There’s a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.

In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can’t usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don’t want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).

It’s often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It’s not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).

Yeah, it’s weird. The gaps in our healthcare are major problems that I want to see fixed and are great uses of taxes. It’s bizarre that routine eye and teeth health aren’t considered health, despite how much those tie into overall health.

And the prescriptions almost feel like a loophole. You can spend a few days in the hospital undergoing an expensive surgery. Every med you get while in the hospital is free. But the moment you get out of the hospital, any ongoing meds cost money. Prescriptions are apparently a lot cheaper than the US, but they can still get hefty especially for rarer things. Plus what is affordable varies. I can easily afford the approximately $100/mo of prescriptions that I have (I actually pay either zero or $1 per prescription because my work has great insurance – not sure why it’s sometimes $1 and other times free), but for people living paycheque to paycheque, that’s a lot of money and lower pay jobs often have no insurance at all (since it mostly covers dental, vision, prescriptions, and some minor others, medical insurance isn’t viewed as quite so vital by many Canadians – I think that’s allowed quite a lot of companies to feel comfortable not offering anything).

Out of curiosity, do annual flu vaccines cost money in the US?

In Canada, the way those work is you just go to any pharmacy or most doctors offices. They’ll take info from your health card, give you the shot (usually no wait, maybe 30 min at most if it’s unusually busy), ask you to stick around for 15 minutes and then you can leave. No cost all and super convenient.

Yeah, I think that’s a misconception that many Canadians have about privatization. Some people get the impression that the US must have no wait and that means private healthcare is better. But while they certainly do have less or a wait, it’s not a difference that I think most people would consider worth it if they saw numbers. There’s diminishing returns. The difference between getting a surgery tomorrow or in one month is huge. But getting it in 8 months instead of 10 months isn’t so big.

I’m sure if you have enough money, you could get any kind of healthcare in the US next day, but not for normal people prices.

I think proponents of privatization like to push this misconception because the idea of reduced wait is really the only thing they have going for them and they’re happy to reap the benefits of misconceptions.

I think it’d be so much better. Though the difficulty with getting to that point is that it’s not merely underfunded because of intertia or something. In a few provinces (particularly my own of Ontario), the conservative government seems to actively want to cut costs and privatize.

Finding a GP is the worst part of it. My experience with emergencies and a hearing loss has been fantastic. I felt my wait time for emergencies has been reasonable for the symptoms I was having. I had appendicitis as a kid and the health care was as top notch as can be for what’s quite a miserable experience for a kid.

I have a cochlear implant and my experience in getting audiologist appointments has been again perfectly reasonable. Most appointments are just routine and could wait a few months. Once I had broken equipment and was able to get a same day appointment. The province paid for everything while I was a kid (countless tests and multiple hearing aids), paid for the cochlear implant surgery, and covered most of the costs of the processor (not really sure why that part isn’t 100%).

The best part is not a single one of these has cost any money besides time off work and transportation. I’ve seen what some Americans pay. I probably would have been at least 50k in debt if I were an uninsured American.

The GP thing, though… it took me 6 months when I moved to Ontario just to get through waitlists, after taking time to sign up for every clinic waitlist I could. My then-partner later tried out the government run program for finding a GP and was not exactly amused by the fact that it never found a doctor even 3 years later when she gave up on it. She just used walk in clinics and referrals from those.

Lol yeah. My cat will never let me forget to feed her. But I’ve killed so many plants. If I’m late with feeding my cat, I feel really bad about it. When the plants die because I thought I’d give gardening another go, I kinda just… don’t feel anything.

The fact that there is an organization of the same name does not mean they own the slogan. People using the slogan almost never do so in reference to this organization nor are necessarily even aware that such an organization exists.

BLM is more of a human rights statement. Anything is “political” if the right choses to whine about it. An example is putting pronouns on name tags. It’s a great idea to ensure employees are addressed correctly and frankly shouldn’t be any more political than a name tag containing your name, but the right choses to view them as political because they need a constant culture war.

It has what appears to be Patrick Bateman and Homelander, who are both utterly blatant psychopaths. I’m not sure which Cillian Murphy character is pictured, but the Keeanu Reeves one appears to be John Wick, an assassin who kills about every other person in New York from the movies I’ve seen (they don’t really have a plot beyond “apparently every single person is an assassin”).

So really the only options are satire or literally the dumbest thing ever created.

Totally depends on what the use case is. The biggest problem is that you basically always have to compress and uncompress the file when transferring it. It makes for a good storage format, but a bad format for passing around in ways that need to be constantly read and written.

Plus often we’re talking plain text files being zipped and those plain text formats need to be parsed as well. I’ve written code for systems where we had to do annoying migrations because the serialized format is just so inefficient that it adds up eventually.

How is USB-C not common? It’s the default for every remotely modern android phone I’ve seen, all the modern game consoles I’ve seen (eg, the Switch and PS5 controllers), and many other random electronics use it (I even had a covid tester that was plugged into USB-C). All my laptops these days use it (including two Chromebooks, a high end MacBook, and a Windows laptop) and of those, only the Windows laptop even had USB-A ports (ie, the other laptops only had USB-C).

I won’t pretend it’s perfectly ubiquitous. There’s lots of older electronics still using micro or mini USB (there’s been no reason for manufacturers to update older devices). But it’s definitely common in my book.

I mean, what kind of adventure would it be without a deal with at least one devil? Satan knows how to party.

That definitely doesn’t match what I’ve seen, in Canada (both Sask and Ontario), nor what polls I’ve seen (eg, on topics like LGBT acceptance).

Note that the alt right are often the loudest (at least on a per capita basis). I think this can skew perception on how common they are, since they are over represented in online comments and there’s some kinds of online comments that are completely dominated by the right (to the degree where “don’t read the comments” is a meme in leftist circles).

Location definitely matters, too. Cities are way more accepting than rural or suburban areas. If you’re in a rural or suburban area, you have my sympathy. I grew up in a rural area myself and it was awful. I think many people (myself included) are purposefully fleeing shittier areas. That means progesssives not only migrate from rural to cities, but also from shitty provinces/states to better ones.

But even within the same cities, I’ve perceived younger people to get better over time. I’m pretty hopeful for gen Z, which seems better than my generation (millenials) were at the same age. I just wish we didn’t have to wait so long for progressives to outnumber regressives.

Good. That’s how it should be. But it’s not how it is for a very massive chunk of the population. A lot of people have sexist beliefs when it comes to men vs women having sex, and they project those onto their children.

That’s one of em. Also Wendover, Legal Eagle, and Real Life Lore.

Come on mate, there’s no way you’d be aware of crypto in an online space like this without being well aware of why most people consider it a scam.

I’m just finishing act 1 (no spoilers please) and my rampant stealing of everything remotely valuable seems to be paying off in my ability to buy literally anything that catches my eye. I kinda wonder if I’m overdoing it with how much gold I have vs the price of things so far, but I don’t want to risk encountering a trader with amazing stuff that I can’t afford.

I still have lots of room for even modest gear improvements. eg, not all of my party members even have 2 rings yet, let alone gear that is genuinely useful to their play style. And some of my characters have some gear that are very niche usage that I’m keeping an eye out for something that will give them an edge in combat.

Lol, same. I think I’ve always made the decision to like and/or subscribe in the middle of videos, usually when I’ve seen enough to conclude I want to see more.

I wonder, does YouTube have any stats they expose for what timestamp people like at? I’d actually be really curious to see a graph of that for some videos. It’d obviously be biased towards earliest good points, but it’d probably identify the best sections.

For the kinds of YouTubers I’ve been mostly watching, it’s apparently Nebula, Curiosity Stream, and… Hello Fresh? That one’s the odd one out for how often it shows up in sponsorships.

I’m often a little suspicious of companies I see too frequently in ads like that. It gives me the vibe that they are struggling to have any natural word of mouth spread and I wonder why. Nebula and Curiosity Stream I can understand since those are pretty niche products (subscriptions for people who enjoy educational videos). But Hello Fresh I also get offers in the mail every few weeks. They push hard to try them out and it makes me wonder what the catch is.

TLDR: want to program? Take an intro and an algorithms class first. I suggest you avoid video games or AI. Web or mobile apps are much more beginner/solo friendly.

As a professional software dev, I see this a lot in my field. Software is very approachable and frankly there is a lot you can just learn as you go along. But usually you still need a decent amount of fundamentals as well as domain knowledge to do that, especially if you want the code to be at all maintainable.

My biggest suggestion to anyone with programming aspirations is to take a step back and start with a basic course on the fundamentals (there’s multiple MOOCs for this that are a good way to get that). Ideally then find a similar class or resource on algorithms and data structures, because those are just crucial for many projects, but more importantly they get you “thinking like a programmer”. Having that analytical mindset is probably the best thing you can do to make winging it actually possible.

But even then, expectations need to be grounded. Eg, video games are by far the most common thing people want to create. But video games require a lot more math, can be performance critical, and perhaps most critically require you to have many other skills, too. It’s one thing to be a good enough programmer, but you also need to make a lot of art.

Another is AI. You can totally learn to make AI stuff. There’s so many frameworks, pre trained models, and easy to use cloud offerings for making custom models. The bigger concern with AI isn’t simply writing code for it, but that modern AI is simply limited. The type of AI most people talk about is basically just prediction and categorization. It’s only as good as the training data. Finding and cleaning data is very time consuming and often very boring. Some parts of this aren’t very automatable and thus aren’t truly programming tasks. So it’s easy for an AI project to fail not because of any programming skills, but because of the limitations of modern AI.

My advice? Self contained web or mobile apps. Those are usually the most feasible for a single person and the most practical. Look at the various apps on your phone or that you see recommended online and consider if there’s things you could do better or if you see niches that aren’t covered. Or even just reinvent an app that already exists for fun. Not all projects have to actually be practical!

There’s also technically the option of contributing to open source, but I think beginners will find that too difficult. A project you create yourself lets you know every line of code and keeps the project easy to understand. Big open source projects can be thousands of millions of lines of code where nobody understands it all and learning to read code is a skill that takes practice and experience.