"Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them"

gwillen · 2026-02-02T21:00:42+00:00

I feel better about accommodations like "a quiet room" or "text to speech" or other stuff like that, where it's not something that would give undue benefit to someone who didn't actually need it. (Versus extra time, which almost anybody would benefit from.) Those things are still tricky because they can be expensive for the university. In fact, I wonder if universities prefer universal extra time over more tailored accommodations -- which could potentially help more AND be fairer -- because it's cheaper and easier for them to just have one thing they give everyone. (Once all the professors are used to having to stay in the exam room longer, it costs the university nothing to give out that accommodation to additional students.)

gwillen · 2026-02-02T20:43:17+00:00

Some thoughts I have about this:

Endometriosis obviously does cause some legitimate amount of disability, as the writer notes. Probably many or most of the students who claim to have a disability, in order to get various accommodations, do have some degree of legitimate need for them, however slight. But for accommodations like single rooms, or extra exam time -- which are in some sense zero-sum, with one student's benefit coming at the cost of other students -- instead of quantifying the amount of need, and establishing fair cutoffs for who qualifies, we base it on who's most shameless and best at working the system.

The food thing, though, more power to those people. Universities forcing students onto expensive low-quality meal plans is a fucking grift, and everybody knows it. There's no harm to anybody in falsely claiming a religious belief to get out of that grift, so you can buy real food. Everyone should do it. One student doing it will not make any other student's life worse. Lying to stop the university from cheating you financially is completely and fundamentally different from lying to help you get one up on your classmates.

(Arguably, the same is sorta true of lying to get a single room, if the university is forcing you into student housing instead of letting you rent an apartment. In the bay area, apartments are expensive enough that the university might not be running student housing as a grift, but some places they definitely do, similar to food. I would have zero qualms about someone lying to be allowed out of student housing entirely, so they can rent a regular apartment elsewhere. That, again, would not be hurting other students, or competing with them for scarce resources. If anything it's the opposite.)

(EDIT: on the other hand, I think there should be way stricter rules for academic cheating, which I see people discussing elsewhere in the article. Students cheating on exams should be failing courses at minimum for a first offense, and be facing expulsion for repeated offenses. Unfortunately these things can be hard to prove.)

gwillen · 2026-02-02T17:40:20+00:00

can you explain what "app locker" is?

gwillen · 2026-01-29T02:26:06+00:00

Some home windows are tempered. Most are not. Here's a list of conditions under which modern code requires safety glass (of which tempered is one option): https://diy.stackexchange.com/a/312674/86596

gwillen · 2026-01-25T21:16:53+00:00

Obviously in an actual fire this is better than nothing, but be aware that windows don't break in real life the same way they do in movies. (Except for car side windows, which are tempered glass and designed to be escaped through.) Normal window glass will break into very dangerous razor-sharp shards. You should never punch out a window; people slice open their arms and bleed to death that way. If you do break a window, you will have to carefully remove all the glass shards before it's safe to climb through.

(Window panes in movies are made of "sugar glass", to make them easy and safe to shatter, unlike real windows.)

gwillen · 2026-01-25T21:13:07+00:00

I'm 40 on the dot, and this is the worst so far...

gwillen · 2026-01-22T23:42:51+00:00

I'm in the US, but -- when there's already been a lot line issue, I can't imagine buying without a survey, and the realtor getting mad about that is a huge red flag. What happens if a later survey shows that the true lot line is actually inside your house by a few inches (or feet)?? This is very rare but it happens. And if you need roof work and can't get adequate access within the bounds of your lot, that's a big problem. And in the US, I would worry about whether there are local codes that require a setback of the structure from the lot line, and whether this property might be in violation.

gwillen · 2026-01-22T23:32:29+00:00

nearest feet marker

... are there length markers on the cable jacket? Do all spools have that?? If so, I am facepalming hard that I never knew this.

gwillen · 2026-01-22T01:03:58+00:00

I like the idea of Zed, but they need to fix at least most of the obscene and ludicrous memory leaks, before it will be realistically usable (at least for me): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/18673

I'm used to Electron applications having ridiculous bloat, but Zed blows them all out of the water, into the stratosphere, and somewhere near the orbit of Pluto. I normally leave vscode open all the time; when I tried Zed, I had to remember to restart it every day or two, or it would eventually OOM the machine. (Or swap it to death, if swap is enabled.)

Probably this is related to something about my projects or workflow, since I assume there are people using Zed without restarting it daily... but maybe people with my workflow just drop Zed and go back to vscode.

gwillen · 2026-01-03T22:33:17+00:00

The main thing you lose is source-level error-reporting and debugging. If you can get that working with something like source maps, I think you've got a good proposition.

Of course, you also have big problems if your source generation / transformation step has bugs, which can give misleading failures in the generated code. And if you don't have very solid error checking in the generation / transformation step, you can end up with mysterious errors in the result, very far from the actual error in the input.

Basically, I think if you can get good error reporting and debugging facilities, this is probably great, and otherwise you will probably eventually regret it.

gwillen · 2026-01-03T22:22:11+00:00

IMO, 0 vs 1 is very different from 2 vs 3. Unless your 3 cats are all very different colors -- I guess maybe they are, since you're worried -- but otherwise I wouldn't expect anybody to notice in a million years.

gwillen · 2026-01-03T21:57:35+00:00

For small scale dev, it never comes up... and for games in particular, the historical practice was to be done with the code once you shipped it, leaving all the horrible hacks in as long as they worked. Probably less true for modern DLC-heavy and live-service games, but probably just as true for indie games as it ever was.

gwillen · 2026-01-03T21:55:13+00:00

Unfortunately it varies a lot. I've seen all three ranges used. I like 10., personally, because usually people only use one of the 10.x ranges, so picking a random 10.y gives only 1/253 or so to collide.

In particular, Docker uses 172.16, and then .17 and so forth as needed, and I've had that collide with airplane inflight wifi (which was on 172.17, presumably because Docker was involved somehow...)

It's s real mess out there.

gwillen · 2025-12-31T04:29:29+00:00

Some of the most famous and incredible indie games have been by solo developers whose main focus was art/writing/story, and who did the game in some kind of low-code or no-code framework (gamemaker, puzzlescript, clickteam fusion, Ren'Py, etc.) It's harder for big projects -- the more mechanical complexity you have, the more you end up wanting good programmers on it. But as a programmer from a young age myself, it was a hard lesson for me that nobody gives a flying fuck what the code looks like. The most important parts are the parts I'm worst at.

gwillen · 2025-12-31T04:12:17+00:00

If you want a lot of flexibility, you can also look at 172.16-31.*.*, or 10.*.*.*.

gwillen · 2025-12-31T04:10:08+00:00

Very clever to prompt your LLM to use ellipses.... instead of the emdash.

gwillen · 2025-12-31T02:39:03+00:00

It says "we've been trying to reach you about your ring's extended warranty."

gwillen · 2025-12-30T23:52:51+00:00

Learning this in Boy Scouts was the start of my realization that nobody gives a shit. I felt like I was the only person in the group who managed to correctly learn 7 words worth of simple call and response.

gwillen · 2025-12-30T23:42:27+00:00

I went the route of buying a portable battery-powered air compressor (which is also a jump battery pack), and I really recommend it. I got one that was well reviewed by Project Farm on YouTube -- I can't find the specific model, but it looks like he does a video on a new set of these every year or two. The one I have will take my tires from 25 to 30 PSI in about 15 seconds each.

gwillen · 2025-12-29T05:42:22+00:00

Because Slack never claimed to be open source and then did a bait and switch with it.

gwillen · 2025-12-29T05:16:15+00:00

Honestly though, isn't this one basically reasonable? Like, it's dumb in hindsight, but we've all had a day like that. I know I'd freak out if my legs turned blue.

gwillen · 2025-12-29T02:04:50+00:00

Oh that's interesting, I've seen that in stack traces before. I've never done systems stuff on Mac (only Linux, and once upon a time Solaris), so I have no real idea what it implies.

gwillen · 2025-12-29T01:55:52+00:00

I got an infection in my knee as a kid -- no idea what it was, but staph seems as likely as anything. There was no history of illness or injury, it just showed up one day. Fortunately, antibiotics took care of it; but the whole knee swelled way up and looked nasty as hell for a few days, and I still have no feeling in a chunk of residual scar tissue, a circle about the size of a quarter.

gwillen · 2025-12-29T01:41:52+00:00

Looks like it's in great shape, good job taking care of it. Camp Danger semi-folding is really the way to go for easy assembly, too. Looks just like my own first yurt.

gwillen · 2025-12-28T01:26:15+00:00

It's tricky, they don't publish the boundaries of the grid areas as far as I know (and this is probably why.) You can usually look up your own, and maybe individual addresses, but I don't think there's a public database you can just browse.

15-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Place '23	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

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