Joshua Wise

Final dispatch from @crowdsupply@hachyderm.io #Teardown2026: I am, of course, fully drained, and also I feel like I'm leaving Teardown with a lot more clarity than years past? Today, I attended @helenleigh@chaos.social 's talk, "Music Machines". I'm glad I did. I've been thinking for a few years that I'd like to take a sabbatical, but I haven't really understood why, or what I'd do with it. Helen reminded me of what I had forgotten: play and discovery is the critical essence of the joy of building things. I knew that I loved building things, and I knew that I loved contributing to the world around me through building things. Engineering is an important part of this, but it's not the only part. What I realized from this all is that what I've been missing is doing research. I spend so much time guiding my clients *not* to do research -- if there's a greased path by which they should can do something, they should -- and putting my nose down and doing engineering to get projects done and polished. But I realized that I have a lot of pending contributions that are just ready for some rough, unfinished-and-potentially-unfinishable, messy research. Playing around with things, figuring out how they work, taking things that are buried deep in the realm of commercial secret sauce and and bringing them to the open source world. I realize that the sabbatical I want is not a break from work (I wouldn't know how to do that!), but it's a break from the kind of work that I've spent the last decade and a half doing, so I can do something genuinely new. I'm not sure, logistically, how to manage that yet. But if nothing else, I know where to start now. Thanks for having me here and reminding me of what I'm really doing. See you next year, Portland.

@dfx4509b *plonk*

Some of the instances of this are pretty good reading. In this case, Blue Shield decided not to cover a newborn and then stonewalled the parents – first over $218, and then up to like $2k or so worth of bills. The state fined them $100,000 for this single instance (and, of course, they paid out to the parents). You, also, can make administrative malpractice like this unprofitable! It’s your civic duty to help the State close the budget gap, at your insurer’s expense!

Get fucked, insurance company. Here’s your reminder that, if you’re a California resident, and your health insurance refuses to cover something, it takes all of 5 minutes to file an independent medical review with the state, and statistically, 73% of the time the state will make your insurer pay. That’s an insane amount! That is a lot of people getting screwed over, and that’s only the people who reported it who got compensation! And there are people who work for the state who take extreme joy in taking administrative action and fining insurance companies – so far this year, California insurance companies have already been fined $19.7 million, and those are not ‘medical loss’ numbers that count towards the amount of profit they’re allowed to make. So do those people at the state a solid. You don’t have to be a green Nintendo plumber to make insurers pay; you can make a difference from your desk. If your insurance company causes you trouble, spend the five minutes to file with the DMHC helpline. This year, my insurance plan just decided not to cover a normal preventative lipid and A1C panel for my annual physical, leaving me with a $200 bill from Palo Alto Medical Foundation. The state decided my insurance should pay it after all, and it’ll go into the file to see if they have a pattern of doing this. Blue Shield, get fucked.

@jonty@chaos.social You're exactly right. I'm so sorry. I *did* mention Uncle Gary's mole, even though you explicitly -- and very clearly -- told me not to in the stern talk. That's on me. Now Uncle Gary is drunk again and waving a firearm at you. This was a horrible mistake, and you're right to be upset with me.