Just a basic programmer living in California

  • 5 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 23rd, 2024

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  • Hospitals are required to provide emergency treatment - what we call ED or ER visits - regardless of ability to pay. Patients are expected to pay for that treatment. It’s just that the hospital isn’t supposed to deny treatment based on whether they think patients will or won’t pay the bill. This is getting-stabilized treatment.

    This is an important point in arguing for universal healthcare: if people can’t afford treatment, they’re more likely to go to the ED where they won’t be turned away. ED visits tend to cost more than non-emergency, so that drives costs up.



  • That’s a helpful one! I also add a function that creates a tmp directory, and cds to it which I frequently use to open a scratch space. I use it a lot for unpacking tar files, but for other stuff too.

    (These are nushell functions)

    # Create a directory, and immediately cd into it.
    # The --env flag propagates the PWD environment variable to the caller, which is
    # necessary to make the directory change stick.
    def --env dir [dirname: string] {
      mkdir $dirname
      cd $dirname
    }
    
    # Create a temporary directory, and cd into it.
    def --env tmp [
      dirname?: string # the name of the directory - if omitted the directory is named randomly
    ] {
      if ($dirname != null) {
        dir $"/tmp/($dirname)"
      } else {
        cd (mktemp -d)
      }
    }
    




  • My wife has worked with lots of people who are not native English speakers who are sometimes taken aback by the idioms. One colleague flat out refused to accept that “FOMO” is a word.

    I suggested that she is in a position to make some up, like “Let’s not put fish in the milk bucket.” But she didn’t go for it. I guess she’s not an agent of chaos after all :/










  • Are you saying that you don’t want to write your software according to the XDG spec, or that you don’t want to set the XDG env vars on your system? If it’s the second that’s fine - apps using XDG work just fine if you ignore it. If it’s the first I’d suggest reconsidering because XDG can make things much easier for users of your software who have system setups or preferences that are different from yours; and using XDG doesn’t cause problems for users who ignore it.

    OP’s recommendation is aimed mostly at software authors.


  • So yes, “XDG” stands for “Cross-Desktop Group” - but I don’t agree that using the spec assumes a windowing system. The base directory spec involves checking for certain environment variables for guidance on where to put files, and falling back to certain defaults if those variables are not set. It works fine on headless systems, and on systems that are not XDG-aware (I suppose that means systems that don’t set the relevant env vars).

    OTOH as another commenter pointed out the base directory spec can make software work when it otherwise wouldn’t on a system that doesn’t have a typical home directory layout or permissions.