vtbassmatt

Catholic schools turn away Catholics all the time. A good friend of mine, extremely devout Catholic, has two of his kids in Catholic school. He was told that his child with special needs couldn’t be educated there. She’s in public school (and doing great).

Yes. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft. But I also am the volunteer IT guy at a nonprofit, and am speaking entirely in that context.

I was quite unhappy to get a mail back in (checks archives) January that our grant would be discontinued and we’d either have to make do with the web versions of things, migrate someplace, or start paying. They also reminded us several more times before the drop date. I don’t really understand why Microsoft chose to discontinue the nonprofit grants, and it put a little egg on my face after I had recommended it to our board — but they definitely notified us of the change and what it would mean.

We’ve opted to pay for now; it’s $3/user/month for the SKU that gets full desktop versions of Office, Teams, etc. so not really breaking the bank compared to all the other things we have to pay for.

What vehicle did Mazda screw this up so badly in? Neither of my Mazdas with CarPlay disable the touchscreen in CarPlay. The ‘21 Miata disables it while in motion (which sucks badly, and I just learned there’s a hack to fix). The ‘24 CX-5 doesn’t ever disable the touchscreen.

Oops, I forgot this one wasn't public. Sorry! Auth was implemented using a library I don't know much about, so I figured better safe than sorry.

Wait, is this Azure or GitHub who had the booth? If it was GitHub, I’m super confused and there must have been some serious missing context. I was at GitHub from 2020-2023 and am not aware of _any_ Windows usage in the service. The only meaningful Windows footprint was for client dev (`gh`, GitHub Desktop, etc.) and even there, Windows was the exception. Service side is all Linux; most engineers worked from a Mac.

If the context was an Azure booth, I’m still mildly surprised (they’ve long been invested in beyond-Windows) but not shocked.

(Edit: I forgot about the Actions stack. Some of that was on Windows. I was pretty far removed from that world and much closer to the classic Ruby monolith side.)

It feels wrong to say something nice about Ticketmaster, but you don't need their app to add concert tickets to Apple Wallet (at least at all the venues where I live). I strictly use their website because I don't trust them.

I've never tried to pay with Apple Pay on ticketmaster.com, but I assume I could do that as well.

The opposite is also true: Apple’s parental controls fail closed in inscrutable and impossible to debug ways. Yesterday, in order to share an iPad’s location with my iPhone, I had to totally disable managing Screen Time on the device. Every time I would click “share with <my name>”, the damn thing would tell me “Location settings can’t be updated right now, try again later”. No other combination of “solutions” on the Apple support forum, the random blogspam links, or the oh-so-helpful search-AI-summary thing even made a dent. I suspect something in the underlying data model was out of sync with the UI or something. Incredibly frustrating experience from the “it just works” vendor.

Accidentally turning on the wipers was definitely #1 for me. A close second was nearly turning the wrong way in roundabouts. I’m not sure why regular box turns were easy to mentally flip but roundabouts just broke my brain instead.

I have another reply in this tree talking about outcomes and independence being much worse not even all that long ago. I won’t repeat it all here but it squares with what you observed in an older neighbor growing up.

Also: did they tell you they were miserable or felt stuck in Groundhog Day? If not, then it’s not a safe assumption. AFAIK many caretakers and family members report satisfaction with their lives despite the added complications. (Maybe your neighbors really were miserable, and if so, just know it’s not the norm anymore.)

The early genetic testing for Down syndrome is pretty accurate now. If it’s still a major worry for you about having kids, get the testing done early enough to terminate. I strongly hope that no one terminates out of ignorance about the realities - both positive and negative - of Down syndrome, but have no problem at all with informed choices.

People with Down syndrome aren’t “downs” or “downs patients”, though. It’s easy to dismiss this as language policing or, as another thread hinted at, performative. But the words we use and how we view the world are part of a feedback loop on each other. Synecdoche-izing people as merely a medical diagnosis colors whether society treats them as full members or not. And unlike, say, the Deaf or autism communities, it’s not currently a subculture or something that many people with Down syndrome identify as.

As an internet stranger, I’m asking folks to consider using “person with DS” instead of “DS patient/person/etc”.