iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Imagine living in a place where if mom gets cancer, you don't have to fear that that means the family might become homeless.

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Every box of pills has a price embossed on the side. That's the maximum price the government allows that medicine to sell for. No Jan 1 surprises ha ha give us 5x more if you want to live ha ha ha. There's a cap, literally carved into the box.

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Mexico graduates twice the number of doctors per capita per year than US. Unsurprisingly, there it's simple to get medical attention, specialist attention and often same day, and pay less than $100 USD for it. Not a copay. Total cost, cash on the barrel head.

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As a self employed in California with a child and wife with a working uterus, our health insurance cost $2,300 a month. In Mexico our insurance costs $550/month. And it's real insurance, just for catastrophic stuff. Regular healthcare is cash visits and generics.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Five years ago we made a choice to exit a system that was actively trying to bankrupt and then kill us when we became no longer profitable. Visiting fam in US for the holidays, and comparing notes, only reinforced our decision to uproot and start over.

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local humor: I needed to show proof of residency in Mexico City. I didn't have a gas bill handy so instead I showed them my bus pass with worn edges, and a text from Telcel that I was out of data.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 28/06/2024

The hard part isn't being your own boss. It's being your own employee.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 18/06/2024

The xz thing really spooked you, huh? A good pinch point is at the installer, eg pip, brew, whatever. Grade repos by "supply chain safety" and make it an explicit act to use an unsafe one, just like "unstable". Not much of a speed bump but would make postmortem and proactive scanning easier.

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 18/06/2024

Random thought about the "blood tax", ie the tradition in Europe where the aristocracy paid low or no taxes but were expected to lead regiments in battle. It was a thing well into the 20th century. Fair or not, that means the country's leadership all had undiagnosed PTSD. Which explains a lot.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 30/05/2024

Red leather yellow leather red leather yellow leather...

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 04/12/2023

Finally I've graduated to "wait you're the guy who" and while it's kinda fun it's not what I expected.

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 02/12/2023

You know what would be nice? If great power also came with an instruction manual.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

Turn public goods into private industries. Turn retirement savings into a casino. Turn mutual aid into the nightmare of health insurance. Turn the trades into corporate training. Crush the unions. And make sure they blame themselves or the poor person next door for their misfortune.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

The answer to "why don't Americans riot?" isn't that they are weak, apathetic, etc. It's because the powers that be carefully studied the powers that were. That's why police are paid very well and protected. That's why the media were merged so all "local" stations spout the same message.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 20/11/2023

"Please write the most unbelievable plottwisty script about the implosion of a large AI startup, in the style of Kara Swisher".

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 29/10/2023

Prediction: the office of US Vice President will devolve into a reserved woman's slot for both parties. A man running against an incumbent woman is bad optics, and it's a bone thrown to women voters without actually giving them power. Veep will be essentially an elected First Lady.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 19/10/2023

I always imagine these being played duo like that pottery scene in Ghost.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 24/09/2023

Different clippers (don't want to spread anything) same kind (because my nails are thick hobbit nails). Just get a big one with leverage if you need it. Mr Tweezer is a decent brand.

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I would love to know how many people have already blocked someone creeping on my DMs, or how often they engage in flamewars.

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Probably the best thing you can do is give people from all backgrounds the tools to calibrate their trust instincts. Not the cheap social pressure shit like "Sally and 10 more friends like this post" but real info (that you have!) about overall reputation and specific p2p interaction.

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The remarkable / terrible thing about heyday Facebook was how it was a data machine at 10^9 scale but with a 10^2 interface. It really did feel like it was only you and Dunbar's number of your closest friends. That's why the outrage is so strong whenever the matrix underneath shows through.

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People who have primarily experience in high-trust environments still understand the difference between high *risk* and low risk. People from low-trust backgrounds understand the value of high-trust links... possibly more than people who take them for granted.

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 31/07/2023

Hmm. The divide between people who count the change and those who don't is huge, but not impossible.

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In the case of X logo and x button... I call that making a tapo.

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 27/06/2023

Feeling that ephemeral bubbly state where I know a book is asking to be written. Next up the feverish plotting phase, the kinda fun tweaking and research, the inevitable wtf reorg/rewrite, the extremely tedious polish, the timorous launch, then the five years' waiting to know if people give a shit.

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 06/06/2023

"...I would think by the year 2020 it would be fairly universal practice for the expert in the field of application to do the actual program preparation rather than have experts in computers (and ignorant of the field of application) do the progam preparation." -Richard Hamming, 1990-ish

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 17/05/2023

I've been living my life all wrong: if you pierce the fat end of an egg with a pin, just half a cm in, and hardboil it, the shell comes off like a prom dress. Piercing the caul (layer between the shell and white bit) allows hot water in to separate it from the white bit. Try it!

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 12/05/2023

@berduck.deepfates.com why am I being followed by a cutel33t-speaking rubber duck? I feel your presence over my shoulder and smell a Proustian whiff of vinyl and soap.

My single biggest gripe in data science is that bad numbers look just as pretty as good ones. Make and test and trash 90% of all the thinkable possibilities, then keep the 10% that actually tell you things you don't already know. Don't "make reports", make the data reveal. Fuck around and find out.

"But you can't just change what's in there!" Why not? Everything is under source control and if wake up smarter tomorrow then you can change it better then.

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"But the sources are dirty!" Welcome to the real world. See if you can't make a filter that brings order to the mess that people stuff in there. Exercise some editorial control. There's no dishonor in a series of regexps.

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"Oh, but the table is so big!" Ok. Then slice off a week or sample it 100:1. Fuck around and find out.

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If there's one thing I see again and again in "data science", it's a lack of imagination or unwillingness to fuck around & find out. Don't be afraid of treating your input data as a goopy mass of numbers that can be recursively subdivided according to your will. Don't let the data push you around.

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Odds are greater than 30% it's in Herndon Virginia. 20% near Bend Oregon, 15% in South Carolina or Texas. "The cloud" is concentrated in about 10 places, when internet cables meet.

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Cultural alienation can sneak up on you. I tried to solve a low stakes choice with my son by flipping a coin. But the coins here aren't exactly heads vs tails, more like "weird bird" vs "weird bird fighting weird snake".

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The future is here, just unevenly federated.

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You'd never imagine it happening but now you're never the same.

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The sight of @scalzi.bsky.social going giddy about a new social platform is like watching Nimoy doing the Carleton dance.

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I love how it's marked both 7+ and 10+ in the metadata. In practice Ipsum has been used in all grades from elementary through university.

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Authors, get in here. One of the richest zip codes in the states.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 30/04/2023

"Lauren Ipsum", a children's novel. It has the curious distinction of appearing in both academic reviews of theoretical computer science and School Library Journal. The sequel "Lauren & the Jargonauts" comes out next year.

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There's nothing like that almost-asphalt-not-quite-alligator texture of old camera plastic.

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Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 29/04/2023

It's not enough to give gpt a memory. You also have to give it a memory "vanishing point".

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 29/04/2023

Your control theory is showing. :D But I like the idea of exponential decay on evidentiary weightings. Exp decay works in a surprising number of contexts iff there is proper feedback.

Carlos Bueno @bueno.bsky.social · 23/04/2023

Writing never gets easier. If you are lucky, it gets faster.