Notices by 🇺🇦 Anna Filina (afilina@phpc.social)

It was quite interesting to have a discussion about healthcare costs with someone having a very US-centric view of how such a system works. Many assumptions, based on how thing currently work in the US, kept interfering with understanding how components influence each other.

Just yesterday, I was trying to explain to someone that Musk will lie in order to appear successful in his cost-cutting adventure. And then I saw this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-musk-trump.html

So we cancelled our US vacation and will instead visit Canada. Any user group in Toronto looking for a speaker during spring break?

AI slop in academic papers.

“bosom peril,” “kidney disappointment,” “fake neural organizations,” and “lactose bigotry.”

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/02/15/how-ai-slop-generators-started-talking-about-vegetative-electron-microscopy/

Convinced someone to cancel Amazon Prime, because no company who so blatantly abuses employees and fires them all when they unionize should remain in business. We're still stronger together. We just need to vote with our money. I stopped shopping on that site ages ago.

I also closed my account entirely to send them a message. You can't abuse worker rights in Canada without consequences.

Big thanks to the community members who also donated. Together until victory!

You can still donate via PayPal here: https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/9b2dUHy6Hf
or via my website here: https://afilina.com/donate/harmata

@ramsey All the people I care about are here, and I'm not going anywhere.

What kind of cookies are deemed "essential" on a website where I'm reading an article? If they were able to show me the article before I consented to cookies, and if all I want is to finish reading it, then those cookies cannot possibly be essential, right?

Ugh, one of my family members, a woman in her 60s, adresses herself to *me* through the camera in a very disrespectful manner. Ot made my blood boil. God, I hate those people so much. They're not even hiding how bad they are. They're proud of it. Now I care even less about what happens to them.

Parents going to USA for the first time 22 years ago.
Mom: same scenery, same roads.
Dad: roads are smoother.

Oh wow, it's so easy to recognize which country a clip is from. Russian cities are immediately recognizable because everything is old, ugly, unmaintained and broken. If you go outside cities, then it just looks like it was left to rot a century ago. Only central parks and some official buildings in larger cities can be mistaken for something modern. Basically, you shouldn't look behind the curtain.

Current status: digitizing old family VHS home videos.

@Takiro Ah, gotcha. I definitely misunderstood your original statement :)

What are those mythical greenfield projects people talk about? My entire job is about upgrading legacy PHP code, and I love it, even though I joke and complain about it all the time.

In a role where 50 things need my attention every day as I'm still being onboarded, the "remind me in 1 hour" feature in Slack is quickly becoming my favorite.

@adrienne @syntaxseed I keep hearing that BlackRock is bad, but I never took the time to properly research why, and some of the stuff that came up was quite generic. What is the biggest issue with them, in your opinion, that sets them aside?

Hezbollah

I really thought it was a joke, but they actually had exploding walkie talkies the next day.

Almost every day, I see microservices that should have definitely not been microservices. Almost every time, it's a big bad of mud with extra complexity.

You can't just split things into random smaller things, slap HTTP in between and call it architecture. In almost every case, cleaning up a monolith would have yielded better outcomes.

You know when you login and then get redirected to a login anyway? This makes people less likely to notice phishing in case of account enumeration.

Find which e-mails are used, send an e-mail asking to login for a BS reason, collect password in fake form, redirect to real login.