure-Go DB project and did some substantial modification, and called it leaf. These sorts of DBs are a dime a dozen, but this fit my needs, which included being usable on programs cross-compiled for mobile devices.

What’s taking all my time lately, though, isn’t my project. I’ve been doing a lot of work on stmps, which is a hard fork of stmp, which is a Subsonic TUI client. I’m doing things like adding album art and synchronized lyrics support, bug fixes, and so on. My dev branch there is called “xxxserxxx”.

All of these are actively developed, if not necessarily getting a lot of commits. I fix bugs as reported, and make improvements as needed.

Here’s a full list; nearly all my projects are on Sourcehut.

Overthinking. Just mine a bunch of iron, or gold, or whatever you can get and drop it in big chunks right on the planet. Don’t bother trying to land the stuff. Aim for Mar A Lago. Then drive in and surface mine the payload.

Great clarifications!

Once a year or so, I re-learn how to interpret Smart values, which I find frustratingly obtuse. Then I promptly forget .

So one’s almost 6 y/o and the other is about 5½?

I certainly was!

Any EU citizens want to swap passports with me?

I think I see what you’re saying.

B2 has multiple data centers around the world - at least 3 in the US and 1 in EU, that I know of. If you want your data replicated, you have to create buckets in multiple locations and connect them for replication, which they’ll do for you (the replication).

If you’re saying that they don’t automatically store multiple copies of your data in multiple locations for you, for free, you’re right. But they do have multiple data centers located around the world, and you can create multiple buckets and configure them for automatic replication so you have redundancy. You have to pay for the storage at each replicated location, though. If you want a bucket in Sacramento, it’ll cost you those pennies. If you want it replicated to Rest on, you’ll pay double the pennies. If you want it also replicated to Amsterdam, triple the pennies.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that they’re single location that could have a natural disaster and you therefore lose your storage. It’s only like that if you set it up that way, and it’s pretty trivial to set up global replication - it just costs more.

I quadrupal vote for this combination.

You could trust B2 more; maybe dig into their structure. They’re solid, and not only that they provide an awesome service with their yearly HD failure rate evaluations, in which they describe the structure of their data centers.

I’m terms of NPS, I’m on their side. Unless something comes out and shady business practices, I’m brand loyal to B2. Been with then for years, and love the service, pricing, and company.

I personally think it’s too late, but I get jumped on for being a “doomer,” so I try to stay outwardly optimistic.

But, yeah: we’re doomed.

I don’t have easy access to loose-leaf tea, unfortunately.

As in, you can’t easily buy it, or that it’s literally hard for you to access?

My wife likes Earl Gray, but it’s caffeine sensitive, and she’s very picky about taste. So she gets hers via mail order; if the issue is sourcing, then the web is your friend.

Also, this is not specifically directed at you but it’s on my mind lately: loose-leaf tea is more effort than tea bags.

This is interesting. Sincerely: how? I’m walking through the process in my head, and it seems to me it’d be harder getting the little bags out of their packaging and manipulating them.

Our process is:

1. Pop the lid on the tea container (must be similar in difficulty to getting into a box of canister of bags, right?)
2. Scoop a scoop with a spoon into e.g. a Teavana tea maker (or the million similar products). I can see how manipulating a spoon can be a challenge itself, but is it harder than digging around in a container for a tea bag?
3. Pouring water’s the same process, either way
4. When it’s steeped, put it on the cup and it dispenses itself. Again, fussing around with a tea bag to pull it out of a cup seems like it’d require more fine motor control and be more challenging

I’m sincerely curious since I’m ignorant about the details of how tea bags would be easier, and I’d like to learn. Every person has different obstacles, and I know you don’t speak for everyone; also, this is just curiosity on my part, so if you’re not interested in explaining, no problem.

Yes, but it’s that act of self-promotion that is the issue, not whether you’re charging for it. It can be almost worse for OSS, because users can be astonishingly critical, demanding, and insulting about something you’re giving away for free. If I was charging for it, I would be less offended, because they’d have some justification for being irksome.

Promoting your software still feels like sales, somehow - that’s growing up in a capitalism, I guess, plus you’re opening yourself to all that criticism.

The integrated tea cups are some of my favorites. I have a beautiful one where you dump in the tea and just lift the integrated strainer out when it’s done.