mspencer712
The first sentence “It was the year of the Linux desktop 1978” stopped me.
My wife is on Wegovy. That injector pictured above is a special kind of perverse design. There’s a plastic donut-shaped trigger the needle has to pass through. Once the trigger starts the flow of medicine, it cannot be stopped. No way to, for example, pay for a higher dosage and use a little at a time, if you were prescribed the 0.25 mg starter dose but only 1 and 1.7 are in stock anywhere. (Without, say, milking the pen like a poisonous snake and using a needle and syringe.)
I’m not sure I follow. Why would a needle be reused? That’s never ok to do.
The pictured injector is single use. The weird workaround would never be ok’d by any doctor, and even if it was, a clean needle would be used to withdraw and administer medicine from the hypothetical medicine ampule for each dose. I’m not qualified to measure loose liquid medicine, and she’s on the second highest dose anyway.
A better design would be more like the pen used by the original senaglutide medication this is related to, ozempic. Screw on a disposable pen needle, dial your dosage on the twisty knob on the other end, inject, dispose of needle. But instead they deliberately designed this thing, with a latching device that starts squirting medicine with no way to stop it. If the user is not familiar with needles and jerks away, the needle comes back out but medicine is still squirting.
It’s a good medicine, except supply issues are making it difficult. My wife’s refill at the hospital pharmacy has been pending since end of February. It’s a weekly injection but her last dose was 15 days ago as of this morning.
What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.
. . .
Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.
(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)
Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.
Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.
Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.
Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?
I think this was asked in good faith, but is unfortunately unlikely to produce useful discussion. The down-voters are right but the original poster shouldn’t feel bad for asking.
Short answer: it’s ok to say “maybe, we have no way to know, moving on” when something is unknowable like this.
Longer answer / topic hijack: as voters there are many contradictions in our system, and important and necessary information is often hidden from us. Doing the best we can might take various forms:
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choose government ran by the least-evil people possible and trust the imperfect system formed by the structured interactions of those people
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choose government that follows policies that align the best with your values or your ethical understanding of the world
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choose government that is best able to reduce harms and injustices, in a practical and realistic way that anticipates the acts of other factions
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choose government led by people you hate the least — no, this one is toxic, lazy, easy to manipulate with lies. Manipulators know the longer they keep people hot with emotion the less time people spend learning.
Please do not reply to this with hatred or calls for strong emotion. Leaders at any level can be deliberately evil, sure, but it’s never helpful to dehumanize entire clusters or demographics.
I think I was in favor of this four months ago. https://programming.dev/comment/8513741
Oh. That’s why they do that. Ok good to know.
As a Flight Simulator / study-level airliner add-on enjoyer I want to point out / supplement the above, that the main point of a real-world airline transport pilot is handling exceptions and problems. Sure I can American-Truck-Simulator-Airbus-Edition my way through a flight from cold and dark at one gate to cold and dark at another. I do not know how to handle failures.
Makes for a fun shower thought. And a fun exercise in task saturation, going into the menu and triggering a bunch of random failures. You usually need a bunch for a fun challenge because, in a study level thingy, the list of potential faults is huge and most of them are just a reduction in redundancy, a “crew awareness” item, or loss of a convenience feature. But I do not belong on a flight deck under any realistic circumstance.
Gives you huge appreciation for how massively redundant airliners are, how much “we already thought this through and here’s what gives you the best chances at a safe outcome” research went into every checklist and procedure, and how much study and practice goes into training and maintaining every fight crew member, cabin crew included.