Better arguments prevail only works when participants argue in good faith grounded in curiously, evidence and reason. The guy who flips the table isn't proposing a novel gaming strategy, you just kick him out of board game club.
Because the hard part isn't the compute, vector dbs, or whatever. It's the huge evergreen index of the whole internet. Getting over the hump of "every site lets your crawler work, gives good results to it, and bypass paywalls" is a massive barrier.
raku kinda puts a bunch of parts of itself together during startup, not entirely unlike Julia.
The sheer dynamism of the thing makes pre-baking that non-trivial, also not entirely unlike Julia.
I seem to recall chatting with the devs on IRC a few years and there seeming to be more than one viable way to potentially fix it, but they all seemed to me to share the property of needing a lot of effort during which nothing would work at all before you got something to show for it - and a decent chance of what you got to show after all that time was "welp, here's why which one can't work" - which is a really heavy lift in terms of somebody finding motivation to try it in the first place.
So tl;dr "yes, I dislike the startup cost, no, I don't expect it to change soon and I don't think it's a black mark against the team that it probably won't."
You're literally describing equity. The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.
I don't think it's an issue of a person's politics, Republicans tried the exact same thing with No Child Left Behind. Is the more important thing the individual rising to their highest potential, or is the more important thing the system where economic factors
have created a cycle where only children of middle-class or better families are given the environment to rise and those kids run with the flywheel and become the middle-class parents.
I was literally never not going to be successful, I think I'm reasonably intelligent but that by far wasn't the biggest factor. My parents made damn sure I was on the gifted track, always got A's, and was set up
to get into an in-demand major at a prestigious university. Was I actually that special or was I just the chosen one, in that I was chosen?
You can only be like "that's not true of everyone <anecdote>" but the exceptions fall away in the aggregate where your success is frighteningly well predicted by your zip code.
> The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.
The top-level-commenter's point is that this is not necessarily the case anymore—the whole promise of educational technology was that we could finally scale individual intervention to every child, but efforts to do so have met with stiff resistance. I also work in EdTech and I've seen exactly what the OP is talking about.
We're at the point where we could extend the flywheel to more children than ever by integrating it into the public school systems instead of having it be something that upper-middle class parents have to provide as a supplement, but the culture has so thoroughly embraced the idea that "getting ahead" is unfair that we're not allowed to systematize it even when doing so would benefit poor students the most.
I went to one of those low-income, garbage schools. I grew up in poverty. I was very frustrated by this attitude when I was in school but with a few decades of hindsight I see why this issue is complicated: do you focus on helping your poorest students graduate and not fall into indigence or do you focus on helping your brightest escape the flywheel of poverty and enter the upper-middle class?
I'm curious what exactly this "unfair"ness is. (I'm being genuine, my partner works in EdTech but I don't and I have very little idea what happens behind the scenes.) My impression in my low-income school was that the parents barely had any idea what was going on and if anything pressured their kids to leave school asap so they could get jobs and bring money home.
Not really, the quality we're able to produce at scale is the best it's ever been in the world. The "quality of everything has been in decline" isn't due to advances in manufacturing but the economic factors that are present even without those advances.
Rapid inflation over a relatively short period of time has forced everyone to desperately try and maintain close to their pre-inflation prices because workers didn't and aren't going to get the corresponding wage increases.
I hope eventually there's a tipping point where the powers that be realize that our economy can't work unless the wealth that naturally accumulates at the top gets fed back into the bottom but the US pretty unanimously voted for the exact opposite so I desperately I hope I'm wrong or that this path can work too.
This is so hard to vocalize, but yes, exactly. Prices aren’t coming down. That’s largely not something that happens. Instead, wages are supposed to increase in response.
Fortunately the rate of change of CPI appears to have cooled off, but the best scenario is for it to track with the previous historical slope, which means prices are staying where they are and increasing at “comfortable” rates again.
Do you mean immediately? At peak inflation wages weren't keeping pace, but wage growth is exceeding inflation right now to catch back up.
Incomes have been, on average, stagnant for hundreds of years – as far back as the data goes. It is unlikely that this time will be different.
> I hope eventually there's a tipping point where the powers that be
You did mention the US. Presumably you're not talking about a dictatorship. The powers that be are the population at large. I'm sure they are acutely aware of this. They have to live it, after all.
* You get a cool industry certification that you can put on your website to justify the vague "we take your security seriously" platitudes we spew.
* It lets you stop putting money and effort into security once you've renewed your certs this year.
* You don't need to hire a dedicated security person, any sysadmin can check boxes.
* You can say you followed industry best practices and "did all you could" when you get breached.
It's the answer to "how do we not care about security?" across an entire industry that stands to make billions from said lack of care. In a depressing way, the company with useless performative security certs will fare better after a breach then the one without them but that actually tried.
My less cynical take about this is that if you need to actually care about security because you'll be up against sophisticated targeted attacks then you probably already know that. For everyone else there's checkboxes to stop companies from getting owned by drive-by attacks.
There is compliance everywhere and compliance is often complying with larger industry "requirements" or considered best practice controls.
If you start a business from scratch, I don't know any company that has developed their own controls library from scratch without complying with some sort of framework or baseline controls set.
The frameworks and control sets that you often comply exist and are there for a reason, but your mileage may vary if you choose to use them.
Replacement migration doesn't really have to do with the absolute numbers in the world but admitting immigrants from countries that have well above replacement rate. The world population is so large that the countries who desire increased population have a loooooong runway.
The only problem, exemplified by the Windrush Generation in the UK, is the rampant racism towards the people who are immigrating to help you.
The error is in the modern western belief that human breeds are equivalent modulo æsthetics and training. East Asia is a rising star as the west commits altruistic demographic suicide!
This nonsense is why I think plea deals need to have no admission of wrongdoing. Which I know makes the name kind of vestigial but it's at least more honest about the transaction. Both sides are negotiating based on the perceived time and monetary effort, and chance of conviction.
Someone who is innocent may (unfortunately) find it their best course of action to take a plea deal and they shouldn't have to falsely admit their guilt to accept it. It's not perfect but it removes a lot of the coercive elements from the transaction.
They are considered somewhat differently which is why some statutes/laws have a clause 'or plead guilty to'.
I don't see how it removes in any way that the threat of imposition of the trial tax is a threat. If you can receive a 5 or 50 year sentence for the exact same crime, with the exact same circumstances other than taking a plea, the extra 45 years can not be considered anything but an explicit threat to take the plea. Or that pleas were considered unconstitutional at the founding of the US and only made legal in the 1960s.
The government only allows pleas for businesses that include a non admission of guilt. Admission of guilt is required as part of the Federal plea process, otherwise defendants could retain too many appeal rights (when you admit guilt from that point on you must prove a much higher 'actual innocence' legal standard on appeal and none of the easier standards like tainted evidence, corrupt officials, improper procedures can be applied to your case).
Sorry, come again? What is a "trial tax"? You mean if you opt to go to trial, plead not guilty, and you lose then they're threatening that the penalty could be more severe? Is that the "tax"?
Maybe it's just me, but if I were falsely accused, I'd take a jury trial in a heartbeat over making a false confession. Just on principle alone. I understand why a guilty defendant might take a plea bargain, but it blows my mind that this works on some people who are innocent.
Prosecutors will argue exactly your point, that no innocent person would take a plea deal or confess to a crime they didn't do. But lots of research is demonstrating the opposite. Keep in mind that once police and prosecutors believe you probably are the one who committed the crime, they will usually stop investigating any alternate theories or people, and only focus on building their case against you - and sometimes, even withhold exonerating evidence. So if you do choose a trial, everything that is presented will be pointing at you and you alone, you can try to raise an alternate theory but nobody in authority will back you up. It's a very difficult spot to be in.
No doubt it's difficult, and in countries like Russia it's downright impossible to defend your innocence successfully under such circumstances. But I think if you ever find yourself in such a situation, you have no choice but to stand on the truth, on principle. It's better to go down fighting than to submit. And in game theory terms, there is at least a potential upside to fighting the charge, even if the potential downside is worse. There is no further upside to pleading guilty to something you didn't do.
I'll tell you this... the judge could tell the jury to ignore it, or declare a mistrial, but if someone had offered me a plea bargain for something I was innocent of, I would tell the jury that I'd refused it. Whether that was stricken from the record or not, at that point you're a political prisoner and you've done all you honestly can.
Yes. In the USA the Feds set extremely high sentence lengths (30-50 years is common). They then offer a plea for 5-10. If you don't take the plea and go to trial and lose, your sentence (for the exact same crime and events that they offered you 5-10) is raised to 30-50. It is called the trail tax, you can Google it. In the US a person exercising their constitutional rights is considered during sentencing to be worth more time in prison than the actual crime/acts committed. Because remember, the judge would accept 5-10 as a reasonable sentence for the crime/acts committed IF it was a plea, but sentences to 30-50 if it is a trial. The criminal acts committed are still the same, only in one case the person has the trial tax imposed. Going to trial is considered WORSE than the crime by American judges.
This is the point of trial by jury. I've served on juries, though never been tried in front of one.
If we were talking about something where I had actually broken a law, I'd expect to lose. But if it were truly a case of mistaken identity? I'd almost certainly defend myself and be confident no jury would convict me.
It's possible that a lot of people don't have sufficient skills to pore through legal books and case histories the way we pore through examples of massive SQL queries, but I'm sure I'd be up to it. And thus I would never concede to a plea bargain for something I hadn't done. Moreover, the whole concept of doing so is so anathema that I wouldn't care if it was a choice between admitting false guilt or execution (as it was in the show trials of the Soviet Union)... I would tell em to execute me. There are things I'm not willing to live with, like making a false confession, so you had better fuckin kill me.
It's not a "tech bro" attitude to say you would prefer to die than to plead guilty to false charges. It's not a new attitude, either. It is an ancient attitude in western philosophy, going back at least to Socrates. Without individual determination to stand by the truth in the face of an arbitrary authority, there can be no just law, only power. A lot of individuals have had to die for truth and justice. Many were quite capable of defending themselves but the option wasn't available. That doesn't mean they didn't comport themselves well.
So you are cool with your mom dying alone without you there for support because you want to keep your reputation? Your dad? Your wife/kids being on their own without your support for 45 years?
You realize people that represent themselves are fools? Court isn't about smarts, it's about knowing how to play the game, your relationship with the judge, all kinds of factors. Heck if you word things just slightly wrong, you are hit and your winning argument is ignored. And a judge won't help you get to the correct wording.
What about my mom and dad's reputation? What about not wanting my kids to believe their father committed some crime? On the whole, I'd rather them know I was innocent and wrongly accused, yes.
I spoke about jury trials, not about court procedure.
When police have a false story that your own lawyer and everyone around you seems to buy, you might then falsely admit guilt. Knowing a lawyer so well that they believe your words above anyone's is a rare privilege.
Don't forget that lawyers that present cases before a judge day after day are get a form of 'the trial tax' imposed on them if they take cases to jury. They are very much biased to accept pleas.
The point of the plea deal is that you aren't pleading to "the exact same crime." For example maybe you're charged with 2nd degree murder, with extenuating circumstances of using a firearm, and that's what you'll be on trial for, facing 50 years. Unless you plead to involuntary manslaughter, with a 7 year max but the prosecutor will recommend 4 because you cooperated. Just an example, I'm making up the numbers. The whole thing is very slimy and coercive, not defending the system, I'm simply explaining why your argument is flawed.
> This nonsense is why I think plea deals need to have no admission of wrongdoing.
No. Not even close.
Instead, plea deals need to be made illegal. Prosecutors who use plea deals in more than 2% of their cases in a given calendar year should face loss of law license for life, and 10 years in prison. It should be aggressively enforced and a strict liability crime (no "I lost track" excuses).
DAs would no longer be able to prosecute as many cases if most had to be taken to trial, and they would be much less permissive of cops who were filing borderline horseshit, who were refusing to use their discretion. Legislators would be less able to keep bad laws on the books, were it not for pervasive plea bargaining.
In my own county, I heard with my own ears the DA bragging about how they do about 4000 cases per year, but take fewer than 30 to trial. Changing the ritual words that need to be spoken isn't a solution to anything.
> DAs would no longer be able to prosecute as many cases if most had to be taken to trial
That's the whole reason that the entire plea system is in place. Trials are so expensive and justice system is so inefficiently organized that everything would go to a standstill without the pleas. You'd have to first modernize justice system to work in more European way before you can abolish pleas.
So, rephrasing: fair trials in the USA are actually a comforting myth, and you won't get one. Occasionally they will do one to keep the myth alive, but the reality is that due process is dead, and if the DA accuses you of something you have no recourse. Because of some legacy paperwork, they're technically not allowed to just chuck you in the slammer unless you admit to the crime, so they threaten you until any reasonable person would confess out of self preservation.
Plea deals hold their extortive power through the fact that it's often the only way people can get out of jail pre-trial when they can't afford excessive bail. But rather than doing bail reform which would fix that problem, we have the left getting rid of bail entirely in situations where it is inappropriate to do so. This means violent criminals can wreak more mayhem while released awaiting trial so that the right can complain about it and we'll swing right back to excessive bail.
The bail bondsman industry is basically this gigantic leach sucking bail money out of our country, but it has lobbyists and can't be banned outright. Bail is not supposed to be a pre-conviction fine, but when you have to go to a bail bondsman you don't get your bail money back even if you show for trial. If you could pony up the cash in its entirety, it's just "held", and you get it if you show for trial. Even if convicted, you get it back (it's not a fine).
Making bail bonding illegal would be a good start to fixing the problem, but it's politically unviable. Attack plea bargains first, DAs and prosecutors can't put up the same kind of political fight that the bonding industry can.
Your dumb rhetoric makes the problem worse, because everyone can tell it's made up horseshit and if you're lying about the details they figure you're lying about the problem too.
> Trials are so expensive and justice system is so
But trials are the point. If you're not doing trials, what the fuck are you even doing? If you can only afford so many trials, then only make that many indictments, and make sure you're only indicting the ones that matter. If somehow, you still need to do more, well then this will force the public and the government to spend the money to scale up the justice system so you can do more trials.
They don't want that to happen though, because if most of these plea deals went to trial, the public would discover just how much horseshit the charges were in the first place. They don't want it, because if they went to trial we'd see so much jury nullification it would all be for nought.
> ou'd have to first modernize justice system to work in more European way
There's nothing about the European way that much impresses me. One wonders what you see in it... is it that you see the results and mistake those for a product of the system, when they're just in large part a product of a different people/culture that can't be transferred to the US no matter how much you wish it so?
It's more about what I don't see. Plea deals, bail bonds industry, treating extorted confession as a solid proof, prison sentences to add up to more than a reasonable expected lifespan, discovering truth not being a goal of the trial, electability of judges, being judged by unprepared impressionable idiots aka jury. The whole thing is a sinister theatre that tries to keep the form of wild times when people didn't know any better while introducing so many ways for the parties to suck money out of the process at expense of the accuser, accused and the taxpayer. No justice system is perfect but US (and UK) one is so far that it's grotesque.
Yea, because they consider threatening death coercive. But funnily enough, a 50+ years in prison threat when the state knows you will die in prison due to age/health, not considered coercive and doesn't qualify. It's the threat of physically being put to death that puts it over the line for this sort of plea for the courts to recognize the threat being made as 'coercive'. So The Justice System absolutely understands that pleas come with implicit threats.
Or you can explain that as 'this can sometimes happen'.
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