At previous companies, I was more than happy to use corporate money to pay for software I believed in. Tools like Hashicorp Vault were certainly worth paying for the Enterprise tier. What stopped me was climbing over huge bureaucratic hurdles cause someone at the company already spent millions on CyberArk which no one wanted to use and convincing anyone to spend a few thousand on anything else was out of the question. It’s not that devs don’t want to pay for it.
Apple Card can also sometimes offer 3% like at Walgreens and you can also get 6 months of free Uber One.
Another benefit of the Fidelity card is they reimburse your Global Entry or TSA pre check.
It’s not a bad idea to have both cards because the Apple Card is 1% with the physical card so having the Fidelity card with you for places that don’t accept Apple Pay is a good idea.
Anyone who's ever had to pick up a prescription at a Walgreens will tell you that 3% doesn't begin to make up for the incredible shit you have to endure there. It's like being placed on hold indefinitely, only you have to keep standing in one spot while people sneeze on you, all while guys with backpacks come in and steal everything that isn't locked up. And if there's something you want like antacids or razor blades, it probably is locked up too, so spend another 15 minutes finding an extremely miserable employee to unlock those cabinets, then wait another hour in line to check out.
I remember visiting the Soviet Union as a kid and it's weird to watch Americans adopt the same passive, drained and resigned faces standing in lines at a Walgreens as Soviet citizens did waiting to cash bread tickets.
It’s very location-dependent. I live in a very dense area with many Walgreens and competitors and they’re all about the same. When you drive out into the far suburbs or country, they’re not as bad.
Good independent pharmacies are the only way to go, IMO.
In my area of Portland, all other Walgreens shut down and all the CVS and Rite Aids shut down in the past few years - post Covid - because the shoplifting and almost weekly armed robberies were so rampant. It's frankly amazing that there's still one Walgreens open, but going there is kind of like walking into an insane asylum. Not that it's dangerous, just incredibly dystopian. The workers are traumatized and miserable. Every single item worth more than $5 is locked up, and even so, there are thieves with backpacks strapped to their chests roaming the aisles, literally every time I go in there, grabbing anything, while the employees just ignore them. Recently I went in to buy Mucinex. I found it in a locked plexiglass cabinet, in front of which was a junkie who was sitting on the floor with no shoes, his nose pressed to the glass, studying the boxes of Mucinex. I had to spend 10 minutes finding a worker to open the cabinet while gently moving the junkie out of the way.
This quarter of the city (inner Southeast) is down to basically 5 pharmacies serving a very densely populated 10 square miles, four of which are in supermarkets (Safeway or Fred Meyer... both terrible). Only one Walgreens is left.
There is a locally owned, independent pharmacy that's owner-operated, about 3 miles away from me, and I've started driving to it. It's the only one in Southeast. The Walgreens is only 5 blocks away from my house, easy to walk to, but I've decided it's worth getting in my car and sitting in traffic to get to the independent one.
My naive opinion is a commitment to not break the ABI is a good thing not just for everyone else but for C++ as well. Languages like C#, Swift and Python (maybe even Rust?) have tools to integrate with C++ fairly deeply and cleanly. If C++ commits to being stable enough then there won’t be a reason to rewrite some amount of C++ into something else. It’s not a surprise that big tech is trying to move away from C++ and that’s not necessarily bad and remaining stable means the transition isn’t rushed. In the meantime people who enjoy and excel at writing C++ still can. Just seems like an overall positive thing to commit to.
This isn't about language ABI, which is the realm of the various implementations which have their own stability guarantees.
ABI stability in the context of the standards committee is about library ABI, specifically the standard library. When the committee updated the wording about C++'s std::string in C++11, it meant implementers needed to change the layout of a std::string, making this "new" std::string incompatible with the "old" std::string. Any libraries passing std::string across API boundaries needed to be recompiled with the "new" std::string.
This has no effect on FFIs for interop with other languages, which are not passing STL types across language boundaries to begin with (a std::string has no meaning in Python).
ABI stability for the standard library is motivated by large, old, coroporate codebases which had poor API practices, passed STL types across ABI boundaries, and subsequently lost access to the source code of those libraries and applications or otherwise cannot recompile them for some reason. Many people question the wisdom of catering to such users.
> ABI stability for the standard library is motivated by large, old, coroporate codebases which had poor API practices, passed STL types across ABI boundaries, and subsequently lost access to the source code of those libraries and applications or otherwise cannot recompile them for some reason. Many people question the wisdom of catering to such users.
It's also motivated by Linux distributions and other complex systems where rebuilding and installing the world in one go is not possible/feasible.
In order for my new and improved Rectangle to talk to another really cool Rectangle, I have to resize one of my edges to fit nicely on the Square and the 2nd Rectangle must do the same. The Square is a stable interface that rarely changes.
I hate that the Square is a stable structure that doesn't change sizes dramatically when it's proven that a new size is better.
Where I work we use Confluent Cloud who has their own proprietary UI. I've always found it to be lacking, hard to use and not very good.
We substituted it with AKHQ https://akhq.io/ , which is miles ahead of anything I've seen. The main issue with it are the interesting UX decisions that requires learning. For example, a lot of links require a double click, which isn't a common behavior in Web Apps. Besides that, it's absolutely wonderful and goes beyond just Kafka. We use Kafka Connect very heavily and AKHQ seems to implement the full CRUD for Connect.
To be fair, Seattle's electric grid has been on all sustainable energy for a while now. Seattle is one of the greenest city in the U.S. On top of that, any person living in King County is able to pay a little bit extra to opt into 100% sustainable energy.
The reaction from Seattle isn't terribly illogical.
EDIT: Should mention the city is NOT carbon neutral by any means. We still have buses running on gas.
True, we are fortunate we can avoid hard choices on power source up here (lots of hydro). But what I meant to highlight was that our focus tends to be on solving our local short-term climate problems, just like everybody else.
My understanding, from whatever nature TV show when I was younger, is that the beetles don't actually die. They literally freeze in ice. I also remember reading that certain countries are releasing tens of thousands of birds (possibly hummingbirds?) to deal with them as well. I don't have links so possibly grain of salt here.
If you look at California as an example, you can see hundreds of acres of trees that are dying year over year. I remember going camping in lush green forests that are all gone now. I'm in the PNW now and from what I've seen and heard from others the summers are getting longer and hotter so it's only a matter of time before what's happening to California comes here.
EDIT: From what I remember as well, every tree comes with defenses to keep beetles away. This is why trees are sappy. In order to produce sap the trees need water, and they produce their own sugars through photosynthesis (sap being a mix of water and sugar). Trees in certain areas are adapted to the length of their winters. A longer winter means more time without dealing with beetles but might also mean less time spent in dry soil.
I just went on a long trip and going on a couple more in a few months. The Tesla navigation will autopilot you to the charging stations making it a something you don’t even need to think about. Most of the chargers are near food or shopping but we usually just take the time to stretch or get some fresh air. By the time your charge is low you definitely feel like you need a stretch anyways. We also went camping at an RV site and plugged the car in. We were able to run the heater while we slept in sleeping bags in the back. If we weren’t at an RV site we would have charged to 95% at a super charger and driven in and tent camped for 5 days and it would have been more than enough to get us back.
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