There are two main points to getting a diagnosis:

1. Access to mental health services and acomodations, which will often require “proof”. Up to you to decide if you need that.
2. Getting “closure” and self-understanding. Which is what most “high functioning” adults are really looking for with a late diagnosis. That does not require your psychiatrist to write anything down though. In your position I’d explicitly ask for that.

TikTok Gave Me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis

Those are very different things.

The whole American credit system is frightening. You all but have to own a credit card (here they are only used by people travelling internationally), the credit card needs to be paid off manually (!?!? my bank just auto-withdraws the balance monthly), etc.

Here we employ a straightforward system to vet potential lenders : mortgages almost always have a contractual stipulation that you must use that bank to cash in your paychecks. Your bank will ask for proof of a stable income. You have to put down a downpayment. Defaulting on a mortgage furthermore puts you in a government registry; it’s not “a wink and a handshake” as you put it, but a formal tightly-regulated process.

There is nothing that the credit score system does that the Belgian system doesn’t achieve, except the part where it enables banks to prey on people through a privately owned and unregulated system used to push citizens towards short-term credit and needlessly dangerous financing habits. A 30 year-old with 50k€ in a savings account and no credit history sounds to me like someone who “should” get a mortgage a lot more than someone juggling 3 credit cards and a 10-year car loan. But the american credit system incentivizes the opposite. That is anarcho-capitalist predation.

In an economy where skill (supposedly) correlates to income, income is expected to increase across a lifetime.

Therefore 25 year-old me borrowing excess income from 45 year-old me is a good thing, purely egotistically.

Furthermore lack of debt means every big purchase is preceded by hoarding. No matter which way you look at it this is bad for society. If I had 50k€ laying around it would be much more efficient resource-wise to lend it to my neighbor so they can build up their business, than to keep the money under my mattress and tell them to tighten their belt for another five years. They get a business, I get a bit more money in the end, everyone is richer and the economy is stronger.

Economics are not a zero-sum game. This belief that “if someone is making money then someone else is getting robbed” is deeply damaging, especially as it seems to be the main economic driver for Trump’s batshit insane administration.

Debt is good. Predatory practices are not. That is what regulations are supposed to curtail. Where I live “credit scores” are not a thing, banks only loan to you based on proof of income, a declaration of open credit lines, and your civil status (age, partnership status, dependent people). Racism and sexism are of course an issue, although if caught the banks face big fines. But it’s not like American credit scores are colorblind…

There’s a rock that is perfect for an entry-level Illusion magic spell. You cast it onto pretty much any dish and it improves and magnifies the taste.

As a more advanced spell of the Alteration school you can also cast it on the ground to remove snow.

This is terrifying. Americans are running headfirst into the Greatest Depression, except this time they are the Nazis and they have enough nukes to eradicate life on Earth.

And their political discourse oscillates between “serves us right” and “yes daddy”. Republicans are complicit and literally everyone else will refuse to resort to political violence or disobedience even as Trump orders nukes to be fired at whoever he’s mad at that week.

Covoit, mobilité douce, transports en commun, lutte des classes, super.

Plus de voitures, non. C’est du greenwashing. Le supposé besoin de “renouveler le parc” c’est de la politique écologique telle que vue par le lobby automobile. Les voitures électriques ne servent pas à sauver la planète, mais à sauver VAG.

La “petite voiture électrique” c’est vraiment le pompon, c’est vraiment le pire de tous les mondes puisque elle a un range de nain de jardin et vise donc un public de milieu (péri)urbain délaissé par la politique de transit. Au prix de remplacer toutes les voitures d’un village-dortoir on pourrait plutôt construire du rail et inciter à de l’utilisation mixte des terrains (i.e. reconstruire des commerces de proximité et proscrire le concept américain de faire ses courses à 30 minutes en voiture 1 fois par semaine). Mais justement les habitants de ces villages dortoirs ne veulent pas de ces solutions car dans la lutte des classes, ils se battent côté bourgeois.

Oui, une Renault 5 électrique c’est mieux qu’une passat diesel. Mais c’est pas avec des ambitions aussi minables qu’on va arriver au net zéro, puis de toute façon comme acheter des bagnoles électriques c’est un projet bourgeois les gros SUV qui ont la même emprunte carbone qu’une thermique ne seront jamais inquiétés.

Pour Paris (et je soupçonne les autres grandes villes) le problème est aussi celui de la région qui fait pas son taf.

La ZFE est bien desservie par les TEC, et c’est pas la faute d’Hidalgo si le reste de l’IDF est majoritairement complètement réfractaire à l’idée de ne pas prendre la bagnole dans Paris (et vote d’ailleurs très à droite).

On peut râler à juste titre sur le côté injuste des ZFE, mais dans tous les cas le but final c’est aucune autre voiture dans Paris que le strict minimum nécessaire (livreurs, ouvriers, urgences, etc.). Que ça passe par une ZFE ou autre chose ça fera chier. Et je peux comprendre le point de vue des parisiens intra-muros que c’est pas à eux de choper un cancer du poumon pour les franciliens dont le gouvernement préfère investir dans des bretelles d’autoroute et une planification urbaine à l’américaine que des stations de RER et une planification urbaine centrée sur le rail comme par exemple à Tokyo.

Va falloir sourcer le fait que renouveller le parc automobile est désirable d’un pdv écologique.

1. Les voitures euro 2/3 ne consomment pas nécessairement plus qu’une thermique euro 6, elles émettent justent plus de composés toxiques (particules fines, NOx). Une clio diesel de 2003 qui consomme 4,5L contribuera toujours moins au réchauffement climatique qu’une clio essence de 2025 qui consomme 5L, c’est mathématique.
2. Faut prendre le cycle de vie en compte. Construire une voiture émet énormément de CO2, leur remplacement prématuré est donc délétère sauf si ça évite beaucoup de CO2 avec la nouvelle bagnole.

Là où les ZFE ont de l’intérêt écologique c’est qu’elles rendent la voiture moins attractive dans l’absolu. Et c’est là que le bas blesse, cette logique n’est appliquée qu’aux pauvres. Puis y’a l’argument de santé publique qui lui se tient très bien.

I just thought of a reason why trying to explain the downsides of solar power generation always goes so poorly for me.

Where I live, solar=good is a given. No amount of oil lobbying can overcome the simple fact that thanks to historically heavy subsidies, PV is free money and therefore anti-solar sentiment is fringe because everyone loves free money.

(Which is its own can of worms because ungoverned PV has externalities which the owners may not be bearing or only partially, while people who can’t install PV are essentially using up some of their own taxes to give a tax break to the bourgeois down the street with a solar mansion, and sure that’s more solar which is environmentally good but it’s also another indirect tax on the poor which is socially deleterious).

Anyway my point is that in a country where nearly everyone has PV or wishes they did, I don’t see any issue with plainly stating “PV is causing major headaches to grid operators”. Because pragmatically we need to justify solutions like dynamic pricing, solar taxes, and the phaseout net metering which are predictably unpopular policies with PV owners who were promised endless riches.
But I suppose from a North American perspective where “renewable energy is good” is somehow the fringe opinion and PV deployment is pathetic, then it makes sense to push back against such messaging.

You’re more likely to win the euromillion than to successfully shift norms away from the 8:30-18:00 working hours. This shit is baked into every employment contract out there. I work an office job where it doesn’t matter so much, but anyone who works shifts or a time-sensitive job is stuck there basically forever regardless of the time zone.

Kind of the whole point of nuclear dissuasion is that we are not, in fact, going to ever do that. And ignoring the existence of nukes (lol), attacking the US on their hometurf is such a monumentally stupid idea people still wonder what went through the Japanese High Command’s mind 80 years ago.

Stop asking Europe for help, because you’re not getting it. You’ve alienated your allies and broken your democracy beyond repair. Either use that 2nd amendment of yours to the fullest extent of its spirit or STFU with the “pwease stop him we’re scawed :(((” rhetoric. We have way more reasons to be scared because we don’t live next door to white cishet male Americans to shield us from his madness. Stop with the victim blaming. Either you stop this child or he starts a war with your assent.

1. He’s dumber than you give him credit for
2. What is the point of the supposed cover story? To cover from who, about what? He’s literally paying people to vote, again. Next to that, buying a social media to influence it almost sounds democratic.

The reason that conspiracy theory is appealing is the same for all conspiracy theories; it’s more comforting to think the powerful have a clever masterful evil plan than the sad reality that we’re all making it up as we go, even the literal Nazis.

Relevant ContraPoints from 4 days ago

The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.

So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs (“ils mangent”) is silent because the “ent” sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn’t for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.

Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it’s all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can’t spell “nénuphar” properly. Children’s purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.

I mean yeah it’s all very complex for sure. Managing a cluster is very involved and k8s administration is typically a completely separate role from dev/devops. I am comfortable with the idea and I still run my selfhosted setup on docker because it’s easier and I have no personal use for multi-node setups.

However when you get down to it pretty much everything in k8s solves a real problem that in a “traditional” infra would require lots of ad-hoc bullshit. The ingress system of k8s is, at a high level, a standardized recreation of the typical “haproxy+nginx+ad-hoc provisioning” setup you’d find in a “classical” private cloud deployment. TLS in, send to nginx, nginx chooses a relevant healthy back-end and reverse proxies the request. K8s doesn’t really do anything crazy complex, the complexity is just inherent to having a many-to-many mapping of HTTP requests while optionally supporting multi-zone setups with local affinity and lifecycle management/awareness.

But unlike with a traditional deployment there’s not a greybeard guru in the back who deployed it all and knows the ins-and-outs so it’s quite common that the complexity is not understood and underappreciated by the “admins”. That complexity is a blessing when you need to leverage it but a curse when you lack the expertise to understand what is happening holistically.

Kind of like a linux distro… It’s amazing when it works but when libpam throws an error and you don’t even know what that library is or does, well you’re in for a fun evening.

The “problem” with k8s is not that it’s abstract-y (it’s not inherently any more abstract than docker), it’s that it’s very complex and enterprise-y.

The need for such a complex orchestration layer is not necessarily immediately obvious, until you’ve worked on a complex infra setup that wasn’t deployed with kubernetes. Believe me when you’ve seen the depths of hell that are hundreds of separately configured customer setups using thousands of lines of ansible playbooks, all using ad-hoc systems for creating containers/VMs, with even more ad-hoc and hacked together development and staging environments, suddenly k8s starts looking very appetizing. Instead of an abominable spaghetti of bash scripts, playbooks, and random documentation, one common (albeit complex) set of tools understood by every professional which manages your application deployment & configuration, redundancy, software upgrades, firewall configs, etc.

A small self-hosted production kubernetes cluster doesn’t have to be hard to operate or significantly more expensive than bare-metal; you can buy 3U of rack space, plop in 3 semi-large servers (think 128 GB plus a few TB of SSD RAID), install rancher and longhorn, and now you’ve got a prod cluster large enough for nearly every workload such that if you ever need to upgrade that means you have so many customers that hiring a k8s administrator will be a no-brainer.

Or you can buy minutes from AWS because CapEx is the absolute devil and instead you pay several times as much in OpEx to make it someone else’s problem. But if you’re doing that then you’re not comparing against “installing things the old-fashioned way”.

I am well aware but any artist that is signed to a large-ish label is unlikely to publish on bandcamp, much less soundcloud. There aren’t 50 ways to pirate mainstream music, it’s either the old-school way or ripping off youtube. Or so a friend told me.

And any artists that do have a bandcamp I would feel bad about downloading their music without paying for it, these guys usually aren’t T-Swift rich…

Which music library can it rip from? Last I checked it couldn’t do spotify’s due to the heavy DRM they use. All the tools you find online either do an audio out rip-and-reencode (lossy though minimally so) or more likely “look up on YouTube Music and download” which is objectively going to yield worse audio quality (though whether that matters for one’s usecase is very dependent on hardware and wetware specifics). The bigger problem with blind YouTube music rips is you’re occasionally going to end up with intros/outros and random diegetic noises from music videos.

I push for FOSS everywhere I can at work, but then we acquire a company and they casually drop “oh yeah we’ve built $solution on Azure Containers using Azure SDN with Azure API Gateway and Azure LoadBalancer and Azure Firewall and Azure Backups and Azure Georedundancy and we use Azure SAST and Azure pipelines (replace with microsoft marketing lingo as applicable - I don’t care to learn it). Aside from that we’re vendor-agnostic”.

It’s astonishing how “we can use Azure/AWS but let’s not lock ourselves into proprietary solutions for which FOSS alternatives are readily available” is somehow a controversial statement in some software outfits. Ignoring the sovereignty concerns for a minute, from a business perspective you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping really hard that Microsoft or Amazon don’t pull a Broadcom and bankrupt you one day by hiking prices a few hundred percent.

It boggles the mind how existentially reliant most of the digital world is on the whims of like, three unchecked billionaires.

Very hard disagree. Hearts and minds.

Dafuq else do you expect a random French opposition member to do? Sit there quietly and look pretty? That seems to be the leading strategy for the US Dems and also an irredeemable dereliction of duty. If you are forced into the opposition, be performative. Be loud. Be ungovernable, if necessary.

It’s nice to wish for a world where a fascist regime doesn’t have full control of the USA, but unfortunately we don’t live in that world so please don’t denigrate the work of politicians who at least are doing the bare minimum of saying something about it.

Running Linux on closed source hardware. Classic.

I bet you aren’t even using your own open RISC-V based SBC, with fully open-source peripherals. Is your computer monitor even running an open-source firmware or are you just a FOSS poser?