Important content and information I want is on YouTube. I pay a YouTube subscription.

I have ADHD. YouTube shorts are poison. I don’t want them. I keep clicking “not interested”. They go away for a bit, they come back, I waste hours of my life scrolling through them before I notice. I click “not interested” 20 more times to get a few days relief…

Even when you’re the customer, you’re not the customer.

I haven't tried it, but I was able to search and find a greasemonkey script:

https://github.com/conifer215/hide-youtube-shorts

> Even when you’re the customer, you’re not the customer.

I think a better way to phrase "if you're not the customer, you're the product" is "we don't want your money, we want you".

VAT can be considered a regressive tax because the poorer I am, the more of my money I spend on goods and services, and the less on savings and investments. As a proportion of income, poor people spend more on VAT than rich people. I think it’s about double, in the UK. So you’re right that cutting VAT helps richer people more in absolute terms. But in terms of of quality of life it helps poorer people more.

[edit] assuming we’re talking about VAT on things that everyone buys. Which is why tax codes often exempt essential items from VAT.

You can do both, in that you can have a system where if you make less than X, you don’t pay VAT on certain things, or less.

California is now doing this for electric car rebates. Only works for items pinned to a person.

This can easily be compensated for by simply giving the poor more rebate on income tax.

Give people as a whole more money and they can spend it on housing. Given the decades long supply problem with housing it simply means rents increase to fill the void.

One infuriating thing about PACE is that even the fraudulent results only showed a 22% recovery rate.

For a disease as serious as ME/CFS, a treatment with a 22% recovery rate is far from good enough. Even if PACE stood up to scrutiny it wouldn’t have made sense to give up on finding better treatments.

I mean, 22% sounds pretty damn good if there are no long lasting negative side effects of being part of the remaining 78%.

Like, sure, shoot for 200% cure rate, but even a success rate of 1% cured of a previously unrecoverable situation is insanely informative.

(self reply) (obviously if the 22% number itself is bogus then you can't trust anything)

Another example of “entertainment” with scope for unconstrained spending: digital goods in the less scrupulous kinds of video games

Which coincidentally often contains gambling mechanics such as loot boxes.

I find LLMs are often better for X vs Y questions where search results were already choked by content farm chaff. Or at least LLMs present more concise answers, surrounded by fewer ads and less padding. Still have to double check the claims of course.

I think I'm discovering that I just don't tend to think in terms of questions rather than content

You should be able to choose to switch off security as you wish. You should also be able to choose to leave it on.

“About the same” is not “the same”, and there are tipping points. The gini coefficient has still seen a decent bump.

But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart below that, showing income percentages going steadily upwards for the top 10 and 1%.

Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a good chunk of society who feel like the system works for them.

And it’s not just perceptions, it’s fundamental stuff. A teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can’t now. For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage on one income, or having access to nice council housing are gone.

I agree with the broad point- as an industry we still fail to think of logging as a feature to be specified and tested like everything else. We use logging frameworks to indiscriminately and redundantly dump everything we can think of, instead of adopting a pattern of apps and libraries that produce thoughtful, structured event streams. It’s too easy to just chuck another log.info in; having to consider the type and information content of an event results in lower volumes and higher quality of observability data.

A small nit pick but having loads of data that “most likely no-one will look at ever again” is ok to an extent, for the data that are there to diagnose incidents. It’s not useful most of the time, until it’s really really useful. But it’s a matter of degree, and dumping the same information redundantly is pointless and infuriating.

This is one reason why it’s nice to create readable specs from telemetry, with traces/spans initiated from test drivers and passed through the stack (rather than trying to make natural language executable the way Cucumber does it- that’s a lot of work and complexity for non-production code). Then our observability data get looked at many times before there’s a production incident, in order to diagnose test failures. And hopefully the attributes we added to diagnose tests are also useful for similar diagnostics in prod.

I'm currently working with Coroot, which is an open source project trying to create a solution for this issue of logs and other telemetry sources being too much for any team to reasonably have time to parse manually. Data is automatically imported using eBPF and Coroot will provide insights into RCA (with things like mapped incident timeframes) to help with anything overlooked in dumps.

GitHub here - hope the tool can help some folks in this thread: https://github.com/coroot/coroot

Fakes over mocks every time

As a patient with an under-served condition I quite often focus on the financial rather than human cost of not having a better system of care when talking about it.

If someone’s going to object to improving the system it’s mostly likely going to be on grounds of cost.