Pretty funny to see people posting about "holding knowledge hostage" on a thread about a new LLM version from a company which 100% intends to make that its business model.
So, yet another permanent rent seeking scheme? That's bad enough for Netflix, D+, YouTube Premium, Spotify and god knows what else that bleeds money every month out of you.
But science? That's something that IMHO should be paid for with tax money, so that it is accessible for everyone without consideration of one's ability to have money that can be bled.
The situation we had/have is arguably the result of the 'tax' money system. Governments lavishly funding bloated university administrations that approve equally lavish multi million access deals with a select few publishers for students and staff, while the 'general public' basically had no access at all.
There's closely related idea that might work, though. Each device editing text could be assigned a 32-bit ID by the server (perhaps auto-incrementing). Devices then maintain a separate 32-bit ID that they increment for each operation they perform. The ID used for each character is (device_id, edit_id), which should fit nicely in 8 bytes.
Indeed, this is close to what Yjs (popular CRDT library) does: each client instance (~ browser tab) chooses a random 32-bit clientId, and character IDs combine this clientId with local counters. https://github.com/yjs/yjs/blob/987c9ebb5ad0a2a89a0230f3a0c6...
Any given collaborative document will probably only see ~1k clientIds in its lifetime, so the odds of a collision are fairly low, though I'd be more comfortable with a 64-bit ID.
I don't quite understand where regex gets its reputation from. I think that once you remember the meaning of the operators, it's not too bad. (And the concise syntax is actually very helpful.)
I get that the meaning of the operators is not clear unless you're already familiar with regex, but neither is the meaning of !, ?, %, &, |, ^, ~, &&, ||, <<, >>, *, //, &, ++ (prefix), ++ (postfix), and so on. You learn these because you need them once, and then they're burned into your mind forever. Regex was similar for me.
I think regex gets some of its hate from people writing painfully complex matchers. 99% of my day to day regex use is simpler string searches on the command line or in my editor. I’m really happy I took the time to learn the syntax (spent about a week on it around 15 years ago) because now it doesn’t get in my way.
Regex syntax helps you understand what a regex does, not necessarily why it does it.
You can't decompose it into parts, you can't give those parts human-friendly names, you can't re-use parts in other regexes, you can't (easily) write functions that return or manipulate regexes (like that "list with separator" function shown above).
let-else is awesome. definitely my favorite rust syntax. The compiler checks that the else branch will “diverge” (return, panic, break, or continue), so it’s impossible to mess it up.
the article says “It’s part of the standard library,” which gets the point across that it doesn’t require any external dependencies but it may be slightly misleading to those who interpret it literally - let-else a language feature, not part of the standard library, the relevant difference being that it still works in contexts that don’t have access to the standard library.
I tend to use Option::ok_or more often because it works well in long call chains. let-else is a statement, so you can’t easily insert it in the middle of my_value().do_stuff().my_field.etc(). However, Option::ok_or has the annoying issue of being slightly less efficient than let-else if you do a function call in the “or” (e.g. if you call format! to format the error message). I believe there’s a clippy lint for this, although I could be mixing it up with the lint for Option::expect (which iirc tells you to do unwrap_or_else in some cases)
I appreciate the author for writing a post explaining the “basics” of rust. I’ll include it in any training materials I give to new rust developers where I work. Too often, there’s a gap in introductory material because the vast majority of users of a programming language are not at an introductory level. e.g. in haskell, there might literally be more explanations of GADTs on the internet than there are of typeclasses
> I believe there’s a clippy lint for this, although I could be mixing it up with the lint for Option::expect (which iirc tells you to do unwrap_or_else in some cases)
I only just learned of that let-else syntax here. I haven't kept a close eye on all the changes to the language over the years, but this is exactly what I've wanted if-let to allow.
Food is a basic human need, paying someone to make a burrito for you and then hand deliver it to your house is not. There is no shortage of food in america. In brazil, many people don’t eat meat because it’s too expensive, and get the vast majority of their calories from beans and rice. you can also do this in america, but almost no one does outside of college students because food is cheap enough relative to wages that people can generally afford to eat a wide variety of foods.
The bigger problem with BNPL, in my view, is that a lot of people are not able to understand the concept of credit. I knew people in my hometown who got a credit card, and their reaction to having a $3k credit limit was the exact same as if they had gotten $3k deposited into their bank account. I’m honestly not sure whether they understood that they didn’t just randomly get given $3k. I saw this happen multiple times. But it sounds very patronizing to say the “there’s a lot of poor people who don’t understand credit, so we need to prevent them from having access to any so they don’t get the chance to screw themselves”, so I understand why no one does.
Curiously, medieval societies struggled with “usury”. Effectively being a wage earner was a tough game as you might owe rent, have a bad month, or end up overly indebted. Most wage earners eventually became indentured servants or worse. This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent.
It’s not just that people don’t understand debt, it’s that the vast majority of people live in precarious situations which make debt a temptation. A little debt to grease transactions and buy assets is good, a lot of debt is a burning crises.
We’re worse off than them - usury wasn’t about high interest rates (though that obviously compounds the problem) - it was about whether interest could be charged on personally guaranteed loans at all.
If all loans were required to be non-recourse they’d suddenly have to be reasonable; anyone suffering too much under them would walk away leaving the collateral.
This isn’t even a death-knell for credit cards; it’d just turn them all to secured ones. But it would be deadly to allowing people to overspend and overextend.
>"This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent"
There are places where they didn't own anything. Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him.
Same in Russia. A couple centuries ago, serfs came with the land. They could be liberated if the owner decided it. However, being a free man is quite difficult without a job.
Correction: slavery in Russia/Soviet Union ended in 1974 when all the rural residents got passports and with it the right to leave the collective farm and change the profession.
There's a very good argument that, after being abolished in 1861, serfdom was re-introduced in the early 1930s via collectivization. Instead of private ownership of serfs, the state effectively owned the peasants who were bound to their collective farms by a system of meagre food-for-labour payments, needing permission to leave the farm/village for any reason, etc. The peasants that "came with" the collective farms were only issued internal passports in the late 1960s. Anyone who knows anything about life in the USSR understands the implications of having no internal passport. You didn't quite need one to breathe when outside your city/town/village, but just about.
> Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him.
A modern echo of this: Several times in the gloomy AM hours, I have worried what might happen if the current US administration tries to impose capital controls [0] like China. You might flee to Canada, only to find out that most/all of your life savings are forfeit to the tender mercies of the US government.
Where do you get the idea that peasants owned their land?
One of the defining traits of medieval Europe was that peasants were forced into serfdom and were granted the privilege to work the land.
More primitive societies banned usury because the concept of interest was seen as unfair. This held them back from investing or speculating on the future and kept them very poor.
Serfdom was not universal in Europe, not even at the time when it peaked.
However, OP didn't talk about owning land but rather about "permanent land rights", which usually means the right to use land. That is, it would still be owned by the feudal, who might be able to sell it to another feudal, but the peasants that lived on it and farmed it were necessarily part of the deal and couldn't be just removed from the land at a whim. That was not an uncommon arrangement even in places that had serfdom.
They literally couldn't be removed at a whim, yes. That's actually what makes traditional serfdom a distinctive arrangement: serfs are tied to land and must be transferred along with it when it changes hands. This would even be codified in the legal system as a right. In some cases it would be "right to subsistence" or something like it instead, meaning that the feudal could remove the serfs from some particular plot of land, but only by providing a replacement plot for them to subsist on. Courts did, in principle, enforce those rights, although of course the feudals would have a lot more opportunities to subvert them in practice (but there are still many recorded cases of serfs granted relief by medieval courts).
In Eastern Europe - and especially in Russia - serfdom began as a similar arrangement, but eventually evolved into full-fledged slavery where people could be bought and sold in and of themselves at a whim, while the original label remained for propriety reasons - basically people wanted to own slaves but didn't want to be called "slaveholders". So, a bit like "democratic people's republics" of whatever today. However, even if you take the label at face value, that arrangement still does not describe most places with serfdom.
> But it sounds very patronizing to say the “there’s a lot of poor people who don’t understand credit, so we need to prevent them from having access to any so they don’t get the chance to screw themselves”, so I understand why no one does.
OTOH, the article literally says that "data [shows] that those with lower incomes, lower education, and worse credit (redundancies here) are more likely to use BNPL."
Most consumer protection laws are somewhat patronizing, but since you can't be an expert in everything, we need them.
Plus being poor is essentially an IQ debuff. I remember I had a week where I had my identity stolen, had a large unexpected medical bill that I spent 20 hours on the phone with my insurance trying to figure out why I was getting said bill*, my grandma was sick, and I was having a tough time at work. If I were slightly less well off or didn't have a job where I could take a day off on short notice to sort all of this out( or as is often the case, both at the same time), that week could have started a cascade effect that would have outright ruined my life. I was so stressed out that week I was forgetting really basic things and doing things wrong, I wasn't sleeping, and all I wanted to eat was junk fast food because it was fast and easy and I didn't have to think about it.
The thing is, a lot of poor people live like that every day. I have some friends who are a single car problem away from being financially destitute because of the death spiral that can come from being poor- your car that you drive to work breaks down and you don't have the money to fix it. You lose your job because you can't get to work, and you can't get another job because you don't have transportation. Public transit is non existent in most of the US. You can get another car, but it's a junker at an insane interest rate and that's another expense you don't need. So yeah in that headspace I can understand feeling like financing a burrito could make sense. If you're already not thinking straight and you're tempted by a simple pleasure that feels like the one thing you can control in life and you know you're going to have the bank balance tomorrow, I can see it.
People wanting stuff like this doesn't mean it's rational to use or moral to offer. It's a symptom of a society that is fundamentally broken, that is designed to keep people on the razor's edge of their current economic status and in constant fear of losing what little they have.
*If you're curious how this happens, I take an expensive medication for a chronic illness and my insurance randomly changed how they pay for it without informing me before I got hit with a $2000 bill
How is that on the other hand? I'm a little confused, as if anything it supports exactly what the person you are replying to was saying as they only mention that they are more likely to use BNPL, it doesn't take the extra step of saying perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to, or should be protected when doing so.
I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you're asking me, but I said "on the other hand" because the person I was responding to was concerned about sounding patronizing by pointing out that laws protect uneducated people, while the article outright states that this targets uneducated people. It wasn't intended to introduce a criticism of what the person I was responding to was saying.
Just to clairfy I'm not assuming you are criticing the commentor, nor am I intending to critisice you, merely that I don't agree the viewpoints are actually that similar at all between the commentor and the article.
The article doesn't state they target uneducated people, it states that they use it more which are subtle but key differences. Furthermore "poor people who don’t understand credit" is not the same category as "lower incomes, lower education, and worse credit (redundancies here)". Even if we assume they are the same group of people (by making an equivalence between understanding of credit and general education/income/credit which we know is not a great assumption) the statements are different anyway.
The article is talking about an observed statistic, BNPL seems to be more prevalent in lower income, lower education and worse credit populations (we actually have really poor data on private credit so this should be taken with a grain of salt). The commenter however is making the claim that this is because they have a bad understanding of credit, and also implicitily that BNPL is bad and a bad use of credit.
These are therefore different as we can easily see for instance that a probable cause could for example be that people with no savings are more likely to borrow to cover spending in-between paychecks for example, or when emergency expenses change their cash-flow. This would not however fit with the commenters viewpoint, and is actually a good use of credit.
If you imagine a continuum from no bankruptcy possible at all, to infinite bankruptcy available at the click of a button - you end up with the realization that the only loans and credit extended would be backed by assets.
If you could declare bankruptcy (Hey. I just wanted you to know that you can't just say the word "bankruptcy" and expect anything to happen.) the moment your credit card bill arrived, no bank would extend you credit beyond what you specifically had on deposit with them to secure it (just like home mortgages are secured by the home).
I agree entirely with this sentiment. It almost feels like it's our ages "Keeping up with the Joneses". Even if 30-50% of your social circle can afford it without incurring debt if it becomes the social norm we'll all keep doing it. It's unfortunate but I don't know how this generation learns this lesson.
Because its driven by something that transcends generations: human desire. Its a very powerful emotion that drives us to act (as is aversion). But, we can train ourselves not to react to this emotion and over time it does become weaker and, eventually, completely subsides. It does take time and practice though which most people are not willing to put in because they don't see desire as a problem.
Why only poor though? There's plenty of middle class people living above their means by abusing credit too. They can deal with the consequences better, but it's equally financially harmful for them
Certainly, but there's less motivation to protect the middle class from poor financial decisions because it can be assumed that they have some financial leeway already and aren't going to be put on the street by one too many doordash orders. So they don't really factor into the discussion much
middle class has shrunk only because the upper class has expanded. Every American citizen living with property taxes is n missed payments from homelessness. unhoused is a misnomer, especially in this context of losing your home.
> In brazil, many people don’t eat meat because it’s too expensive
During the 2008 recession, I remember a woman who called in to one of the financial advice radio shows (Dave Ramsey?). She was talking about how her husband has been laid off and they were eating beans, tortillas and rice, and how i simply thought, "so you're eating....mexican food?"
That said, it's crazy how a burrito is $12 now and a two taco, beans/rice dinner at the generic Mexican restaurants in town is $16. This is peasant food that should be dirt cheap. Even the gray-market facebook food sellers want $12.
That's also labor and capital costs though, not just raw ingredient costs.
It's also a byproduct of minimum wage, the time spent on making the burrito, prepping the kitchen, cleaning up, processing the order, doing the accounts, etc. all adds up meaning a single meal has a minimum cost directly proportional to minimum wage.
Though don't get me wrong, minimum wage is an overall good imo.
However if we had universal basic income instead, and thus could scrap minimum wage, you might see the price of a burrito drop.
There are many, many stupid people who would benefit from being protected from themselves. How far down that path we want to walk as a society is an eternal debate.
I don't quite understand the full argument that you are trying to make. You seem to assume that it is more justified to "protect someone from themselves" than to "protect stupid people from loan sharks", and that the situation at hand resembles the latter more than the former.
To me the justifiability of these two imperatives seem to be reversed. But to the extent that "protecting stupid people from loan sharks" is unjustified, we also think that we should "protect weak people from robbers and bandits", and protect people from frauds.
> You seem to assume that it is more justified to "protect someone from themselves" than to "protect stupid people from loan sharks", and that the situation at hand resembles the latter more than the former.
But sadly also a lot of not-stupid people who sometimes need to (or would benefit to) borrow on short notice, and it's better that they're doing that on a credit card with protections and that they can pay off. I've been both: easy credit in my youth ended up with me racking up a lot of silly debt that I had to spend several years living frugally to pay off, but also now that I'm much more financially secure, having some credit cards that work as a very cheap line of credit if I'm having a liquidity crunch is also very useful.
The main issue is forcing that protection down the throat of whomever doesn’t want to be protected. Or in other words, believing that the government knows better than you on how you should live your life.
And yet in some cases there are clear societal benefits that outweigh any hindrances on personal freedom, such as seat belts in vehicles. In any society, individuals must make personal sacrifices in order to be part of that society and to receive the benefits of society as a whole.
It's not that "the government" knows better than you how you should live your life, but it sets the ground rules that we all must adhere to in order to participate in society.
And for better or worse, because our society dictates that we won't simply leave crash victims who weren't wearing a seat belt to die in the median of the highway (whether they want to be left or not) we mandate that everyone wears a seat belt.
> Food is a basic human need, paying someone to make a burrito for you and then hand deliver it to your house is not. There is no shortage of food in america.
Do some googling about what is a "food desert", plenty of lower income people in the USA live somewhere that the grocery store options and fresh, nutritious ingredient shopping options are VERY poor. Or a costly distance away to drive on a regular basis.
I am not saying this excuses ordering $25 burritos on doordash or uber eats but it is an influencing factor.
The lack of food can be explained either by a shortage of demand or a shortage of supply. Many people assume that the demand is there and the supply is the problem - people are desperate for healthy food but no one wants to sell it to them for some reason (the reason is always left unsaid). Instead, they have no choice but to shop at 7/11. So presumably, as soon as a store selling fresh, nutritious ingredients opens up, it would be swarmed with people buying broccoli and chicken breasts. However there is some evidence that the reason no healthy food is being sold is because people's demand for heathy food is being provided by a supermarket a few miles away, or that they just have little demand for healthy food in the first place. Here is an article with more information: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/decemb...
To support your point, I live in the complete opposite of a food desert but I know a lot of people who don’t know how to cook… like not really. “Cooking” to them going to Trader’s Joes and buying one of those frozen packs. If I gave them a bunch of chicken breasts and broccoli, they would struggle to make it tasty, even if I told them it load it up with fats and sugars.
Cooking — as in being able to make any set of common ingredients tasty, quickly, with few dishes to wash, and without looking up recipes each time — is the skill you need before you can “unlock” supermarkets. If I was still 19 and a new supermarket showed up, I would know f— all to do except browse the frozen section.
This is way more an issue than some realize. A repairman I used to know would always have great deals on amazing kitchen gear. It was always 5-10 years out of date but barely used (Viking oven where the burners had been used a bit, but the oven still had all the plastic bags and manuals in it).
Super valuable houses where nobody ever cooked. He said the only thing he’d ever be called to service was the microwave and the fridge.
It does sound strange to me. I wouldn't consider myself as someone knowing how to cook, but I mean, there's stuff like eggs, pasta, or sausages that you literally just stick into a pot of water and boil it for N minutes (where N is right there on the packaging even). And you wouldn't do that in a microwave oven.
Time is extremely scarce for poor people. Cooking healthy and cheap meals means research, planning and batch meal prep. This also requires being a forward-looking state of mind.
Personally, I think the government should be investigating ways to raise income levels for the poorest. I don’t know what form this should take - UBI? negative income tax? - but fix that and the rest would follow for many people.
I generally support measures like increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit but I'm skeptical that would really solve this particular problem. Poor people in other countries manage to cook healthy and cheap meals from a few staple ingredients. There's no research or planning involved, they just get on with it.
Lack of calories is not an issue in the USA. There are redundant pathways to get the staples people need, food banks, stamps, ect.
The few percent of the population that suffer insecurity do so as a symptom of other complex causes. Children of addicts and mentally unstable will struggle to get dinner, even if there is a food pantry down the block. A homeless schizophrenic living out of a backpack wont always have food with them.
For reasons like this, there is a floor to the practical floor to the elimination of hunger.
Also, if you havent, I would recommend reading through a food insecurity survey if you haven't. The definition is broader than most realize.
If you look at malnutrition rates in the US, I think you get a much clearer picture.
There are certainly “innocent” poor if you want to use the term - those who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own and are working hard to get out of it.
And just as certainly being poor can be a result of bad choices and other things. Denying that either is possible is a recipe for disaster.
What we should do is work on the things that will work for those who need help and help them improve their skills or provide them a structured environment where are those skills are not necessary.
FWIW when you look at other countries, there are many out there where the word "poor" implies much less wealth than it does in US, yet poor people in those countries routinely cook their own meals. Indeed, historically it is the norm for basically everybody but the topmost layer of society.
Speaking as an immigrant, from what I've seen in US, it is mostly a cultural issue, not lack of time or ingredient availability.
Even in most "food deserts" it's possible to get cheap and healthy food like beans, rice, potatoes, apples, peanut butter, frozen chicken, cheese, canned vegetables, etc. Most of that stuff can be stored for a long time and doesn't require frequent trips to the grocery store.
These food deserts are exclusively caused by completely unjustifiable crimes committed by those lower income people. They aren't stealing bread, rice, beans, vegetables. They are stealing flat screen TVs and destroying their local Walmart.
Food deserts only exist where the negative cost of being burglarized has managed to exceed the large income of fulfilling humanity's third most basic need besides air and water.
“Fear of sounding patronizing” sounds like a cocktail party problem. If that’s stopping someone - being made fun of by another member of their elite class - that’s a recipe for failure.
Being careful not to sound patronising towards the poor in public is one of the most ironclad unstated rules of wealthy social groups in the West. Breaking it immediately reveals one to be a member of the outgroup ("gauche"/"nouveau riche"/"tasteless"/"a philistine"), which will cause other wealthy people to break ties for fear of being tarnished by association. Since relationships with other wealthy people are a cornerstone of becoming and remaining wealthy, there is a massive incentive not to do this.
I think the underlying reason is that being patronised is very antagonising, and the poor generally outnumber the rich, who must ultimately depend on them in a variety of ways.
Exactly, perfectly put. It becomes an ingroup code, with very little to do with the actual people that are being discussed.
But if people want to have a serious conversation, it’s intellectually dishonest to steer around topics in that way. That’s how you end up with clueless policies.
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