The best thing about universal healthcare isn't how much money I may or may not have to pay, it's that I literally don't once have to think about a bill or filling out a form to avoid paying too much.
I wouldn't care if I ended up paying more in tax than I would in an insurance model. The benefit is being able to 100% focus on my health instead of navigating a system to try to reduce what I'm paying.
When you're diagnosed with an illness, that's a huge peace of mind.
Not limited to healthcare btw. This is also how I feel about my public transport card, unlimited data on my cellphone plan, and so on.
I'll take a queue over bankruptcy any day. And these queues people complain about are triaged - if you're dying you skip to the front. The complaints about waiting hours are from people with broken arms, and at least they get seen and their arms get fixed, for free or a nominal price.
Trust me it doesn’t work perfectly in other countries. Yes, americas system is messed up but in countries like Sweden you will still have to navigate the system to actually get the healthcare you need. There are people who are denied healthcare in Sweden because the govt has deemed that it’s too expensive to save them (while people with similar conditions and a good insurance in the US are covered).
My mum was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer. Almost three years of radiation, chemotherapy, trail drugs, appointments etc. free transport and accommodation at the major city four hours away when required.
Insane prescription drugs that seriously raised the eyebrows of the pharmacist every month.
Never paid a cent, never had a single call or piece of paper for logistics or payment or any of that bs.
She was a teacher her whole life, middle class, no private insurance ever.
It can be, and is, phenomenal in countries that do it right.
That may be, but I'm speaking from experience in my country.
Almost 10 years of treatment for a health condition, and the only forms I've ever filled in were:
1. Legal risk document to say I understood the risks of treatment
2. Change of address form
3. Form to say I wouldn't impregnate people while on a certain medication
And honestly, that's it. I've genuinely been able to focus on my health without being bothered by forms.
Also inflexibility, large backlogs, quality of staff, etc.
In Canada all of our best doctors go to the US and there's often nurse shortages. It's not just a private incentive either, the US gov pays out far more in public healthcare coverage as a percentage of GDP and per capita than Canada and almost all of Europe.
Despite their reputation the US doesn't have a lack of public healthcare spending (ranking #1-3 in the world). It's just their system's insurance regulation is extremely convoluted, creating risky edge-cases and perverse incentives. If they fixed that they would by far have the best healthcare system in the world.
All of that happens in the US, the big difference is that if you get care you stand a good choice of going bankrupt. The largest single reason for bankruptcy in the US is medical care and of that group the largest chunk is folks who previously had insurance but no longer do.
Most countries have both public and private. In Spain I have public and then private on top of that which 220 eur a month for a family of four all services included and no co-pay. The public option works to set a roof on what private insurance can charge.
> The public option works to set a roof on what private insurance can charge.
Exactly! This is what no one in the US seems to understand. My encounters with private clinics and hospitals in the UK (all 10+ years ago, at this point) were unbelievably luxurious, at prices that (totally, completely free-market driven, mind you) were affordable on middle-class incomes. Or, yeah: there's private medical insurance, also free-marketed to "shockingly reasonable", by US measures. Americans on good salaries have been bamboozled into believing that a single-payer system will trap them into some kind of hell-hole hospital° with no recourse, when in fact the exact opposite is true.
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°And, of course, the "hell-hole hospital" examples are cherry-picked. Bad on their own, of course, but not representative of a system as a whole, nor recognize that equally awful anecdotes are abundant in the USA.
Right, and in my country you can even mix and match it.
I went to see my GP, paid for by public health, they referred me to a specialist.
I chose to pay €100 to see a private doctor who was available sooner (the next day) and had better ratings.
They referred me for an MRI which was done at another private provider, paid for by public health.
I went back to the private doctor and paid for a non-surgical treatment, which wasn't available on public health.
If that doesn't work, later I can opt for surgery, paid for by public health.
And even more importantly: There is one system that tracks all diagnoses, treatment, medication etc used by both public and private healthcare providers, so medical history is available instantly to everyone.
Honestly one of my main healthcare related complaints about living in Canada is not having centralized health records. Sometimes Europe feels like living 2 decades in the future lol.
Unfortunately a lot of us do understand this, but our representatives (who definitely know this) don't care or are actively opposed to making improvements other than reducing taxes (which hurts more than helps, IMO).
And yet, the average American pays more in taxes for public healthcare (medicare, medicaid) that they don't receive any of, than the average European pays in taxes for (some kind of) universal healthcare.
It's so bizarre seeing Americans in the debate not wanting "crazy high taxes like in Europe", because the US already spends twice as much public money per capita as the OECD average.
The dirty secret of course is that healthcare as a good is much more expensive to produce in the US than elsewhere, and a large chunk of that is because the private insurance system adds a ton of unnecessary overhead. And yet all the healthcare insurance companies in the US talk about making healthcare "affordable for all". Yeah, no, they're leeches. They're rent-seekers. They drive up the cost of everything.
The US has a massively progressive tax system. On a net tax basis about 50% of the country pays nothing. Sure, they pay sales tax and employment taxes, but they also receive some mix of earned income tax credits, child tax credits, snap, medicaid, housing, etc. There is no real way for the US to have a single payer tax system without more people actually becoming net tax payers.
You can't just ignore the money people are spending on healthcare right now. Every expenditure on private healthcare (insurance, copays, etc.) would be collected as tax going forward. That would be roughly $10-$20k annually?
Many more people would become net tax payers overnight without actually spending more money.
Yeah this is something people in favor of single payer healthcare in the U.S. don’t want to acknowledge. In most other countries, the middle 50% of taxpayers pay a much higher percentage of their income than in the U.S. Everyone somehow thinks we can make it work just by raising taxes on “the rich” (where that is usually defined as anyone making more money than them). But if it was that easy, then why does Canada and most European countries have so much higher taxes on the middle class?
Now I’m not inherently against increasing taxes (for all) if it gave us a much better healthcare system, but you have to be intellectually honest about who would have to pay those higher taxes. It’s not just Elon Musk.
I'm curious what the actual number is. I have health insurance through my work and I pay over $1,500 a month for that (and still have out of pocket costs). That's $18,000 a year. That's a substantial percentage of my income which essentially is just a tax going to the insurance company instead of the government. Now if it cost a couple thousand more a year and I didn't have to worry about getting claims denied for random reasons, I'd take that deal. If it's $5,000-10,000 more a year? Then I'd have qualms.
The US spends more money on healthcare than any other country (per capita and in PPP-adjusted terms), with the lowest life expectancy out of all of its peers [1].
Make of that what you will, but that tells me that after cutting out all the corporate abuse and inefficiency, the average person should be spending about the same for similar standard of care, except without all the bureaucracy and stress.
While it’s true that the U.S. spends way too much on healthcare (more than any other country as you said), the fact that it has a mediocre life expectancy is almost entirely due to things that have little to do with the quality of health care. Much more driving than most other countries resulting in more auto accidents and thus deaths, way more guns resulting in more murders and suicides, etc. Drug overdoses, in particular opiates, are probably the biggest one than can arguably be linked to healthcare.
My understanding, paraphrased: "In order to gradually roll out one change, we had to globally push a different configuration change, which broke everything at once".
But a more important takeaway:
> This type of code error is prevented by languages with strong type systems
That's a bizarre takeaway for them to suggest, when they had exactly the same kind of bug with Rust like three weeks ago. (In both cases they had code implicitly expecting results to be available. When the results weren't available, they terminated processing of the request with an exception-like mechanism. And then they had the upstream services fail closed, despite the failing requests being to optional sidecars rather than on the critical query path.)
In fairness, the previous bug (with the Rust unwrap) should never have happened: someone explicitly called the panicking function, the review didn't catch it and the CI didn't catch it.
It required a significant organizational failure to happen. These happen but they ought to be rarer than your average bug (unless your organization is fundamentally malfunctioning, that is)
It's different to expect somebody to write the correct program every time than to expect somebody not to call the "break_my_system" procedure that was warnings all over it telling people it's there for quick learning-to-use examples or other things you'll never run.
To be precise, the previous problem with Rust was because somebody copped out and used a temporary escape hatch function that absolutely has no place in production code.
It was mostly an amateur mistake. Not Rust's fault. Rust could never gain adoption if it didn't have a few escape hatches.
"Damned if they do, damned if they don't" kind of situation.
There are even lints for the usage of the `unwrap` and `expect` functions.
As the other sibling comment points out, the previous Cloudflare problem was an acute and extensive organizational failure.
You can make an argument that .unwrap() should have no place in production code, but .expect("invariant violated: etc. etc.") very much has its place. When the system is in an unpredicted and not-designed-for state it is supposed to shut down promptly, because this makes it easier to troubleshoot the root cause failure whereas not doing so may have even worse consequences.
It's not remotely the same type of error -- error non-handling is very visible in the Rust code, while the Lua code shows the happy path, with no indication that it could explode at runtime.
Perhaps it's the similar way of not testing the possible error path, which is an organizational problem.
I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way.
The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless.
I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.
My 2 cents. It's when OKRs are executed without a vision, or the vision is that one and well, it sucks.
The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget.
100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe).
This means for a year or more, a lot of AI everywhere, impossible to avoid, will make usability sink.
Now, if this was only done by Microsoft, I would not mind. The issue is that this behavior is getting widespread.
You would think they would care about the fact that their brand is being torched but I guess they figure they're too big to need to care.
Their new philosophy is "the user is too stupid to even think for themselves LOL." It's not just their rhetoric, it's every single choice they've made screaming out their new priorities of which user respect is both last and least
I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.
Why is this, I wonder? Aren't the models trained on about the same blob of huggingface web scrapes anyway? Does one tool do a better job of pre-parsing the web data, or pre-parsing the prompts, or enhancing the prompts? Or a better sequence of self-repair in an agent-like conversation? Or maybe more precision in the weights and a more expensive model?
their products are just just good enough to allow them to put a checkbox in a feature table to allow it to be sold to someone who will then never have to use it
but not even a penny more will be spent than the absolute bare minimum to allow that
this explains Teams, Azure, and everything else they make you can think of
How do you QA adding weird prediction tool to say Outlook. I have to use Outlook at one of my clients and have switched to writing all emails in VS Code and then pasting it to Outlook as “autocomplete” is unbearable… Not sure QA is possible with tools like these…
Part of QA used to be evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing.
... why, it's almost like in eliminating the QA function, we removed the final checks and balances on developers (read: PMs) from implementing whatever ass-backwards feature occurs to them.
Just in time for 'AI all the things!' directives to come down from on high.
exactly!! though evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing is hard when no one knows what it is supposed to be doing :)
I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.
This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too.
Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff.
You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / statistics based approach that worked well without suggesting outright rubbish.
In .NET we've had intellisense for 25 years that would only suggest properties that could exist, and then suddenly I found a while ago that vscode auto-completed properties that don't exist.
It's maddening! The least they could have done is put in a roslyn pass to filter out the impossible.
Loosely related: voice control on Android with Gemini is complete rubbish compared to the old assistant. I used to be able to have texts read out and dictate replies whilst driving. Now it's all nondeterministic which adds cognitive load on me and is unsafe in the same way touch screens in cars are worse than tactile controls.
I've been immensely frustrated by no longer being able to set reminders by voice. I got so used to saying "remind me in an hour to do x" and now that's just entirely not an option.
I'm a very forgetful person and easily distracted. This feature was incredibly valuable to me.
I got Gemini Pro (or whatever it's called) for free for a year on my new Pixel phone, but there's an option to keep Assistant, which I'm using.
Gotta love the enshittification: "new and better" being more CPU cycles being burned for a worse experience.
I just have a shortcut to the Gemini webpage on my home screen if I want to use it, and for some reason I can't just place a shortcut (maybe it's my ancient launcher that's not even in the play store anymore), so I have to make a tasker task that opens the webpage when run.
This is my biggest frustration. Why not check with the compiler to generate code that would actually compile? I've had this with Go and .Net in the Jetbrains IDE.
Had to turn ML auto-completion off. It was getting in the way.
The most WTF moment for me was that recent Visual Studio versions hooked up the “add missing import” quick fix suggestion to AI. The AI would spin for 5s, then delete the entire file and only leave the new import statement.
I’m sure someone on the VS team got a pat on the back for increasing AI usage but it’s infuriating that they broke a feature that worked perfectly for a decade+ without AI. Luckily there was a switch buried in settings to disable the AI integration.
You can still use the older ML-model (and non-LLM-based!) IntelliCode completion suggestions - it’s buried in the VS Installer as an optional feature entirely separate from anything branded CoPilot.
There is no setting to revert back to the very reliable and high quality "AI" autocomplete that reliably did not recommend class methods that do not exist and reliably figured out the pattern I was writing 20 lines of without randomly suggesting 100 lines of new code that only disrupts my view of the code I am trying to work on.
I even clicked the "Don't do multiline suggestions" checkbox because the above was so absurdly anti-productive, but it was ignored
The last time I asked Gemini to assist me with some SQL I got (inside my postgres query form):
This task cannot be accomplished
USING
standard SQL queries against the provided database schema. Replication slots
managed through PostgreSQL system views AND functions,
NOT through user-defined tables. Therefore,
I must return
Gemini weirdly messes things up, even though it seems to have the right information - something I started noticing more often recently. I'd ask it to generate a curl command to call some API, and it would describe (correctly) how to do it, and then generate the code/command, but the command would have obvious things missing like the 'https://' prefix in some case, sometimes the API path, sometimes the auth header/token - even though it mentioned all of those things correctly in the text summary it gave above the code.
I feel like this problem was far less prevalent a few months/weeks ago (before gemini-3?).
Using it for research/learning purposes has been pretty amazing though, while claude code is still best for coding based on my experience.
This is a great post. Next time that you see it, grab a screenshot, put on GitHub pages and post it here on HN. It will generated lots of interesting discussion about rubbish suggestions from poor LLM models.
This seems like what should be a killer feature: Copilot having access to configuration and logs and being able to identify where a failure is coming from. This stuff is tedious manually since I basically run through a checklist of where the failure could occur and there’s no great way to automate that plus sometimes there’s subtle typo type issues. Copilot can generate the checklist reasonably well but can’t execute on it, even from Copilot within Azure. Why not??
I have had great luck with ChatGPT trying to figure out a complex AWS issue with
“I am going to give you the problem I have. I want you to help me work backwards step by step and give me the AWS cli commands to help you troubleshoot. I will give you the output of the command”.
It’s a combination of advice that ChatGPT gives me and my own rubberducking.
that's what happens when everyone is under the guillotine and their lives depend on overselling this shit ASAP instead of playing/experimenting to figure things out
Given that most Next.js and RSC apps run on Vercel, I’m wondering if they’re doing the same thing. There’s no information about this in their latest blog post [0].
At 600DPI that's over a marathon in each dimension.
I do wonder if there are any DOS vectors that need to be considered if such a large image can be defined in relatively small byte space.
I was going to work out how many A4 pages that was to print, but google's magic calculator that worked really well has been replaced by Gemini which produces this trash:
Number of A4 pages=0.0625 square meters per A4 page * 784 square miles =13,200 A4 pages.
No Gemini, you can't equate meters and miles, even if they do both abbreviate to 'm' sometimes.
> I do wonder if there are any DOS vectors that need to be considered if such a large image can be defined in relatively small byte space.
You can already DOS with SVG images. Usually, the browser tab crashes before worse things happen. Most sites therefore do not allow SVG uploads, except GitHub for some reason.
svg is also just kind of annoying to deal with, because the image may or may not even have a size, and if it does, it can be specified in a bunch of different units, so it's a lot harder to get this if you want to store the size of the image or use it anywhere in your code
Using a naive rectangular approximation (40x10^6m x 20x10^6m - infinite resolution at the poles), that's a map of the Earth with a resolution of 37mm per pixel at the equator. Lower resolution than I expected!
Or indeed, ask them who won the space race, because by most measures, that was the Soviets too.
Soviets achieved:
- First artificial Orbit ( Sputnik )
- First animal to orbit ( Laika )
- First Man to orbit ( Yuri Gagarin )
- First Woman to orbit (Valentina Tereshkova )
- First EVA ( Alexei Leonov )
- First moon landing ( Luna 9 )
- First landing on another planet ( Venera 8 )
Many of these years before the USA achieved the equivalent. The first female US astronaut wasn't until the mid 1980's.
The Americans were at one point beat so bad that they invented their own game that only they were playing.
Yes, that spurred their entire economy and the boosted scientific investment paved the way for the decades of dominance since, and that should be rightly celebrated, but the idea that the USA "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
They are still jerking on these 50+ years old achievements, without having new ones. "Space race" didn't stop after Venera landing, and soviets/russians are thing of the past now. Aside of useless ISS trips, they have no relevance in space anymore.
> "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
"Won the space race" because they were first at the very beginning is a nonsense too. Following this logic, China won rocket race because they invented first rockets centuries ago.
I agree with your conclusion that this stuff will get locked down again over time.
I think there's also another major reason people don't like to ship desktop software, and that's the cost of support of dealing with outdated tools, it can be immense.
Ticket as raised, "Why is my <Product> broken?"
After several rounds of clarification, it's established they're using a 6-year old version that's hitting API endpoints that were first deprecated 3 years ago and finally now removed...
It's incredibly expensive to support multiple versions of products. On-prem / self host means you have to support several, but at least with web products it's expected they'll phone-home and nag to be updated and that there'll be someone qualified to do that update.
When you add runnable executable tooling, it magnifies the issue of how old that tooling gets.
Even with a support policy of not supporting versions older than <X>, you'll waste a lot of customer support time dealing with issues only for it to emerge it's out-dated software.
If that took "several rounds of clarification", then the support they're paying for is worthless. Getting version of the application should be among the first bits of information collected, possibly even required for opening the ticket.
You've never asked someone for a version and got back a version number for a completely different product?
Obviously it depends on your audience, and 3 rounds is exaggerating for the worst case, but in previous places I've worked I've seen customer support requests where the first question that needed to be asked wasn't, "What version are you using?", it's "Are you sure this is our product you're using?".
Actually getting version info out of that audience would have been at least an email explaining the exact steps, then possibly a follow up phone call to talk them through it and reassure them.
If your reference is JIRA tickets or you're selling software to software developers, then you're dealing with a heavily filtered stream. Ask your CS team for a look at the unfiltered incoming mail, it might be eye-opening if you've not done it before. You might be surprised just how much of their time is spent covering the absolute basics, often to people who have had the same support multiple times before.
A big problem with CLI tooling is it starts off seeming like it’s an easy problem to solve from a devs perspective. “I’ll just write a quick Go or Node app that consumes my web app’s API”
Fast forward 12-18 months, after several new features ship and several breaking API changes are made and teams that ship CLIs start to realize it’s actually a big undertaking to keep installed CLI software up-to-date with the API. It turns out there’s a lot of auto-updating infrastructure that has to be managed and even if the team gets that right, it can still be tricky managing which versions get deprecated vs not.
I built Terminalwire (https://terminalwire.com) to solve this problem. It replaces JSON APIs with a smaller API that streams stdio (kind of like ssh), and other commands that control browsers, security, and file access to the client.
It’s so weird to me how each company wants to ship their own CLI and auto-update infrastructure around it. It’s analogous to companies wanting to ship their own browser to consume their own website and deal with all the auto update infrastructure around that. It’s madness.
Upgrading once a month is insane at any rate, I could see the point in upgrading maybe once a year. For stable projects, you're very much fine upgrading only when there's a vulnerability or you need something from a newer release. Upgrade when you actually need to and use stable versions that have been out for a while, no need to hamster wheel it.
When I worked in commercial aerospace, before we even shipped live there was an incident with a CERT advisory against the XML package we were using. But the fix was only added to the current major version and we were stuck one behind. It took ~3 of our best problem solvers about a week to get that damned thing upgraded. Which put us behind on our schedule.
This made some of my more forward thinking coworkers nervous because what if this happened after we went live? So we started a repeating story called “upgrade dependencies” and assigned it round robin once a month to someone on each application. Every time someone got it the first time they would ask me, “but upgrade what?” Whatever you want, but preferable something that hasn’t been in a while.
For IP and security reasons we were already on vendored dependencies, so it was pretty straightforward to tell what was old. But that made “upgrade immediately” problematic if fixes weren’t back ported far enough and we didn’t want that live.
I wouldn't care if I ended up paying more in tax than I would in an insurance model. The benefit is being able to 100% focus on my health instead of navigating a system to try to reduce what I'm paying.
When you're diagnosed with an illness, that's a huge peace of mind.
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