nikhil.io

My personal record is nine bills for the same, minor urgentcare visit. Things I’ve learned: It’s not your provider’s job to deal with insurance, it’s yours. Don’t pay outright1. You’ll keep getting clobbered until every single service provider has billed you. Call them whenever you get billed. B…

AUSTIN, TX—Stressing that the billionaire’s completely erratic behavior had strained the already fraught relationships, sources confirmed Thursday that a rift was widening between Elon Musk and anyone who had ever met him. “Elon’s megalomania and tendency to lash out indiscriminately seem to have…

The cringe I get from the explanation from someone who truly knows the game is akin to the one I get from “hacking the mainframe” or “tracking the killer’s IP address” or the casual “bypassing the firewall”. All hat, no cattle indeed. I can venture a guess at the answer but: Why, why is any of thi…

This is the Patek Philippe 5131. It’s a world-timer with an intricate and lovely, hand-painted cloisonné enamel dial, and is a marvel of engineering and ingenuity from one of the Holy Trinity of watchmaking that will set you back at least $150,000 if you’re lucky1. It also features one of the shit…

A theater-owner on Telugu moviegoers at RRR: This fucking shit destroyed my theater opening night. The Telugu crowd specifically wrecked out shit. No issues with the Hindi dub or the Tamil dub. Confetti cannons, spraying soda everywhere, littering in the parking lot, sneaking in more people than…

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially d…

Heslin’s vow on Wednesday comes one day after Jones offered an FBI agent and 18 members of 10 families who lost loved ones in the school shooting $120,000 each to settle defamation lawsuits he lost against them in Texas and Connecticut late last year. […] Jones, the host of the “Infowars” interne…

COVID Theater has become a sad thing to behold these days. Do we still wear masks? If transmission is mostly airborne, why do we get to take them off at restaurants to eat our food when droplets from a sneeze can travel in excess of 25 feet? What’s all this talk about a second booster? Is Omicron s…

The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer,” Milton said. “That’s the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let’s [sic] us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same languag…

My university just announced that it’s dumping Blackboard, and there was much rejoicing. Why is Blackboard universally reviled? There’s a standard story of why “enterprise software” sucks. If you’ll bear with me, I think this is best appreciated by talking about… baby clothes! There are two types…

By Barry Deutsch, September 2009. Things are much better now.…

Ayn Rand is to philosophy what Twilight is to horror fiction - being that the only people who like it have absolutely no experience of what the subject is really about and as a result have nothing to compare it to. Her influence only extends to the general public and she is pretty much ignored by a…

I was rather dismayed to find out that there were no more episodes of “Grill Talk” with the leader of one of the worst companies on the planet1. I wonder if the PR team that thought it was a good idea to show the ‘casual and human’ side of their ethically bankrupt CEO are still with the company. H…

Value™ must be delivered to stakeholders at any and all cost 🏏…

This is for children under 13. Because children over 13 engage with Social Media in very healthy and fruitful ways. “They are also simply too young to navigate the complexities of what they encounter online, including inappropriate content and online relationships where other users, including pre…

A most dangerous Easter Egg by Microsoft, known only to the most elite of hackers.…

A guide to elegant post-dinner debauchery from Mr Wei Koh, watch aficionado, Style Council member and founder of The Rake Magazine, in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen. The ‘guide’ in a nutshell: “Drink whatever you want, with whomever you like, talking about anything you’d want to, on any day…

Was discussing water quality in Des Moines with DL. Told her that our city couldn’t hold a candle to Ames, that their water was the “cleanest around.” Wanted to prove this but couldn’t find the 2014 viral hit “Hooray for Ames” video anywhere on the internet. GN, blessed datahoarder that he is, luck…

any history of COVID-19 in the US should really start off with an anecdote about how the chernobyl miniseries came out in 2019 and there was immediately a conclave of pundits smugly declaring that we would never respond to a disaster with such epic and malicious mismanagement @small_jawn…

This is what it takes to read a bloody article with a PiHole to block ads. I don’t even want to get started on the AMP nonsense. First, a focus-stealing popup asking if you’d like to subscribe to some bullshit. . . . followed by another popup asking you’d subscribe to more bullshit. . . . a…

Dear web developers, The answer is zero. Zero. Get it through your thick skulls. Zero is the number of times anyone has EVER wanted something to autoplay on your site and start making noise. I’d honestly rather you mine crypto-currency in my browser than use my speakers. #kthxbye @MalwareJake…

Tapped this YouTube suggestion on a lazy Sunday. This man pushed my capacities for sympathy and empathy to their breaking points in this 20-minute highlight reel. I don’t know what to type here other than quote the very first sentence of his Fandom wiki page: Raj is widely regarded as one of the…

is a simple and aptly-named COVID tracker that uses data from Johns Hopkins. As of September 1st 2020, my state of Iowa is #1 (woohoo!) with a 7-day infection rate of 261/100,000 people (“there might be 2 to 6 times as many recent infections”) and an R0 rate of 1.7. “Over the past 30 days, 246 peop…

In Ramayya Vasthavayya, Avinash is a mononymous “Central Crime Branch” officer who, according to the barcode on his IDENTITY CARD, loves new-agey mind meld books. Or so I gather. Couldn’t decipher the other barcode but submit that it might reveal his preference for reasonably priced cutlery sets at…

Michael Leggett, lead designer of Gmail from 2008-2012 “It’s like Lucky Charms got spewed all over the screen,” he says to me, as he scrolls through his inbox. It’s true. Folders, contacts, Google apps like Docs and Drive–and at least half a dozen notifications–all clutter Gmail at any given mome…

Via Deepu. My anger has never been with the writers for having a character I love to come to a tragic end like that. No matter how gut-wrenching it was, they, or George RR Martin, always laid out a convincing argument for why it happened. And that’s what great writing does, it makes you think of…

Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8 The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one: Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine f…

For a single project I made the mistake of working on in my Dropbox folder: Wonder what the downsides are to hardlinking by default. And, fundamentally, why creating an amazing, Python-like standard library is such an intractable problem in the first place. […] core-js is also utils library,…

Al Jazeera on godman Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCMFSkbom4A This is insane: Chauhan: One day the Guru summoned a meeting of his closest male devotees. There were about 400 to 500 people. He said “We are going to remove your virility. After that, your mind isn’t goi…