Nirbheek Chauhan

Donate Less We have a new donation page. But before you go there, I would like to impress upon you this idea: We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum. That's c...

it's been a very difficult year or two for @gnomefoundation.bsky.social and, to continue to exist, the foundation really needs you.

however, we first want to ask you to *donate less*:

blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/...

#gnome

This is a really important and underrated idea about fundraising. The single-largest source of inefficiency in non-profits is having to chase large funding sources.

Crowdfunding isn't just great for users, it is also great for the recipients, because they can plan better.

So at the start of Half-Life: Blue Shift there's this really cool train crash.

I had a discussion about this in a gamedev server where we were trying to determine how this was done. There's nothing in the game files to suggest it was an animated model, so I decompiled the map to check it out and...

I didn't see Rorschach's death as a moral triumph. I saw it as a complete loss. The limited literary literacy of a teenager.

Beautifully crafted, of course.

Today I obviously feel horror at what Ozy did, and I see that this is how many people slowly boil themselves into supporting Fascism just because it's winning.

I remember the first time I read this panel at age 19. I had enormous cognitive dissonance because I, naively, empathized with Rorschach but I had an instinct to align myself with the "winner" in a comic.

My instinct won out and I began to subscribe to Ozy's position.

📢 We're thrilled to announce GStreamer 1.26

... a new major stable feature release!

Check out

gstreamer.freedesktop.org/releases/1.26/

for details of all the exciting new features and improvements!

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

Reading the ffmpeg mailing list is indistinguishable from reading Phoronix comments when the topic is GStreamer.

This can perpetuate itself & you end up with an entire pool of "senior devs" who have incredibly large gaps in their knowledge.

This is a tremendous waste of human resources, and explains a large chunk of the issues facing the industry. This happens everywhere there's lots of VC funding for 5-6yrs

(4) is something interesting, because if enough companies do this kind of growth, it poisons the talent pool.

Junior developers who spend 1-2 years learning nothing will often go to a new company and learn how to hide their lack of experience, and keep their low output away from notice.

3. Giving junior developers mentorship is critical, but you will not do that if you grow too quickly
4. Keeping developers pipelined with work is difficult even under ordinary circumstances. If you grow so quickly that your senior devs are overloaded, juniors can spend 1-2 years not doing any work

An underrated discussion topic is the mistakes companies make when over-hiring because they raised a lot of (too much?) money.

1. Hiring is difficult, growing is even harder
2. Building a good team structure is hard, it's near-impossible if you grow too quickly

i am looking for work. preferably between india and canada/usa, preferably in open source, preferably leading teams. but i'm good at a few other things, too. :)

www.deobald.ca/essays/2025-...

retweets appreciated!

(yeah. let's still just call them tweets.)

I have news…that place where you got food poisoning is probably not where you got the food poisoning.

Time between exposure and symptoms:

Campylobacter: 2-6 days
E. coli: 2-5 days
Salmonella: 6 hrs-6 days
Norovirus: 12-48 hrs
Shigella: 1-3 days
Staph aureus: fast
Listeria: 9-48 hrs

Introducing a thought I have: Plastic Water Bottles.

A “Plastic Water Bottle” is what I call any problem that we see as super evil despite the fact that there is an extremely similar bigger problem (plastic soda bottles) that we never think about only because we’re simply more used to it.

I am partial towards the idea that hospitals should sell their own health insurance. That aligns the incentives correctly, at least. I think that might happen in India. The regulatory framework is sufficiently unconstrained for such experiments to be possible.

As a consequence, insurance companies push back, turn into hyper-capitalist evil organisations that will suck from the only entity they can: the patient.

I think insurance as a concept breaks down in health insurance, as does the idea of a free market. You cannot shop around when you're sick.

Insurance incentivizes hospitals to engage in pseudo-fraud: inflating the costs of items and needless procedures. This creates a adversarial relationship between hospitals and insurance, which is awful.

I am seeing this start to happen now in India, and I think it happened in the US ~30yrs ago.

I've also heard that residency positions for new doctors are (purposely?) kept low, which leads to a constraint in supply, which keeps salaries high.

The very concept of insurance breaks down in the face of people's demand/need to be covered for everything, and that raises costs for *everyone*.

This has the following side-effects:

a) Top-heavy structure of medical institutions, made necessary by (1) & (2), increases cost per patient
b) No mechanism to cut costs through tech development, due to (3)
c) Too risky to invest in new facilities such as hospitals due to (1)

etc. Very difficult.

Speaking about the US specifically, the biggest reason is that the cost of every single thing has increased massively. Due to:

1. Onerous regulations
2. Over-litigiousness
3. Regulatory capture
4. Cost disease across all labor markets

People in almost every country complain about their healthcare system, for different reasons:

1. The wait time is far too long
2. I can't get access to specialists
3. If I don't like my doctor, I have no recourse
4. Getting claims reimbursed is too difficult
5. Getting insured is too difficult

F1: Fired steward warns FIA is 'running out of people to do those jobs' A senior steward who has been fired by Formula 1's governing body says the FIA is

F1: Fired steward warns FIA is 'running out of people to do those jobs' . Tim Mayer says he was fired because FIA president “took offence” at something in a right of review document - BBC Sport www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formul...