I'm convinced this happens in a lot of projects. If you're e.g. Microsoft, you can pay a few people to contribute maliciously to a GPL competitor's coding and governance full time.
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
> Spending half an hour mind-numbingly learning words through flashcards will teach you about as much vocabulary as an hour watching educational videos, but it'll be far less fun and you'll feel like it actually took two hours.
The first part is definitely untrue, you won't learn any vocabulary spending an hour watching an educational video, you'll be lucky if you remember one new word tomorrow. That half hour on Anki will be spread out over six months, and will teach you 20 words.
As for the second part, doing Anki is like doing through any sort of timeline that spits out random rewards and failures. I get a rush whenever I remember stuff, and I get bummed out when I forget; it's basically facebook.
I understand why one wouldn't think that with single-word vocabulary flashcards, because they are horrible to do and unhelpful. You should be running sentences, not words. Words rarely translate well, change form when they are in sentences, and often show up as part of seemingly ungrammatical set phrases.
Actually, every point was right and the data model is terrible. I've been using it for years. The other commenter just mentioned a list of things that the software does do and basically said "isn't that good enough for you" a bunch of times. No, it's not. Anki's concepts of flashcards, and how it stores and manipulates them, are horrible.
It's hard to do many, many things in Anki that should be trivial, impossible to do many, many things that should be possible, and the things you can do involve the types of queries being run over your entire collection that causes the app to slow to a crawl after you add about a dozen decks. And in general: I can adjust far too many things that I don't even care to adjust and probably shouldn't be adjusting, and things that should be trivial to do are impossible.
It's bad. Ankidroid is a little better, but they're also stuck with the data model.
That’s because the default model is designed for the general user. If you sat down and really worked with the documentation, you would realize you shouldn’t be using decks or collections for management you should be using tags. Decks and collections are a different abstraction for different purposes.
I’m in medical school which has basically mastered Anki. The AnKing deck, used by over a million medical students, has over 35,000 cards, cross-tagged by numerous study resources that exists on a single “deck” which receives regular updates. I regularly run basically instant queries on over 40,000+ cards.
Medical school Anki has basically mastered this workflow and the original commenters complaints are completely wrong/come from a misunderstanding of Anki’s data model.
To be put simply, ignoring subdecks, filtered decks, cards vs notes, etc.: cards can only belong to one deck, but can have multiple tags. What exactly do you want to see differently in the data model?
Regardless, I believe "something like Phoenix is using the phx.new and the generators which gives you a ton of files and structure that is a bit overwhelming " is true, it can be overwhelming, when the same thing in, say, Go, would be only one file.
Ok sure, but Phoenix is the go-to solution for web projects in Elixir, especially newcomers are frequently told to just use Phoenix instead of trying to build on Plug.
The feedback from the Python person was a bit harsh, and evaluating a language based on LLM generated code is of course silly, but I think some of it still holds true.
I'd love for Elixir to be a more approachable solution for simple web services.
> I've never had a problem with someone who seems to be unhoused (I wouldn't know).
It's not unusual to never have problems with the homeless (especially if you rarely come into contact with them), but your personal experience here is worthless. Especially irrelevant is your experience of people in SUVs with phones. Not knowing if the people around you are homeless is not a sign of open-mindedness, it's a sign of a possible lack of sensitivity.
People who are homeless are going through issues, and are largely being shunned and ignored by the public. They often became homeless because they were impossible to live with. The ones most likely to be around you, in your space, and that you're likely to clock as homeless are the most aggressive, because homeless people with all their marbles generally make an effort not to seem homeless and don't ask strangers for anything. They die quietly, off alone in a corner, unless someone saves them first.
And rationally, which I discovered myself as a homeless teenager 30-some years ago: you'll never meet, or help, the homeless people who aren't pestering you and bothering you and invading your space.
So when visible homeless people are being talked about, there's no reason to completely avoid drawing any conclusions or making any generalizations about them. I feel it's a clumsy attempt to avoid judging people based on their wealth, but there are many other homeless people in the same position as visibly homeless people, but who are not visible. Pretending that the visually homeless are completely indistinguishable from other groups of people is just a form of active neglect. Pretending not to see them does not make them disappear.
Why is yours any more worthwhile? When in cities, I regularly interact with people who you might assume are homeless. I think my direct experience is definitely valuable to the conversation - unless it disagrees with you, of course.
> People who are homeless ...
It's your narrative that is worthless.
> They often became homeless because they were impossible to live with.
Is there some data for that? The leading cause of homelessness, last I saw, was losing your home to medical bills. Anyway, I'm not living with them, just talking at the bus stop or outside the store.
> homeless people with all their marbles generally make an effort not to seem homeless and don't ask strangers for anything
That is certainly untrue. The confused and mentally ill people generally are in their own worlds. The people talking are fine. Maybe if you act with hostility or defensiveness, you get a different response, but I guarantee if you just stop worrying about it and behave decently as you (hopefully) do with anyone else, it's really no issue at all.
> you'll never meet, or help, the homeless people who aren't pestering you and bothering you and invading your space.
You're just making things up, including that homeless people are pestering and bothering me, etc. IME, which is considerable, people who seem homeless are no different than other people, except they are vulnerable and don't dress as well.
> there's no reason to completely avoid drawing any conclusions or making any generalizations about them
There are plenty of very strong reasons to avoid conclusions about people you don't know - you don't know what you are talking about and will harm the people. Generalizations do the same thing, denying people their basic freedom to be themselves and be responsible for their own consequences, not someone else you met a year ago.
It's also a reason my direct experience is valuable, and your generalizations are worthless. Any serious pursuit of knowledge - science, courts, etc. - utterly reject generalizations and require direct observation.
> I feel it's a clumsy attempt to avoid judging people based on their wealth
That part is intentional and not clumsy at all. It avoids dangerous errors and protects vulnerable people. Looking at behavior today, who are the crazy ones - the billionaires or those without homes?
I think what they are talking when they say visible homeless is people that are “chronically homeless” which is people “experiencing homelessness for longer than a year with a serious mental illness, substance use disorder, or physical disability”. [1] These are not people losing their home due to medical bills. Drug addiction motivates panhandling, a way to obtain cash for drugs over social support systems that provide non-cash assistance. Serious mental illness often leads to very visible erratic behavior, either directed to “their own world” or at other people. I can’t speak to you experience, but a small percent of homeless people do harass people for money, or scream nonsense, and end up arrested or in the hospital far more than the vast majority of other homeless people. [2]
I guess I find it hard to believe that you never encounter panhandlers or mentally ill homeless people acting erratically, aggressively, or both. I don’t really understand what you mean by “people who seem homeless are no different than other people, except they are vulnerable and don't dress as well”. Most homeless people dress as well as any other lower income housed person, unless you just mean anyone who looks kind of poor. The people sleeping on park benches in filthy clothes are rarely “no different” than other people, because again, they are almost all dealing with serious physical, mental, or substance abuse problems.
[2] “Participants averaged five hospitalizations, 20 visits to the emergency department, five to psychiatric emergency services, and three to jail in the two years prior to being enrolled. While these are the homeless people who are the most visible to the general public, and to many health care workers, researchers said they represent only about 5 percent to 10 percent of chronically homeless individuals.” https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/09/418546/study-finds-permane...
> I think what they are talking when they say visible homeless is people that are “chronically homeless” which is people “experiencing homelessness for longer than a year with a serious mental illness, substance use disorder, or physical disability”.
I think it's a big leap to try to read their mind, or assume they had some scientific definition in mind.
> I guess I find it hard to believe that you never encounter panhandlers or mentally ill homeless people acting erratically, aggressively, or both.
I've encountered people asking for money; my point is there is no problem. They are just normal people - they might as well be asking for directions or the time. Most are even more passive: They sit on the ground - as if they need to demean themselves to assuage the fears of housed people - and quietly ask while people walk by. A few days ago someone walked up to me and said, 'I'm going to tell you straight - I need $40 for food and shelter tonight'. Again, he might as well be someone behind a deli counter trying to sell me something. And when I pulled out a few dollars and a ten dollar bill came with it, they asked for it directly. I said no, but again it was no problem at all; I never felt threatened. I think people bring their fear with them; every person generally acts like you treat them.
I see people acting aggressively and erratically, but it's to the air. I just give them a wide berth; they never bother me. I wish I could help them but I don't know how.
> unless you just mean anyone who looks kind of poor
That was the point I was making to the other commenter - I don't actually know who is homeless. I don't usually ask people for their housing information.
> The people sleeping on park benches in filthy clothes are rarely “no different” than other people, because again, they are almost all dealing with serious physical, mental, or substance abuse problems.
According to who? Also, plenty of other people deal with those things, but they have resources to support them, including family/friends and money. Lots of high-profile people have those problems.
Some billionaires are very publicly acting out on serious mental health issues.
> a small percent of homeless people do harass people for money, or scream nonsense, and end up arrested or in the hospital far more than the vast majority of other homeless people.
A small percentage of everyone is antisocial or have crippling mental illness. As I said, I've never been threatened by an apparently unhoused person, but I've been threatened by other people.
Once I parked in a spot that apparently someone else wanted. They got out of their car, flashed a badge (I think it was a fire department badge) and threatened to break my windows. Drunk people in bars can be dangerous. Law enforcement can. Another customer once hit me in nice bank office. I've seen threatening people at some sporting events. I'm pretty sure they all had homes.
> pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model.
Public transit is already extremely degraded, which is why there was an opening for private fixed-route transport. Whether you were born in 1920 or 2000, you can wistfully recall how much better public transportation was when you were a child.
Complaining about private buses doesn't get public transportation funded. Funding public transportation gets public transportation funded.
I think the person you replied to never said "only people who do not understand Rust dislike it," or anything similar to that.
Even pretending that they did, I don't know if "appreciat[ing]" Rust means that you're saying that you "understand" it. It seems like choosing a different word in the second sentence of a two sentence argument may be an subtle way of hinting that you don't know Rust, although you've read articles about Rust and made judgements about it. If this is true, then it doesn't strongly support the first statement.
I'm seeking to draw a distinction between disliking rust for the real (or perceived) difficulty of learning/using it, and disliking it on principle, because you don't like it's trade-offs, approach to achieving it aims, syntax, type system, etc. This dichotomy is meaningful irrespective of the level of experience one has with Rust, beyond a certain level (and for the record I believe I have the requisite level of knowledge of rust to have an informed opinion on it).
For example, I don't know much Haskell. It seems to me (and to many other I read online) like it would be difficult to learn (and maybe use), although I'm familiar with functional languages in general. However, based on the little I've learned about it so far, it is a language I'd absolutely love to dig much deeper into as time permits, because almost everything about it makes so much sense to me.
Here's something amazing, I started to design my ideal language, before I started learning Haskell, and almost every language construct in Haskell I learn about seems to match exactly how I'd designed my language by coincidence (even down to keywords like "where", "do" blocks, etc.)
Works that way with learning a spoken language, too. I couldn't learn my second language until I stopped thinking I was supposed to judge whether things in the language were "good" or not. Languages aren't meant to be "good" in a beauty contest sense, they're supposed to be useful. Accept that they are useful because many, many people use them, and just learn them.
I probably wouldn't have been able to do that with Rust if I hadn't been an Erlang person previously. Rust seems like Erlang minus the high-overhead Erlangy bits plus extreme type signatures and conscious memory-handling. Erlang where only "zero-cost abstractions" were provided by the language and the compiler always runs Dialyzer.
Alternatively, they view government services as a bad thing when they are terrible, which they very often are because of the retreat from public investment that's been going on since the 80s; and when they view them as good, they also view them as temporary. Because they will be.
No efficient service will be allowed to survive long in the US, if anyone has any power to cut it. An efficient service is just one that temporarily lacks enough middlemen to increase costs, or enough red tape to reduce enrollment. If neither of these things happen, that means no one with any power has any personal interest in it, so it will be cut arbitrarily at some point in order to make a budget target.
The reason USPS has lasted so long (even in its degraded state) is just because it has lasted so long previously, and is deeply integrated into society. But there's been a bipartisan effort to privatize it and sell it off (to each other) for nearly a generation now. They've taken the steps of lowering its quality and level of service, barred it from entering lines of business that private companies have taken over, and played accounting games with it in order that people will depend on it less. This is not something "conservatives" did, but both Democratic and Republican Congresspeople have even dropped into deceit to try to make happen, and they publicly blame each other for the inexorable progress of dismantling USPS during each administration to distract extreme partisans.
Democrats talked a lot of trash about DeJoy before not firing him when they had the opportunity. It's like how they screamed about DeVos being horrible and out of touch, but Arne Duncan, the school privatizer-in-chief, got to play the "cool" white guy who plays basketball with the "cool" president with virtually identical policy positions.
Once people have stopped depending on the USPS because it is bad, they can give it the Royal Mail treatment that they've always wanted. Mail privatization in the UK was a massive success if you don't care about the mail. The people who got it made a lot of money. The mails there became so brutally expensive and unreliable that it probably affects exports and it still doesn't matter.
edit: sometimes I feel optimistic, though. There was a recent announcement that while hiring for a new person to run public transportation in Chicago, the city has decided that, this time, they will look for somebody with experience in transportation. This is unusual because the job is usually filled by political patronage, by someone with no experience.
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
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