It's a test measuring outlier knowledge. By definition, most of the words will be words that never come up in common usage (and thus words of limited utility outside of reading classic literature). You shouldn't feel bad if you don't know 90% of them.
it's still stupid. proper way to measure vocabulary is to divide words into groups by usage(it's easy to analyse articles or videos from last 10 years to get real and not theoretical data), from most used to least used. you end up, for example, with 10 groups with simple words like "then" and end up with rare words, like "discombobulate". you pick 10 words from each group and ask the user about knowledge of these words. then you can build a solid overview of the user's understanding or knowledge of the vocabulary.
It'll be doing something like that. Ask you a known word. Ask you a less known word. Get more and more unlikely until it can place where your knowledge falls off.
So once it's verified that you know a couple of semi-common words it won't ask you any more common words at all.
Not sure that works though for flogging, say, client IP to affluency data to advertisers, unless they can already reliably pinpoint the client IP to an address (which for all I know, maybe they can).
The roombas with cameras don't need an internet connection to work-- they need it if you want the app control features like scheduling. The imagery based navigation is still local.
When I got one in ~2019, I covered the camera and connected it long enough for it to get firmware updates (which annoyingly you can't trigger and it takes a few days)... then I firewalled it off to get no internet access.
I later figured out that if you let it connect and firewall it off it just sits in a tight loop trying to connect again hundreds of times per second which meaningfully depletes the battery faster.
Changing the SSID name so it couldn't connect to the wifi solved the problem.
I'd like to get a new one-- the old one still runs well (with some maintenance, of course) but the latest robot vacuums are obviously better. Unfortunately at least some are more cloud dependent and I can't tell which are and to what degree.
Calibre has had a comically obtuse and amateur UI for over a decade. I don't think anyone working on it is spending time on a grand beautiful UI redesign (which would be really hard, both in effort and in politics). So I don't think it's fair to complain that anytime someone adds a feature you don't use that is taking time away from UI work.
I wasn't complaining, I don't mind whichever feature an open-source freely-available project I use weekly wants to work on. I did suggest these features might have taken some effort, and opportunity cost dictates it wasn't spent elsewhere.
>You're 'technically correct' but the total amount of land being created is so small as to be meaningless in a global sense.
By that argument we don't even need to create any land at all. There is plenty of empty or nearly empty land all over the world. It may not be as desirable as specific places, but i can assure you the cost to make large swathes of land inhabitable by humans is comparatively low.
> The problem is that everyone wants a different 20% of the functionality.
I'm not disagreeing with your basic take, but I think this part is a little more subtle.
I'd argue that 80% of users (by raw user count) do want roughly the same 20% of functionality, most of the time.
The problem in FOSS is that average user in the FOSS ecosystem is not remotely close to the profile of that 80%. The average FOSS user is part of the 1% of power users. They actively want something different and don't even understand the mindset of the other 80% of users.
When someone comes along to a FOSS project and honestly tries to rebuild it for the 80% of users, they often end up getting a lot of hate from the established FOSS community because they just have totally different needs. It's like they don't even speak the same language.
There's a good report/study about the complexity of Microsoft Word floating around somewhere.
It was something like:
- almost everybody only uses about 20% of the features of Word
- everybody's 20% is different, but
- ~80% of the 20% is common to most users.
- on the other hand, the remaining 20% of the 20% is widely distributed and covers basically all of the product.
So if you made a version of Word with 16% of its feature set you would almost make everybody happy. But really, nobody would be happy. There's no small feature set that makes most people happy.
Yeah but MS Word is also designed with the guidance of an army of accountants and corporate shareholders. Your study plays into that, but there's a much bigger picture when you talk about analyzing how any product came to be that has MS as a prefix.
Kind of like how the author likely knows about the report and wanted to make a blog post about it without saying anything about or citing the report itself. IT seems like it but 80/20 can be found in lots of places, just like 60/40 can.
In the UK, you can pay more (say 30%-40% the cost of a US health insurance plan), get treated like royalty in private care, skip all the lines for specialists, still be covered by the NHS to pay 0 for anything catastrophic, and still never get a bill in the mail from anyone.
It's not an either/or situation. The US has the least efficient healthcare system of any country in the world. It provides less treatment per dollar than anywhere else. You can provide universal basic coverage and still provide luxury insurance plans.
True of the UK, not true of Canada (where providing services covered by the public sector is illegal AFAIU). I think this is exactly the sort of model to move to, price sensitivity for routine care - government insurance and forced saving for the catastrophic. Healthcare should be entirely untied from jobs.
US healthcare is a mess and I'm not defending the cost - but it does have the highest number of top specialists in the world & strong R&D.
> I'd be interested to hear from a charge coding expert about Claude's analysis here and if it was accurate or not. There's also some free mixing of "medicare" v.s. "insurance" which often have very different billing rates. The author says they don't want to pay more than insurance would pay - but insurance pays a lot more than medicare in most cases.
I'm a cofounder of Turquoise Health and this is all we do, all day. Our purpose is to make it really easy to know the entire, all-in, upfront cost of a complex healthcare encounter under any insurance plan. You can see upfront bills for many procedures paid by various healthcare plans on our website.
The information posted in the thread is generally correct. Hospitals have fictional list prices and they on average only expect to collect ~30% of that list price from commercial insurance plans. For Medicare patients, they collect around 15%. The amount the user finally settled for was ~15% of the billed amount, so it all checks out.
The reason for fictional list prices (like everything in US healthcare) is historical, but that doesn't make it any more logical. Many hospital insurance contracts are written as "insurer will pay X% of hospital's billed charges for Y treatment" where X% is a number like 30. No one is 'supposed' to pay anywhere near the list price. Yes, this is a terrible way to do things. Yes, there are shenanigans with logging expected price reductions are 'charity' for tax purposes. But there isn't a single bad guy here. The whole system that is a mess on all sides.
Part of the problem is that the US healthcare billing system is incredibly complex. Billing is as granular as possible. It's like paying for a burger at a restaurant by paying for separate line items like the sesame seeds on the bun, the flour in the bun, the employee time to set the bun on the burger, the level of experience of the bun-setter (was it a Dr. Bun Setter or an RN bun setter?), etc. But like the user said, some of these granular charges get rolled up into a fixed rate for the main service.
However, the roll-up rules are different for every insurance contract. So saying the hospital 'billed them twice' is only maybe true. The answer would be different based on the patient's specific insurance plan and how that insurance company negotiated it. Hospitals often have little idea how much they will get paid to do X service before it happens. They just bill the insurance company and see what comes back. When a patient comes in without insurance, they don't know how to estimate the bill since there is no insurance agreement to follow. So they start from the imaginary list prices and send the patient an astronomically high bill, expecting it to be negotiated down. In some areas, there are now laws like 'you can't charge an uninsured patient more than your highest negotiated insurance rate' but these are not universal.
If you find yourself in this situation, there are good charities like 'Dollar For' that can help patients negotiate this bill down for you. We are trying to address this complexity with software and have made a lot of progress, but there is much more to do. The government has legislation (the No Surprises Act) that requires hospitals to provide upfront estimates and enter mediation if the bill varies more than $400 from that amount. But some parts of the law don't have an enforcement date set yet, which we hope changes soon.
I was going to say please use and donate to 'Dollar For' [1] which provides this service, which is likely a better choice for this type of problem than trying DIY.
Cars (especially in the US) are an emotional and personal purchase. They are an extension and representation of your personality. It's fashion.
The entire history of the US car business has shown that the path to success is to produce different variants for different customer bases and refresh those variants to drive continual sales.
Some manufacturers take this to Nike-level extremes with rare variants, 1-of-1 models, etc (looking at you, Porsche). Other manufactures take it to the other extreme with base one platform being repurposed for 5+ different customer segments with wildly different body designs - for example the Toyota Tundra, Tacoma, Lexus LX, 4Runner, and Land Cruiser are all the same car with a different shell.
So the conventional wisdom in the industry is that Tesla is committing suicide by producing generic, stale cars without model variants. Tesla seems to have bet that the conventional wisdom is wrong and producing cheap, repeatable cars with less variation is a better business strategy. Time will tell.
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